There are more than 4.6 million food posts on TikTok alone. Why, then, do we still love cookbooks?

Two of Australia’s top ten bestsellers in 2025 were cookbooks, both by Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats. Other popular books include Brooke Bellamy’s Bake with Brooki and Steph De Sousa’s Easy Dinner Queen. Yet increasingly, people are cooking from YouTube videos and other social media clips. What is the appeal of cookbooks today?

Cooking content on social media has become one of the most popular categories globally. Dedicated apps like SideChef have been created to help beginners understand technical terms in online recipes and automatically generate shopping lists.

In a 2025 study, SideChef found there were more than 4.6 million #TikTokFood posts and Pinterest listed food and drink as a top category. On YouTube, there are 6.74 million food and drink channels, which are 99% creator-driven. All-time YouTube views of food content reached 5.9 trillion in 2025.

Short-form videos provide step-by-step instruction and glamorous depictions of your next meal, but hard-copy cookbooks are more than just a collection of recipes.

Most cookbooks are technically categorised as illustrated non-fiction, filled with close-up photographs of food and images of the author in action. These illustrate the recipes, integrated with accompanying conversational text to engage the reader.

The three types of cookbook readers

Today’s cookbook audiences can be divided into three major groups: aspirational readers, everyday cooks and escapists.

The aspirational readers may want to cook like a chef, hoping the author will share secrets and include them in an inner circle of confidants. Others may aspire to a gendered ideal of domesticity, or seemingly effortless sophistication (just a little smoked duck breast and pickled fennel salad with pomegranate seeds and candied mandarin peel they threw together at the last minute).

The everyday cooks are looking to answer the dreaded question: what’s for dinner tonight? Some of these readers seek reliable, practical, frugal, and efficient solutions for the task of making food at home.

Others are seeking specialised instruction for new generations of appliances offering shortcuts or hands-off cooking, such as slow cookers, air fryers, or electric pressure cookers.

The escapists, however, are less concerned about 30-minute meals or how to reverse sear a steak. Their ideal cookbook is instead a fantasy, travelogue, or memoir, transporting the would-be cook to a nostalgic past or a far-off land, such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem.

The most extreme form of this escapism was described by US food writer Molly O'Neill as “food porn”, a substitute for actually engaging in the physical act of cooking. Stripped of the connections of community and shared meals, food porn is an extreme form of self-indulgent food writing that replaces the depth of social and cultural connections with “prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience”.

Cookbooks in this category are more like coffee-table books, meant to be perused at leisure rather than addressing an urgent need to get a meal on the table. Impractical recipes with difficult techniques, specialised equipment, and exotic ingredients are no barrier to this genre. The reality that time is also an expensive ingredient is not a consideration.

The most successful, bestselling cookbooks in Australia in recent years, like Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats: Dinner or De Sousa’s Easy Dinner Queen, combine some elements of aspirational and everyday cooking, while turning away from the extremes of food porn. Their appeal extends beyond competent instructions and dependable results.

Maehashi’s recipes start with a pitch to the reader: Why should I make this, and why should I use this recipe? How will the dish fit into my repertoire of standbys? Her unpretentious, personable tone is reassuring for anyone developing their skills. The notes to the methods include helpful tips, substitutions, and explanations, avoiding technical terms. Many recipes are easy enough for rank novices, but include a wide range of cuisines and dishes that elevate the everyday cook. Her most challenging recipe is beef wellington, now infamous for its connection to the “mushroom murders”.

As with other successful cookbook authors, Maehashi’s popularity benefits from social media crossover. She has 1.7 million Instagram followers alone.

Is there a generational divide?

While there is a presumption that younger readers are more likely to get their food inspiration online and older readers prefer hard copy, the desire to limit screen time and “be present” also drives print sales.

Physical cookbooks are an antidote to the false efficiency of recipes on social media. Influencers often ask you to follow, comment and like to get their recipes. This content often ends up unread in your inbox or in a jumbled folder of saved posts and screenshots.

Without an extra paid app, such as ReciMe, and the time to organise the content, locating that viral recipe may take longer than pulling a book off the shelf and flipping to an old favourite. Some print cookbooks, like Jerusalem, now offer access to the e-book edition, so you don’t have to lug the hard copy around the grocery store or take photos of the cookbook with your phone.

Historically, cookbook audiences were first limited by literacy levels and the cost of purchasing books. Because of this, the first cookbooks were written by, and for, an elite audience rather than skilled professionals. During the 17th century, French cuisine as a distinct mode of cooking became the standard for noble households across Europe, and cookbooks for nouvelle cuisine gained popularity. Many skilled chefs, however, were illiterate and were prohibited from sharing the methods of their guilds.

Before printing technology increased the availability of books in the early modern period, cooking and baking were reliant on oral tradition and apprenticeship to teach skills and share knowledge. Chefs working in noble households, however, were exempt from guild restrictions and revealed their trade secrets to an elite audience only.

Today’s hard-copy cookbooks bear the scars of use – tangible evidence of time and effort in the kitchen, covers stained with splatters of tomato or pages stuck together with drips of pancake batter. The dirtiest, dog-eared cookbook is the one you turn to for dependable, familiar results. This contrasts with the pristine, glossy cookbook gathering dust in the front room, filled with recipes you will never make.

Like yellowed, handwritten recipe cards from a bygone era, a physical cookbook becomes an heirloom to pass on to the next generations. Smudged with butter, dotted with red wine, and covered in annotations (too much salt!), the cookbook becomes part of family history.

The ubiquity and convenience of digital recipes, often fleeting, has not replaced the physical cookbook as a touchstone of reliability, a cultural archive, or a guilty pleasure.

Garritt C. Van Dyk has received funding from the Getty Research Institute.