At this time of year, bookshop shelves groan with new cookbooks. It seems every famous (and many not so famous) food writers put out a new book each year, or every second year, at least.
The big names are there as usual: Nigella Lawson (Kitchen), Jamie Oliver (30-Minute Meals), Nigel Slater (Tender Vol 2), Annabel Langbein (The Free Range Cook), Jo Seagar (It's easier than you think), Simon and Alison Holst (100 Favourite ways with chicken), and earlier in the year Allyson Gofton (Slow), Sophie Gray (100+ Tasty $10 Meals) and Joan Bishop (New Zealand Crockpot and Slow Cooker Cookbook).
According to Nicola Legat, publisher at Random House, to October this year, 379,000 food and drink books worth $10.9 million had been sold in New Zealand - and that doesn't include the busy Christmas period.
"We are huge consumers of cookbooks, but what is really interesting is that in the top 20 titles, they are all local, showing us even though all these great overseas titles come in we really like our local cookbooks and trust our local writers," she said.
According to Legat, apart from Go Fish! by Al Brown and The Free Range Cook by Annabel Langbein, the other best-selling cookbooks were all practical books about affordable, easy food, including four on slow-cookers, Edmonds Cookbook, and Sophie Gray's 100+ Tasty $10 Meals.
Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb, a book buyer at University Book Shop which has the largest selection of cookbooks in town, says about half the cookbooks they sell are published in New Zealand.
Books with an accompanying television show do particularly well as evidenced by Annabel Langbein's The Free Range Cook, which leapt to number one on the best sellers list, sold out and had to be reprinted.
People prefer substantial books with beautiful photographs, and even the Edmonds Cookbook has lots of photographs these days. American-style cookbooks unillustrated or illustrated with drawings are not as popular, Wylie-Gibb says.
The most popular international cuisines are Southeast Asian and Mediterranean.
"Nowadays you can basically get everything, if not somewhere in town you can order it on the internet. It used to be that people were worried you couldn't get ingredients."
Sales of cooking and gardening books have burgeoned in the past two or three years. There were always people doing that, but there's another group newly introduced to it who perhaps cannot afford to buy as much and realise food tastes better if they grow it or make it themselves, she said.
Television cooking shows have also made it cool to know about cooking and food and how to put flavours together, she said.
