Why Did My Book Take 5 Years?
The release of THE COOK'S GARDEN is a thrill. Also it's emotionally complicated. Spoiler alert: tears for Mom ahead, but the ending is a happy one.
Remember the early months of the pandemic? That’s how far back I have to go to tell the origin story of The Cook’s Garden, my new 496-page gardening guide and cookbook, which will be published by Knopf on August 26.
So come with me into the Wayback Machine and let’s revisit memories of long ago.
It was February 2020 and I sitting in a piazza in Venice on assignment from Travel & Leisure. I’d been traveling for three weeks already, going from my home airport, BDL, to Santa Fe, then Los Angeles, then Venice to write about the moody, lonely pleasures of La Serenissima in winter, after which I would backtrack to Oaxaca to meet up with a chef buddy doing research for his new restaurant. It sounds like a lot of flying to me, too. The only explanation I can offer is February, the month when winter in the Berkshires loses its charm and the frigid drafts make me think of flying off to someplace warmer, or at least someplace with a better furnace than the one at Deerhook, my house from 1750.
The talk around Venice was of the mysterious respiratory ailment first identified in China. It had reached Italy. Then the shutdowns began, locally at first but spreading fast. I was sitting in the piazza with a pair of Euro-sophisticates who lived in London, and we were debating whether to put down our Negronis and go straight to the airport. I checked on my phone for flight options: too late to get away that night, so we ordered another round and hoped for the best. The next morning I flew to Oaxaca, one step ahead of the virus, and I made it home to the Berkshires before the WHO declared a pandemic.
The lockdown was easier here than most places. My town is small and surrounded by the great outdoors. I was happy to be home and safe from the world. My family in Tennessee is a self-sufficient lot and they, too, were relatively untroubled. While my mother was vulnerable as a cancer survivor, it suited her perfectly fine to stay home, happy as a clam in her kitchen, garden, and sewing room. We FaceTimed every day around four o’clock, a habit we got into because my mother had spoken to her mother every day for decades. Nanny died in January 2020, at 90 years old, and I didn’t want my mother to feel unmoored. I started calling her daily. The pandemic gave us time.
My mom and I were already close, always had been. She was a single mother and I’m an only child. But we entered into a precious new phase of our half-century relationship. Every day we talked, often for an hour or more, and never did we run short of topics or meet a cross word. Perhaps because she had recently lost Nanny, my mother had extra love to pour into me. Or perhaps I was old enough finally to absorb her gift without the teenager’s knee-jerk, recoiling ingratitude and tetchy shows of independence. I shined love back at her and amplified it with filial gratitude.
Meanwhile, my Berkshires neighbors Del and Christine, on whose land I garden, agreed to pod up with me. We saw a lot of each other. We ate well. I had hundreds of pounds of potatoes in my cellar from the previous year’s garden plus bushels of onions and garlic, a pantry full of canned tomatoes, and a freezer full of green beans, corn, and okra. We hunkered down.
To be honest, when I think back on the early weeks of the lockdown, I cherish memories of the time I spent with my mother, my neighbors, and by myself on long, frigid walks. I didn’t imagine, in March 2020, how many people would suffer and die in the months ahead. Naiveté protected the Berkshires idyll.
Come spring, I planted an extra-large garden and laid stonework for new walkways around Deerhook. A group of ladies from the neighborhood walked past daily, and we chatted from a safe social distance.
Then in May 2020 came the call every writer dreams of.
Lexy Bloom, the editor of my first cookbook, Saving the Season, called to ask if I would be interested in doing a book about growing vegetables and cooking with homegrown food. Something in the spirit of The Victory Garden Cookbook, a former best-seller published by Knopf in 1982 but left behind by changes in the food culture.
“Interested?” I said. “There is nothing that could interest me more.” I agreed to a rushed deadline, knowing in my heart I wasn’t likely to meet it, then hurried to the garden to plant what I would need for recipe development and photography.
