Mark Bittman

She was fantastic.

And it was the days when publishers were supportive.

We hired, uh,

Another editor, Jack Bishop, who was a friend of mine, and the three of us worked for six months sort of going over this thing.

Page, coincidentally, 25 chapters.

So we took a chapter a week for six months and just went over every single thing.

And that's when we came up with the idea for sidebars and for lists and for more variations and for all the things that makes How to Cook Everything possible.

the sort of amazing book that it is.

And, um, after that, I, um, after that, I've had a collaborator, Kerry Conan, who has done a,

a great deal of the work and, but the, the template, you know, was set in the mid-90s, early, yeah, the mid-90s and so that's 30 years now and everything has sort of, it's pretty amazing because I got the column in the Times and I thought, well, this is, nothing could be better than this and I started writing and then how to, everything came out and like won every award and sold a zillion copies and,

And it turns out that's what I'm going to wind up.

That's going to be the first line of my obituary is how to cook everything, which is fine.

There's certainly nothing wrong with that.

I mean, I was a kind of pimple on the elephant's butt.

I mean, I wasn't like an integral part of the paper.

I got to do what I wanted to do.

The column was really popular.

Everybody was happy about it.

And it was all...

It wasn't all me.