Celebrating Glorious American Food for the 250th anniversary of the United States

To mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, we invited publisher Lena Tabori to tell us the story behind Glorious American Food, the multi-award winning large format cookbook by her friend, the late Christopher Idone, which was recently added to ckbk and which celebrates the richness of America’s culinary traditions.

By Lena Tabori

In 1984 Christopher Idone, chef, cookbook author, and entrepreneur traveled the U.S. with photographer Tom Eckerle with the intention of creating a showcase of regional American food. Christopher wanted  to explore the history and celebrate the recipes that grew out of the marriage of the land and the people who lived or settled there—the American Indians, the Spanish and the Mexicans in the Southwest, the French and the Africans in the Gulf States, the English, Italians, Irish, Germans, Dutch and Portuguese in the East. They returned with history, hundreds of recipes and photographs, dozens of menus and endless stories.

A year later, my company Welcome Books produced a large (10” x 13”) lavishly illustrated book based on that extraordinary trip for legendary editor, Jason Epstein, to be published at Random House. Glorious American Food would be Christopher’s second cookbook (several more would follow). It created a storm in the cookbook world. Selected by every major book club, it sold tens of thousands of copies at the then stunning price of $50, as well as winning every award imaginable including Best Cookbook of the Year  from the IACP, not to mention the Photographers Annual Award.

Lauded as a history of America as seen through its food. James Beard wrote, "It is rare that one finds a book on food that epitomizes both luxury and well-tailored simplicity and it's a mark of Christopher Idone's brilliance that he encompasses both." And, Marion Burros followed with a review in the New York Times Book Review, "Among the best (of this year's cookbooks) are those that celebrate American food and…the most beautiful, if not the most definitive, is…Christopher Idone's Glorious American Food."

Twenty years later, in 2005, my company Welcome updated, redesigned and published it again as New Glorious American Food with 70 menus, 275 recipes, and Christopher’s wonderful anecdotes representing the best of traditional and contemporary cooking from the Deep South to the Northwest. Two hundred of Tom Eckerle’s lush photographs continued to both document Christopher’s extraordinary recipes and act as a visual travel guide through the various landscapes of the U.S.

We lost Christopher in 2016. What a gift he was to everyone who crossed his path. Elegant, gracious, funny, brilliant, creative, soft spoken, beautiful and relentlessly curious. The books he created, many of which I was lucky enough to either publish or package, were invariably exquisite, ambitious, and packed with glorious recipes, accompanied by glorious photographs. One of the magical people.

Highlights from Glorious American Food

One of the most striking images in the original 1985 book is Christopher's sashimi supper (pictured above). This was taken on a California Pottery plate of mine, looking out from a house I lived in at the time in Hollywood overlooking Los Angeles. I had bought that property in 1982 when I was making an animated film, Ziggy’s Gift for ABC (it won an Emmy the following year for Outstanding Animated Program). Christopher often stayed with me.

Christopher had an extraordinary aesthetic, an elegance coupled with a kind of simplicity and earthiness. In this trip around the U.S. he always stayed with friends and inevitably used their homes, their cutlery, their dining accessories when setting the tables for Tom’s photography.

I love so many of Christopher’s recipes—his corned beef, apple pie, scallop stew, fish chowder, matzo ball soup, chopped salad, french fried onions, chicken salad, corn bread, potato tart, polenta, angel food cake—all come to mind).

The recipes I make again and again are his strawberry shortcake and his focaccia. Also, I have never hosted Thanksgiving without duplicating his Roast Turkey with Pan Gravy. He was also kind enough to include my own Swedish Glögg in the book…

View the full collection of Lena’s Highlights from Glorious American Food

"Glorious American Food is a food odyssey of the first magnitude. .. a mouth-watering picture book of foods, farms, orchards, oceans—in short, a culinary portrait of this country." – USA Today

About Christopher Idone

Christopher Idone was a celebrated chef and an award-winning culinary writer. He was the founder of a catering company, Glorious Food, and was soon sharing his passion to a bigger audience via his cookbooks. His second book, Glorious American Food, was named Cookbook of the Year and Best General Cookbook from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. He was also a food consultant who appeared on the Today show and Good Morning America, and contributed to House and Garden, the New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, Food Arts, and Harper’s Bazaar. Idone died in 2016. Other books by Idone which are now available on ckbk Apples and Lemons (from the Country Garden Cookbook series), and Brazil: A Cook’s Tour (based on his extensive travels in the country, and enthusiasm for its cuisine).

About Lena Tabori

Lena Tabori is an award-winning publisher, author, and pioneer in visual book publishing. Her career began in 1967 at Harry N. Abrams, where she became their first female vice president. In 1980, she co-founded the prominent illustrated publishing house Stewart, Tabori & Chang. She later established the packaging firm Welcome Enterprises and launched its official publishing imprint, Welcome Books (which she sold to Rizzoli in 2014). As an editor and author, Tabori created the highly successful, multi-million-selling "Little Big Book" anthology series, which features popular titles on Christmas, Love and more. Beyond print, she won an Emmy Award in 1983 for producing the animated film Ziggy's Gift. Driven by environmental advocacy, Tabori later co-founded the website Climate Change Resources in 2018 which she still runs. A Sweden native, she currently splits her time between the West Coast and East Hampton, New York.

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