Lucy Waverman

I got my hands on a copy of Lucy Waverman’s new cookbook. Lucy is a food columnist with the Globe and Mail newspaper and also a food editor of Food & Drink – the glossy magazine printed by the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario). I have a lot of respect for Lucy Waverman. She has a very simple, down-to-earth style to presenting food. She follows the trends so that her recipes always feel fresh. But she doesn’t fawn over the trends. And her recipes work. So I was excited to see she has a new cookbook out, called Lucy’s Kitchen. It’s a collection of recipes close to her heart. I pasted a sample from the cookbook here. But I have to say, I was a bit disappointed by Lucy’s Kitchen. To be fair, I flipped through the book rather quickly. But there didn’t seem to be a lot of variety in the types of recipes profiled. They all seemed to be comfort food. A lot of braising, stews and roasts. I prefer her previous book Home for Dinner because it has more recipes that I felt motivated to try. One thing I was surprised to learn about Lucy Waverman came from an interview she did on the radio while doing her book tour. She talked about how she’s not a big fan of sweets. She make them and eats them, but she favours savory dishes. Which I thought an odd thing to say for a food columnist. I thought food columnists are supposed to keep their taste buds open to all possibilities. It made me go home and flip through the desserts section of her last cookbook. She said in the interview that she favours fruit based desserts, which is true. Many of the desserts in Home for Dinner have fruit in them. But it made me think differently about how food columnists select the recipes they profile. I have always believed that good food columnists are critical about the quality of the recipes they profile. But I never thought much about how a columnist's personal likes and dislikes play a role in what recipes are printed. If a columnist really doesn't like chocolate, knowing that many readers probably do like chcolate, would he or she feature a recipe with chocolate in it?