From that day forward, my daily call with my mother included garden talk. Much of what I already knew about gardens had come from her. But she continued to be a storehouse of practical advice and garden wisdom, and she steadied me through a long project of gardening, shooting garden photos, developing recipes, shooting food photos, and writing. If only I could relive every word of each of those conversations.
My mother knew many gardens in her lifetime, starting with her childhood in the Chilhowee Mountains of East Tennessee. Her grandfather, Pap Martin, plowed with a mule, and the vegetables that grew in the plow’s wake fed the family. I can hardly imagine how welcome those vegetables must have been after the wintertime monotony of pinto beans and cornbread at every meal, with sometimes a little smoked sidemeat on the side. No wonder my mother loved yellow crookneck squash, corn on the cob, stewed greens, raw cucumbers, fried okra, sliced tomatoes, and leafy salads.
My mother escaped Appalachia thanks to guidance from a starchy grammar-school teacher, a college scholarship, and the mentorship of a college professor and his wife. She left poverty but never lost her love of growing things. Her adult gardens were lush, lavish, exuberant—aglow with a half-hundred roses, fragrant with jasmine and gardenia, busy with cherry tomatoes, crowded with zinnias, and nearly overrun by the sweet herbs she loved to pinch and smell. One year Mom planted lemon balm and lemon thyme after finding a recipe that called for both, then added lemon verbena for good measure. (See Lemon-Herb Pound Cake on page 263 of The Cook’s Garden.)
During our daily calls, I’d jot down my mom’s gardening tips and makes notes of the funny things that would pop out of her mouth. She was somehow released by Nanny’s death to become the fullest version of herself. She simply blossomed. She enjoyed speaking her mind because there was nobody on earth who could correct her or tell her to pipe down. My desk was mulched with bits of paper scribbled with her sayings.
One of the phrases I jotted down was “preserve the legacy.” Those were the words my mother heard spoken by a sonorous disembodied male voice when she awoke in her bedroom on February 9, 2020. Nanny had been dead only a few weeks. My mother bolted upright. The voice repeated the words, very clearly, and my mother got of bed to write them down. She knew them to be a message from Above.
The meaning of the message was no less clear to her, and she launched herself into the great task of writing a family history, based on the reams of research she had collected over the decades. She traced our lineage back to the 1790s, when our forebears first arrived in what would soon become the State of Tennessee.
Then the cancer came back. Endless treatments took her away from her writing desk, but worse was the mental strain of navigating the cancer-care industry.
Still, she worked diligently at her writing project; I worked at mine. We swapped tips. We commiserated. We shared the fascinating bits that turn up in research and don’t find a home but are “too good to waste,” as my mother said when offered anecdotes like cookies. Our daily talks grew sweeter and sadder. I spent as much time as I could in Tennessee, and my garden suffered utter neglect.
On one visit, I carried a printout of my as-yet-untitled manuscript with me — a five-and-a-high-inch stack of paper weighing thirteen pounds. We spread the chapters across on my mother’s dining table and discussed how to structure the book. By season? Didactically, such as putting easy vegetables ahead of challenging ones? Alphabetically? If alphabetically, then by giving each vegetable it’s own chapter (Beans, Peas)? Or by grouping them as vegetable families (Beans & Peas)? If vegetable families, then using the botanical names (Alliums) or common names (Onion Family)? If you look at page 266 in The Cook’s Garden, you’ll see how I followed her advice in the end. I trusted her instincts because they were always based on empathy—making it better for the reader.
Then came the bad day.
My publisher informed me of a hard decision. The book had grown into something substantial and meaty, perhaps even lasting, a work to be proud of. And it had gotten big. Very big. Too big. The publishing house would need much more time to produce what was, in effect, two books in one. Production challenges were exacerbated by staffing cuts and supply-chain disruptions due to the pandemic. The typical twelve-month production schedule had stretched to eighteen months. And we were already behind schedule. I had been late hitting certain benchmarks, in part because of time spent with my mother and in part because I wasn’t willing to say “good enough” and let go of the manuscript. The book’s release date would have to be pushed back by a full calendar year, from spring 2024 to summer 2025.
