Cookbooks: 1970s to the Present

The years following 1970 brought a proliferation of cookbooks so dramatic that few could keep count. National publishers churned them out by the thousands, and America’s taste for cookbooks grew through the decades up to 2010, when publishers introduced more than three thousand new cookbooks to the market. In that year, more than 37.5 million cookbooks were sold.

It seemed that authors or their publishers could not possibly think up a new food angle to tackle—and yet they continued to do so. Whether buyers were really cooking from all of these tomes was open for debate. Some shoppers confessed to buying cookbooks merely for bedtime reading, as a way to escape to culinary destinations without lifting a spatula.