The Photoshoot Diaries I
Classic German Cooking taking shape
Good morning and happy new year!
Today is the first day of the photoshoot for Classic German Cooking. The photoshoot is taking place in my apartment in Berlin. The photographer, the wonderful Elena Heatherwick, arrived from London yesterday with a small and very sweet entourage including her 3-month-old baby. The fact that Elena agreed to this shoot with such a little one in tow fills me with nearly overwhelming gratitude every time I think about it.
I thought it might be fun to take you along with me over the next week as the team works its way through the recipes we’re shooting for this book. Only a couple cookbook shoots that I’ve worked on have been in the author’s home; usually they take place in studios and the authors aren’t present. So I feel quite lucky that the shoot is taking place here.
The organization started several months ago. First I had to find a photographer. While leafing through my collection of cookbooks, I came across Elena’s work and found it totally beguiling and perfectly suited to the rustic, traditional recipes in Classic German Cooking. I wrote her a slightly unhinged love letter asking (begging) if she might be interested in shooting my book in October. She wrote back right away and said that she was interested, but that she was having a baby in October. Was there any wiggle room in the schedule? I checked with my publishing team. There was, but no later than early to mid-January. (Cookbook production takes months - shooting in January meant pushing the pub date to the end of October, just one week before the most consequential election of our lifetime, but oh well.) I wrote back assuming Elena would say that it was too soon, but instead it turned out that she was happy to come, as long as she could bring her baby, partner and mother-in-law with her. The more the merrier!
Once we knew that Elena was on board, I had to find a food stylist in Berlin. To my utter delight, my number one choice, Xenia von Oswald—who worked as a food stylist for a decade in London, then moved to Berlin and continued styling before opening up one of the best lunch places in the city, Rocket + Basil, with her sister Sophie—was both available and interested. A food stylist is the person who cooks all the food on a photoshoot. But not only that, they do all the shopping, all the sourcing of perfectly frilly cabbages and gorgeously crusty loaves of bread and all the organization of which dish to cook when. A good food stylist is not only a very talented and capable cook, but also a visual artist, one who knows just how to ladle out stew to make it look nice, how to strew chives in just the right way and bend noodles in a particular coil and which plate might look best with a particular pile of food on it. They help make decisions about which dish to shoot in the pot it was cooked in versus which dish to serve plated.
As for a frequently asked question: Cookbook food shoots do not involve any fake food or photogenic but inedible substances. The whole point is to cook the recipes just as they’re written and to photograph them realistically, so that readers can see what they’re going to be making. Elena in particular has an incredible eye for light and homey-looking food—just leaf through some of her most recent cookbook projects, like Jeremy Lee’s Cooking or Julius Roberts’ Farm Table to see why I fell for her work. Together with Xenia’s cooking talent and excellent eye, the team was falling into place.
With that and the week for the shoot established, I had to start thinking about props. On most other shoots I’ve worked on, a prop stylist is in charge of sourcing all the pots, plates, forks, tablecloths, glasses, napkins, tabletops and other physical objects required for beautiful photos. But because of the reality of our shoot, it made the most sense for me to source all of that stuff. Between my collection, my mother’s and a very good friend’s who lives just a few blocks away, I knew that we would probably have enough things to power this shoot—finally a lifetime of flea market visits were paying off!
The recipes in Classic German Cooking are, well, classic. Traditional. Rustic. Time-honored. Thick stews, cozy roasts, simple salads, long-cooked vegetables. Modern ceramics and angular brass flatware wouldn’t work here. For this food to make sense visually, we needed traditional porcelain plates, slightly tarnished silverware, vintage tablecloths, cast-iron pots with decades of patina. Thankfully, these are all the things we use in everyday life. And my mother and my friend Christa, in particular, both collect antique kitchen things like magpies. Their homes are treasure troves.
The day before the shoot, Max and I went to Christa’s apartment and gingerly lifted all the plates, platters and bowls, jugs, copper cookware and cutting boards and carefully drove them home. The same at my mom’s. A month before the shoot, a friend who works for Berlin’s illustrious Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur invited me to their archives where I was allowed to pick out the loveliest hand-painted dessert plates, dinner plates, tureens and platters. They arrived carefully packaged in layers of paper and padding and when I unwrapped them yesterday, I was nearly moved to tears by the incredible handcraft and the honor of getting to include these beautiful objects in my book.
Now, every available surface in my living room and dining room are covered with props. The kitchen is crammed with all the food for today and Xenia and her assistant have been hard at work since early this morning. (Xenia started cooking a few days ago, actually.) The balcony is filled with ingredients, thank goodness that it’s freezing out as my fridge is the size of a newborn crib. We only have about six hours of proper daylight to shoot in and we need to shoot 55 recipes over the next seven days (every other recipe will have a photo). So things are quite tight, time wise.
Okay, I’ve got to run—the first shot awaits! Leave any questions about the photoshoot below and I’ll be sure to answer them.
Fascinating to learn all that goes into a new cookbook. I so enjoyed all of your details and can't wait to see your work in print.
How do you possibly have your family around during this shoot? You continue to amaze me!!