Ms. Beranbaum, is it true that as a pastry chef, you have collected over 15,000 cookbooks?
Oh, I definitely used to have upwards of that many, but not anymore! My husband insisted that I give most of them away to culinary institutes, schools, libraries, secondhand shops… We agreed that any book signed to me, I won’t give up. But my husband is right that I don’t really use them very much — maybe sometimes I’ll use one as a reference book, but I have so many that I just can’t get around to using them all. People send me their book, I flip through it and I get tempted to try something, but it’s hard to find the time when we’re in the middle of our own thing. This is also why I don’t intend to make any more cookbooks myself, because I want to be able to have the time to try other people’s recipes, to see friends, to travel more.
It’s hard to outdo yourself when you’ve already written what is widely considered the gold standard of baking cookbooks, The Cake Bible, back in 1988.
A lot has changed since then! When I started out writing The Cake Bible, baking books were a loss leader. Publishing houses used to use them them as tax write offs, it was very hard to get them to publish baking books. At the time, Flo Braker, who’s a wonderful writer and baker, had just written and published her book The Perfect Art of Simple Baking, and it hadn’t performed as well as they’d hoped, despite being considered a classic today. We have the same publisher, so it took years for them to be persuaded to take the risk on another baking book. When they finally agreed, they wouldn’t give me a contract for another long while. So it’s funny, today we have this great community of bakers out there creating recipes, but back then it was different.
Even to a detriment, no? Now with the Internet and social media, anyone can publish a recipe that might not be strictly tested or accurate.
It’s unfortunate, isn’t it? I think people get such pleasure out of baking when it works and it’s such a pity that TikTok and things like that just give bare bones of what you might need to know. And these days, as you said, anybody can publish their own recipes.
Is it your goal as a cookbook author to teach and mentor the future generation of cooks, rather than necessarily showcase flashy recipes or ingredients?
It’s my happiest thing about the success of my professional life, that I can reach out to other people and make a difference in their life. For example, The Cake Bible was the first baking cookbook to include measurements by weight rather than just by volume and that made a huge difference to the success of any given recipe. People who were baking bread were willing to use weight to measure, but for something like a brownie, I think people thought, “Well, it doesn’t really make that much difference.” But it absolutely does, and my editor let me put the weight measurements in, and we really worked to make it user friendly. And today that’s the standard, editors and publishers are courageous enough to do that because they know how crucial it is for a baking recipe.
“I never intended to have a career. I never even knew to dream of what I ended up doing.”
You used the word courageous — is that really how it felt at the time? Was there a lot of pushback on that idea?
It was fairly unheard of! People just simply weren’t used to the idea, scales were made differently then as well, so it was just something that was new. Now we know today that it’s faster, neater, easier and more accurate than when we’re trying to use volume measurements. It’s funny, people always joke that my middle name should be precision. (Laughs) I really am that meticulous. When the book first came out, that was before we had the Internet, I received a few letters from people saying that was the first time they’d actually baked a cake that worked for them. So people found out the difference in following through with that kind of precision. With cooking, you can experiment, you can change the variables. With baking, you have to be willing to follow the rules, at least the first time.
It seems like you were perfectly suited to this job as a pastry chef and cookbook author then. Was this career always what you had in mind?
Having a lot of kids was my main goal! I never intended to have a career. My mother worked full time, and I thought it’d be wonderful to be a stay at home mom. I never even knew to dream of what I ended up doing.
But you always loved baking?
Well, I always loved writing. My mother didn’t do a lot of baking at home because she was a dentist, so sweets weren’t very common in our house. My grandmother made the perfect apple pie without a recipe, I do remember that! But I never loved baked goods or cakes because I found them so sweet, I actually didn’t enjoy eating cake. It wasn’t until I went to university and made my first cake from scratch that I started enjoying eating and making desserts. I started out baking in what they called home economics at University of Vermont, and I took home economics just long enough to discover how wonderful food could be if you made it yourself. That was my epiphany. And then I left school and started working on my own. I learned to develop recipes just from baking and experimenting in my kitchen, I thought of myself like Julia Child. I ended up writing my master’s thesis about flour: Does sifting flour affect the quality of a yellow cake mix?
Apparently that paper eventually lead to you revolutionizing the now-famous reverse-creaming technique, right?
That’s right, I mean, I didn’t invent it, it was being done with shortening, but I found that shortening had no flavor, it doesn’t enhance the other flavors. I found a way to do it with butter. At the time when I wrote the thesis, it was just theoretical. So it was many years later that I actually came up with this way of doing it, and it really changed the way people bake, which I was and still am thrilled about. Because suddenly people were willing to follow the directions that I gave and… That just astonished me. Because what could be make you happier than having that kind of connection with the world? It’s something that I’ve always found so heartening.