Recipes Need a "Lightbulb Moment," says Emily Weinstein, Editor-in-Chief of New York Times Cooking and Food
With 24,000 recipes in the NYT Cooking database, this high-powered editor knows what she wants from them -- and writers
One morning, I opened my email and found a paid subscription from Emily Weinstein. I gasped! What a huge compliment.
Emily is in charge of everything you see in the New York Times food section: recipes, reviews, features; and the NYT Cooking online database. She leads the team that assigns and edits freelance stories. She’s ultimately in charge of restaurant reviews and freelance stories, and writes the popular newsletter Five Weeknight Dishes.
I asked if I could interview her for this newsletter, and to my delight, she said yes. Emily has a huge, influential job. She leads a team of approximately 50 editors, reporters, restaurant critics, columnists, video producers, recipe developers, social media editors and photo editors. They produce content for:
· The New York Times Food section
· NYT Cooking, the subscription recipe app, which has around 24,000 recipes
· And the off-platform channels (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok).
Emily joined The New York Times in 2007, as a senior staff editor and web producer, for dining and home. Before she was at The Village Voice for four years in a variety of positions. She was also an editorial assistant at Jane magazine. She is a graduate of Vassar and has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia university.
“I started really young and the work kept growing. It’s been an amazing education to work at The Times,” she told me. “There’s nothing like it.”
Here’s Emily on recipe testing and writing, career, and what The New York Times wants in a contributor:
Q. Your staff doubled between 2020 and now. Why is that?
A. The one-word answer is video. There are about 17 people now who work in video. In 2020 there were two.
Do you think food writers need to be good on video?
A. I don’t. These are really different skills. We work with freelancer writers who don’t have video skills.
Food writers need to hone an expertise, such as writing on Substack, that allows you to directly connect with people who want to cook your food and support your endeavors. Video makes a lot of sense, but you have to find your platform and work hard and strategically at it.
Q. What are you most proud of at the NYT Cooking and Food section?
I’m really proud of my team. It’s stacked with people who are smart, creative, collaborative, genuinely nice and supportive of each other. That’s something to shout from the mountaintops. I’m proud of how much people love NYT Cooking.
And there’s the new cookbook, a collection of 100 recipes of The New York Times recipes. When I promote the book, people want to talk about their favorite recipes on NYT recipes. It’s amazing to feel that love for the work that we do, and I’m proud to have built something people use in their daily world. I cook from this app all the time and I love it.
Q. The comments in NYT Cooking are infamous. There’s even an Instagram parody. Do you get frustrated with the comments sometimes? Do you ever have to turn them off?
A. I love the commenters. They are incredibly knowledgeable. We never turn off the comments.
It’s easier for me to love the comments because I’m not a recipe developer. I don’t take them personally. I can take them in stride. The ones that are really frustrating are from the readers who change literally everything in a recipe and then don’t have success.
Q. How many times is a recipe tested?
A. It depends on the recipe and the level of complexity. There are two rounds of edits, countless conversations, and then we use an independent recipe tester. Finally, the recipe is made on set during a photo shoot. That’s also our chance to find any problems.
Q. What qualities do you look for in a new recipe contributor?
A. Ideally, we’re looking for people who have professional experience developing recipes, working in a test kitchen, or working in a restaurant kitchen. We’re not looking for home cooks who “really like to cook.” We are looking for some experience.
We want people who write really good recipes. They don’t always have to be easy, but they do have to be simple in a way. We don’t want fussy or fancy. We want to give our readers really great ideas for food that they can make after work or on Saturday mornings.
We do publish more complicated recipes, but on balance, we want something simple and delicious. The recipes need to have a lightbulb moment, a clever use of ingredient, or a good tip or trick. A better way to make something. And, of course, the food should be delicious. You need to be writing instructions that really take the reader by the hand and make it easy for them to follow the recipe.
We work on tight deadlines, so we need writers who have a demonstrated ability to work in that kind of context. Someone who can be communicative and hit deadlines. Someone used to a deadline environment, with a professional attitude.
Q. A lot of your writers are called “contributors.” What are their responsibilities?
A. Many are freelancers. They might regularly appear in a video series. They might write a newsletter. They have a relationship with us and we work with them all the time. Some of them are really busy with other work, so we’re happy to get on their calendar. There’s no minimum number of recipes they have to produce in a month.
