Catharsis Cookbooks Crowd Post-Covid Shelves

Pound, mash and chop up your feelings with recipes from a host of new catharsis cookbooks. Illustrations by Stephanie DeAngelis/Running Press hide caption

When the pandemic started, food writer Sandra Wu started making smoothies, with a vengeance.

"Like, ugh, let's press blend," she remembers. "Let's put in some liquid, like ugh, and get it in there."

All her anger, frustration and fear melted away, she says, like the strawberries she pulverized in her blender. Now Wu's writing a cookbook, Feel Good Smoothies. It's part of a trend of catharsis cookbooks, says Paula Forbes, who publishes a newsletter about the cookbook industry called Stained Page News. She recently noticed a number of new cookbooks focusing more on the rage of cooking than the joy of it.

"Rage Baking, which was controversial," she says, noting other emotion-themed cookbooks, such as Procrastibaking: 100 Recipes for Getting Nothing Done in the Most Delicious Way Possible by Erin Gardner, and the upcoming Baking By Feelby Becca Rea-Holloway.

"Which she describes on Instagram [@TheSweetFeminist] as a book about 'feeling your emotions (all of them, without judgment),'" Forbes adds. And "for when you feel bad, Alison Riley is writing Recipe for Disaster: Good Food for Bad Times."

Finding release through pounding filets, chopping onions and smashing basil is the concept of a recent cookbook called Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook. It was written for those days when you're boiling over, steaming mad or just plain fried, according to its San Francisco-based authors, who sold the proposal right before the pandemic.

"We're dealing with the wildfires here in California, which is really creating a sense of existential angst and, like, devastation," says Tara Duggan, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. "And we just effortlessly wove in Covid," chimed in freelance food writer Rachel Levin, dryly.

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Levin and Duggan maximize pounding, whisking, grinding and grating. Cooking redirects your energy, they say, forcing you to be in the moment. Spatchcocking chicken can serve as a coping mechanism. But isn't this all vey ... 2020?

"It'd be easy to gloss over our cookbook — honestly, to gloss over any cookbook — as a COVID relic right now," Levin admitted in an email. "We conceived of Steamed before COVID, when our world was just in its normal state of major upheaval (climate change, partisan politics, mass shootings, systemic racism) and minor daily irritations.

"If anything is certain: the pandemic taught us to persevere, but it, 100 percent, won't be the only challenge we face in life."

"Steamed calls out the kitchen for what is, most certainly has been, and always will be: a refuge," Levin added. "Complete with sharp blades for cleaving watermelon and blunt instruments for pummeling chicken thighs and soothing wooden spoons for slowly, mindlessly, stirring yourself into a state of calm."

We're still not done processing our emotions from last year, Levin says. And always, we need to eat.

SNAPPED ASPARAGUS WITH CHERMOULA, from Steamed

SERVES 2 TO 4

Snapping the ends off of asparagus spears is one of the more mindless, meditative tasks in the kitchen. In fact, it could easily cross reference with "Chilling the F Out" section of this book. But listen closely and the snap itself brings a perverse satisfaction of its own. (Is it an asparagus stalk or your obnoxiously loud neighbor's neck? You decide.)