How to Write Reicpe Headnotes
Writing a thriller requires writing a story that keeps readers turning the page. Writing a cookbook should require grabbing someone’s attention so they don’t skip the headnote.
This is not easy to do, but it’s worth the extra effort.
Sometimes a headnote includes important tips. Other times it’s a way to convince a reader to take a chance on a recipe, even if it means tracking down white asparagus or a specific kind of shrimp paste and/or takes a couple of days to make. Some headnotes are all about sharing a charming story that makes the reader excited to try out the recipe. And some are all about giving attribution to others. Each headnote makes a case for the existence of the cookbook.
In this post, I break down why recipe headnotes in cookbooks matter + how to ensure your headnotes engage readers and keep them cooking from your book.
Why recipe headnotes matter:
Headnotes make your cookbook engaging and complete. Think of a cookbook as an album. Sure, you can listen to a Spotify playlist of curated singles. But sometimes you want to hear the whole album uninterrupted by ads for a new podcast on gators in the Everglades. Headnotes are part of the glue that holds the cookbook “album” together.
Headnotes make a case for why a reader should make this recipe and trust you.
Headnotes can give readers a heads-up about a step that takes extra time.
Headnotes can offer an opportunity to instruct. Maybe you need to point out how to work with a specific ingredient or how to shop for it. Headnotes can be educational.
Headnotes allow authors to attribute sources when applicable. This is even more important today. Attributing a recipe to someone else (whether it’s a dish from their restaurant, a recipe you’ve made for 10 years and riffed on, etc.) does not diminish your work. Rather, it allows you to gracefully acknowledge someone else’s creative output while also telling the story about your connection with it. (We are assuming that you are not taking someone else’s recipe and publishing it as is; if you are, you’ll need to get permission from the author and publisher, and that’s a different story. If you were to do get permission to publish someone else’s recipe, though, you’d still need a headnote that explains why it’s so great that you had to have it in your book.)
Writing Headnotes
Most cookbook headnotes strive to engage, inspire, and/or instruct. But say you’re stumped. You have a green garlic souffle recipe, and you like the recipe, but you don’t really know what to say about it in a headnote. Try these prompts:
When did you become familiar with the feature ingredient? (What made you gravitate to green garlic?)
Does the recipe require attribution? (Maybe you had an old Chez Panisse cookbook with twice-baked green garlic souffles, and you took the idea from there and made it your own.)
Is this something from your family/childhood/upbringing/cultural background? (You come from a family of green-garlic farmers.)
What drew you to making it in the first place? (You had a craving for a savory souffle with some punch.)
How did you ensure you make the best version? (Are there some little-known tricks of the trade with getting a souffle to rise?)
Did you learn how to make this recipe the hard way? (You made this 100 times and failed UNTIL you let the eggs come to room temperature.)
Why should anyone care about this recipe? Sell us on why we should try it out! (Justify why I should seek out green garlic and gruyere and spend x number of hours preparing this at home and doing the dishes.)
REVISIONS
OK, so you have a first draft of your headnote. Hooray! Put it aside and work on another headnote. Then come back to this headnote in a day or a week or at some point down the road. Re-read and edit. Make it better. Read it with your other headnotes in the chapter, then as part of the entire manuscript before submitting the manuscript to your editor. Your first draft of your headnote will likely not be your final draft.
Consider the following:
Length. Are some of your headnotes very long and some very short? Does that feel intentional, or did you run out of steam? Does the headnote length make sense in the overall context of the book? It’s OK to write long headnotes, but if you want all of your recipes to fit on one page, you may have a more limited word count per recipe than you think. Give overly long headnotes a trim. If some are long but feel complete, see if there is room for a sidebar or an extended headnote. It’s also OK to write short headnotes, but if they feel a bit thin or lack your voice/point of view, try adding more description or context. Think about how the whole book fits together. When I was writing A16, by the time I got to the gelato recipes, the headnotes became quite short. I had already written an overview about the gelato, and adding long headnotes to each flavor didn’t feel necessary. My editor checked to ensure this was intentional, since the rest of the recipes in the chapter had long headnotes.
Tone. Is the tone consistent? Sometimes when I sit down to write, I feel more chatty than at other times, when I veer into Important Writing (when I include every bit of research I’ve found - this is not good territory). Reading batches of headnotes together can help you weed out the outliers in tone. Reading headnotes out loud helps check tone and ensures you’re sounding human. Tone is especially crucial if you are writing with others. When writing La Buvette with Camille Fourmont, some of my headnotes had too much instruction—”do this to get the best results” kind of thing. To Camille, our headnotes meant we didn’t give readers enough benefit of the doubt and made the recipes look more complicated than they actually were. We solved this issue by including recipe notes at the bottom of the page. It was a simple fix that helped ensure the headnote tone was in line with the big-picture tone.
Content. This is a relative of tone, but it’s about the substance. Are the headnotes consistent in the type and style of stories they contain? When I was working on Burma Superstar, the developmental edit came back to say that some headnotes included stories of various people from the restaurant, but there weren’t enough stories to make this feel cohesive. Our solution was to add more stories from people to make the stories feel intentional.
Sameness. There is a such thing as being too consistent. Do too many headnotes start with the same word? Are too many headnotes educating readers on this or that ingredient - and if so, should some of that go into an ingredients section? Are the captivating stories few and far between? Try mixing educational aspects with personal story. Try including a disaster story or a success story. Maybe one recipe took 100 times to get right. Maybe one was so preternaturally blessed that it fell into place on your cutting board a year ago and you never looked back. With the Burma Superstar cookbook, even though I added more stories about people in the headnotes, I didn’t add a story about a person in every headnote. In some cases, it was enough to explain the versatility of a recipe.
BOTTOM LINE
Headnotes aren’t afterthoughts. They can be fun to write, but it’s also important to give yourself the time to edit them. At their best, they give structure and substance to the world you are building within the covers of your book. Yep, world-building. It’s not just for writers who toil in the realm of dragons and swords. You can build your own mini food world in your cookbook.
*The typos in my posts are all mine— sorry!. But for your headnotes and recipes, ensure multiple readers see them to catch errors!