Cookbook Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Nobody cooks from a book they have not first read in bed. A cookbook is bought on the photography, kept for the recipes and loved for something else entirely — the sense that a particular person is telling you about food. That person is audible almost entirely in the paragraph above each recipe, which is also the part most likely to be written last, at speed, when the author is tired of their own book.

We work on what cookbook authors write — full manuscripts and recipe collections, headnotes and introductory paragraphs, chapter introductions and section framing, the book's introduction and personal material, ingredient and equipment notes, sourcing and substitution guidance, proposals and sample chapters for publishers, recipe testing feedback and revision notes, pitches for extracts and features, and the front matter that tells a reader how to use the book. Our editors work on the writing around the recipes.

The headnote is where a cookbook becomes yours rather than anyone's, and most headnotes waste their forty words. "This is a great weeknight supper the whole family will love" is true of every recipe ever published and tells a reader nothing about whether to cook this one tonight. We work through these so each headnote does one job rather than three — either it tells you why this dish exists, or what makes it different from the version you already know, or the single thing that goes wrong; so the personal material is specific and brief, since a reader will follow you anywhere for one real sentence about your aunt's kitchen and nowhere at all for a paragraph of warmth; so any practical warning appears here rather than being discovered mid-method, because the reader has committed by then and the headnote is the last honest moment; so the same three adjectives are not doing the work across ninety recipes, given that a book where everything is hearty, vibrant and comforting reads as though nobody was paying attention; so the headnote says who this feeds and when you would actually make it; and so at least some of them admit that a dish is fiddly, expensive or worth it only occasionally. Headnotes written this way are the reason people cook from your book rather than owning it.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished recipes, manuscripts and proposals. We are editors rather than recipe testers, food safety advisers or publishers, and we offer no view on whether a recipe works or a book will sell. What we can do is make the voice around the recipes yours and worth reading.