Is Carmy's Cookbook Due?
Is Carmy's Cookbook Due?
On a popular type of TV merch
If you’re a fan of The Bear, you can wear your love on your sleeve…and on your torso and your head. FX has partnered with J. Crew to make shirts, jackets, and hats that look like uniforms for the show’s fictional family business, Matter of Fak Supply Company.
The launch of costumes-made-real merch is a milestone for a TV show—it’s a sign the program has progressed far enough on a path of popularity that an inside joke can be taken outside. I was on top of an alp last month and spotted a Dunder Mifflin t-shirt on another hiker. On the train ride home, I sat across from a teenager in a Central Perk hat.
The Bear hasn’t reached the ubiquity of The Office or Friends, which explains why the merch drop is one or two degrees less populist. The decision to partner with J. Crew for a limited capsule collection places The Bear’s merch alongside both the modern “brand x brand” collaborations and other store-specific tie-ins like Banana Republic’s Mad Men collection and the Brooks Brothers Great Gatsby line. This strategy fits a show whose costumes are simple on the surface but full of stylishly subtleties that only an obsessive could spot. Fans have already scoured the internet to find the bandanas Sidney wears or the plain white t-shirts Carmy favors.
While browsing the J. Crew capsule and FX’s merch store, I was surprised at one piece of merch that isn’t on offer. It’s one that seems fitting to the show’s setting and to the millennial-with-disposable-income fanbase that would buy a “Matter of Fak” canvas jacket.
There is no The Bear cookbook.
Yet.
The cookbook is a common—and lucrative—TV tie-in, no matter how bizarre the premise or prestigious the show. There are official cookbooks for The Sopranos, Hannibal, Downton Abbey, Emily in Paris, True Blood, Yellowstone, and Game of Thrones (featuring a foreword by George R.R. Martin). A show doesn’t even need to be new to get a cookbook. Streaming buzz inspired cookbooks for Friends, The Office, and girls both Gilmore and Golden.
The oldest example I can find of a TV cookbook tie-in is 1970’s The Dark Shadows Cookbook.1 The genre seems to have truly found its footing ‘90s, though. In my collection, I have a copy of 1992’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous cookbook (signed by host Robin Leach himself and purchased for fifty cents at a Radcliffe College library sale). I’ve held onto it because it’s a perfect example of what a TV cookbook should be—aspirational but not out-of-reach, consistently themed, and aimed squarely at the show’s core audience. Like the show, the book obsesses over the preferences and habits of the one percent. It has lush photos of extravagant homes and pages of reverent prose. Also like the show, the book is meant for people who are on the outside and are looking for escapism. Most of the Lifestyles recipes are dishes a decent home cook could handle on a weeknight. It’s for people who will never ride a private helicopter to their yacht, but who would like to have a bite of Regis Philbin’s favorite pasta.
It can’t be easy to find enough recipes that fit a show’s theme and are easy to make at home. Even the most basic dishes in Lifestyles belong because they’ve been touched by celebrity. The cornbread recipe is no more complicated than the instructions on the side of a cornmeal box, but it has Randy Travis’s endorsement, so it works for the book.
TV cookbooks go wrong when writers pile references on top of recipes that could appear anywhere. The quickest way to do this is to take a standard dish and imply it’s a certain character’s favorite—what they cook at home or might bring if you invited them to dinner. This gustatory cosplay leads to The Star Trek Cookbook’s offerings of “Klingon green beans and walnuts” and “Seven of Nine’s steamed vegetables.”
The most pleasant surprise in a tie-in cookbook is when it works as a cookbook in and of itself. The Downton Abbey cookbook teaches the reader how the upper classes used to eat. With the TV bits excised, it could read as an update of historic cookery. The Bob’s Burgers cookbook is full of ideas for interesting hamburger toppings, and without the branding, it would work well as a pun-filled guide to family dinner nights.
The TV cookbook that best transcends its origins is also the one that I think of when I imagine a cookbook for The Bear. Cafe Nervosa: The Connoisseur’s Cookbook is a Frasier tie-in from 1996 that captures its era and niche perfectly. The book has good recipes for nut bread, pastries, coffee drinks, and the type of light lunch fare that you’d expect to find in a high-end cafe in the mid-‘90s. The Frasier references are minimal. Most of the photos are beige-heavy glamour shots of food without an actor in sight. Today, the book feels like a historic document; it gives a precise look at a dining trend of its time.
A book from The Bear could do the same. The show thrives on the same interest in fine dining and kitchen culture that made Kitchen Confidential a bestseller and that makes negative reviews of restaurants like Per Se go viral. Matty Matheson, who plays the character Fak on the show, is himself an accomplished chef and cookbook author. The show’s fans have already begun to fill the void a dedicated Bear cookbook would occupy, recreating recipes like the potato chip omelet from the show’s second season and scrutinizing a shot of Carmy’s bookshelf to put together a list of every cookbook the character owns. The Bear’s cookbook could synthesize the show’s culinary influences into something that’s a little more pop, but still reverential to its influences. It would be to the Ottolenghi books what a J. Crew t-shirt is to the $105 Merz B. Schwanen crew necks Carmy wears on the show.
Like a branded shirt, the cookbook would also work as a projection of taste. It says to anyone who looks at the shelf that the owner is interested in good food and good television. It’s a conversation starter. Something to talk about over dinner.
My search didn’t include books like Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook (1968) or others tied to food-based shows.