Mrs Wee Kim Wee’s cookbook – Cooking For The President
The daughter of Mrs Wee Kim Wee, Wee Eng Hwa has self-published a 230 recipes cookbook titled Cooking For the President. Some of the recipes included in this 544-page book are mee siam (rice vermicelli in spicy gravy) and kueh ko swee (steamed rice flour cakes flavoured with palm sugar), babi masak assam (braised pork belly with salted vegetable, mustard leaf and tamarind) and many other Peranakan dishes.
Ms Wee chosed to self-publish her cookbook because she wanted ‘complete freedom’ over the content and quality of the book. While most recipe books contained just recipes and pictures, she has included a biography of Mr and Mrs Wee and family photos as well. Also worth mentioning is that Ms Wee is also the photographer for the dishes published in the cookbook. Well done! From a publisher’s view point, the cost of producing a cookbook in full color is not just money spent on the full color prinitng but in the photography. A single shot of a dish can cost you $150 onwards if taken by a professional food photographer! So, if you have 100 dishes to shoot, the cost just add up and the bulk of the cost in cookbook production is really in the photography.
Is it easy to do your own food photography? I must say it is much easier now if you have a good digital SLR camera and armed with a few basic food styling techniques I am sure any cookbook author can do the job with the right photography training.
Rank Seminar Pte Ltd, will be running a short food photograpy course soon (in December), contact us if you are interested.
Indeed, your family’s recipes are an important part of your family history. But instead of going for the printed cookbook which is expensive to produce, why not do an ebook?
Why not combine your family photos and time-tested recipes into an E-Cookbook and gives it as a gift to your family members during special occasions. E-Cookbooks are perfect gifts for family and friends for all occasions — birthdays, weddings, Christmas and family reunions! Here are some reasons why you should consider doing your own family cookbook.
Reasons Why You Need A E-Cookbook
Family recipes are part of our heritage and legacy. Food appeals to our senses and evokes memories that we share with our family members so it is worth documenting. Secondly, the ebook allows you to make the book comes alive by adding multimedia content. You can add old family photos, video clips, sound files and hyperlinks to make the book interesting and interactive.
It Is Low Cost. To print a full color cookbook you need a print run of at least 1000 copies and this will cost you between $10,000 to $15,000 or higher (for a book not more than 200 pages and slightly bigger than an A5 size) after you have paid for food photography, design and layout, and printing. But if you do an e-book you can cut the cost down by more than 60% and you can just produce 50 or 100 copies according to your preference.
To find out more, you may want to contact Rank Books at: http://www.rankbooks.com/cat_e-books.asp
Read more about Cooking For The President at: http://www.soshiok.com/article/13785