Q. Who do people pitch if they have an idea for a feature that could be a reported story, profile, or trend story.
A. Krysten Chambrot (associate editor, Food. DJ).
Q. Whom do they pitch if they want to submit recipes?
A. Genevieve Ko (a deputy editor of NYT Cooking and Food. DJ).
Your readers can pitch us at recipes@nytimes.com.
Q. Thank you. It’s fairly rare to have a freelancer write a feature story, right?
A. We have a big staff and we only publish so much food reporting as opposed to stories about restaurants. Some examples are the Jerrelle Guy story on baking for Christmas morning. Kristen Miglore writes stories answering commonly-held kitchen questions. Rebekah Peppler writes cocktail stories.
Q. What are the trends in today’s recipe writing?
A. People do really want simple food. Even people who love to cook and don’t mind spending time in the kitchen. They want to spend under an hour. Also people are excited to learn about what they don’t know about: dimensions of a cuisine they haven’t explored before, or a technique. Those two things aren’t at odds with each other.
Q. Are there any food trends that really annoy you?
A. No. It would be nice if people understood the kind of work we do – testing and testing for amazing results – versus stuff that’s made to entertain people. There’s a level of care that we put into our work so that not only can you enjoy this but you can replicate it.
I see things all the time where I think “I bet that doesn’t taste good.”
Q. Do you like to keep writing? Is that why you write the newsletter Five Weeknight Dinners? You also wrote a cookbook with recipes from NYT Cooking staff and contributors. And you’re a working parent of two girls, correct? How did you make the time for this book?
A. I actually really like to write, and if I didn’t have this newsletter, I would have nothing but emails. And I have an MFA in writing from Columbia!
Also the newsletter keeps me really close to my readers and what they want, because they send me emails. And it keeps me close to our recipes and our work in a way that is enormously valuable.
Q. Now you have to promote the book, which is usually harder for editors, who tend to be in the background.
A. I like it! I am not someone who dreams of being on TV and I’m not a recipe developer, so it’s amazing to me that I’m cooking on TV. I’m an extrovert who also likes to stay at home. When I go to an event and meet people in the audience or they ask questions, there’s a surplus of goodwill. It’s a total joy. (See dates for upcoming events below. DJ)
Q. Do you have any tips for authors doing promotion?
A. The best thing about being on stage is trying to enjoy it. These people showed up to celebrate you.
Q. Most of my readers are not interested in becoming a restaurant critic. Being a reviewer was once a coveted job. It still is at The New York Times, but what about in the country overall? There are very few jobs. What changed?
A. It’s more that fewer jobs exist, and there’s a smaller pathway for people to follow. The power of that position has diminished. The competition is coming from Instagram and Tik-Tok. The restaurant critics there do it a very different way from how we do it. They are recreating that role. It’s less rarefied. There are lots of opinions flying around.
There’s also the expense of having a restaurant critic. Publications need to have a big budget. Restaurant reviewers need to eat omnivorously and voraciously at restaurants.
A recipe developer is at home cooking. The knowledge that recipe developers have about food can be useful in restaurant criticism.
Q. What is the future of food writing?
A. Obviously AI is the sea change that’s coming. Nothing is more human than food: cooking it, prepping it, growing it, tasting it. AI cannot do any of those things. For us, it’s incumbent on us to embrace the humanity of food.
Q. May I give readers your email?
A. It’s dearemily@nytimes.com.
If you’d like to see Emily and her colleagues in person, her events include:
February 3 in Boston at WBIR, with Melissa Clark and Eric Kim
February 10 in San Francisco at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, with Melissa Clark.
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Dianne Jacob
Editor, Writer and Coach
Email: dj@diannej.com
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My Book
Here’s the latest edition of my multiple award-winning book, Will Write for Food: 2021: Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs, and More.
I’m also the co-author of:
Disclosures: I am an affiliate of Food Blogger Pro, Amazon and Bookshop.org.
A wonderful interview, Dianne, and I couldn’t agree more with Emily’s words below.
“Nothing is more human than food: cooking it, prepping it, growing it, tasting it. AI cannot do any of those things. For us, it’s incumbent on us to embrace the humanity of food.”
As always, this is a tremendously helpful interview with someone who knows what readers and cooks want. As I'm working on my cookbook, I've been thinking about simplifying recipes as much as possible while still teaching a technique, introducing a new flavor, or a trick to help someone's baking.