I was gutted. It meant my mother wouldn’t live to see my book.
Carol Martin Satterfield died last year at home in Blount County, Tennessee, on May 9, early in the day. After the undertakers left, I drove up into the Smokies, to where our forebears had homesteaded in the 1790s. The spring-fed streams dashed and sparkled, living waters. The next day arrangements would have to be made. It was peony season and we would fill the chapel with them. At the graveside, we sang my mother home with the old Baptist hymn “I’ll Fly Away,” just as we’d done with Nanny only four years earlier. Then we gathered at the old train depot in Greenback, drank draughts of mountain spring water from Old Ned’s Place at Top ‘o the World in the Chilhowee Mountains, and shared a buffet of Southern vegetables like what she grew up on, like a few of the recipes in The Cook’s Garden. She would have loved it.
Almost exactly one year later, on May 14, 2025, I held a physical copy of The Cook’s Garden in my hand for the first time, and I could hardly face it. The emotions were too strong, too mixed up. I loved how it looked, how it felt in hand—as solid and honed as a Mercedes, and yet friendly, easy to dip into, flip through, and linger over. And this thrillingly beautiful object also held my grief and shame, shame that I hadn’t finished in time to show my mother. The book seemed to berate me: if only I’d worked better or faster or smarter, if only I’d been a better son, she would have lived to see it.
The logical fallacy of my self-flagellating grief is obvious even in the phrasing. You’ll see what I mean by striking through the end of the sentence: “if only I’d be a better son, she would have lived to see it.”
I put the book on a table where I could keep an eye on it, keep it at bay. I needed to let it air out a bit. My neighbor Del happened to come by the next day and noticed it.
“Whadya think?” he said.
“Mmhm.”
“It’ll grow on you,” he said.
And you know what? He was right. I barely touched the book for a month but then had to prepare for a promotional event. By chance it opened to a picture of Green Magic broccoli in my cousin Jack’s hands. Another picture showed a bouquet of parsley offered by my kitchen collaborator, Dash, who helped with recipe development and food styling. A recipe header mentioned my chef buddy Wes. On another page I saw the names of Del and his wife, Christine, and their daughter, Claudia. My dad showed up several places. And my grandparents on both sides. And my uncle David. And friends from across the country — Tom, David, Sara, Samin. And the many generous farmers I met on the way. And everywhere, it seemed, I could see the sparkle of my mother, like morning dew on corn stalks.
The joy of homegrown food had convened all of us, brought us to the garden and convened us around the table. That joy is what I want to share with you.
* * *
What is The Cook’s Garden?
The Cook’s Garden is a complete guide to growing and cooking vegetables. It’s an evergreen reference for practical advice, 125 recipes, inspiration, and the reading pleasure of armchair gardening.
If you use it, you’ll see curious things happen….
Like kids eating turnips and asking for seconds. See the recipe for Tops and Tails with Zesty Umami Butter on page 332.
Like carnivores at the cookout pushing aside the meaty meats for a bigger helping of Barely Cooked Corn, page 186.
Like New England Yankees using raw baby okra to scoop up Smoky Eggplant Dip, page 444, and declaring themselves fans.
The Cook’s Garden is two books in one, as I said above. The first ten chapters are called Gardening Basics and have a theme: Grow What You Like to Eat. The last fourteen chapters, Vegetable Knowledge, have a complementary theme: Cook What You Grow.
There are tons of color photographs on nearly every spread, and poems to discover, and little essays on compost, loam, leaves, no-till agriculture, and Gardens of Defiance.
The book covers the whole soil-to-table cycle — how to grow it, cook it, eat it, compost it, repeat. It’s 100% chemical free and 100% flavor focused.
Did I hear someone say The Cook’s Garden would make the perfect gift for the gardener or aspiring gardener in your life?
Yes, I did!
Did I hear someone else complain about the astonishing prices of fresh vegetables at the grocery store?
Yes, I did!
The Cook’s Garden is there for you. Place your pre-order right now and it will ship Tuesday, the official publication date.
Buy The Cook’s Garden here.
