“Jerusalem fever” is spreading across the country, according to the NYT.

Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (Ten Speed), released last year, was chosen as the IACP’s Cookbook of the Year, and was the James Beard  winner in the International category.

The NYT story notes that Ten Speed already has 200,000 copies in print, which is unusual since most new cookbooks, especially those that are not by celebrities, “disappear without a trace” (sadly, the same could be said for all book categories).

At least part of the success is attributed to social media. Fans started a page on Facebook dedicated to it, as well as on Pinterest and Instagram. The hashtag #tastingjrslm, allows them to communicate about favorite recipes. The NYT itself features the authors on this month’s “Recipe Lab” videochat.

Holds in libraries are unusually high for a cookbook (one library shows 90 on 17 copies). The NYT story quotes the rector of an Episcopal church, who says, “I took it out from the library as many times as I was allowed to. And there were still so many things I wanted to make that I was forced to buy it.” (We like the image of the library rapping the reverend on the knuckles for hogging the book).

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 1st, 2013 at 10:50 am and is filed under 2012 -- Fall, Cookbooks, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.