This Book Is the Best Thing I've Ever Worked On

Howdy cookbook fans!

And welcome to a very, very, very special issue of Stained Page News. This is the issue where I FINALLY reveal the project I’ve been hinting at in this newsletter for years, a project that I think is worth the wait. Because it’s easily the best project I’ve ever worked on—proud is an understatement.

I am talking about Cured: Cooking with Ferments, Pickles, Preserves, & More by Steve McHugh with Paula Forbes. (That’s me.) (You knew that.)

Photography by Denny Culbert. Edited by Kelly Snowden. Design by Emma Campion. Published by Ten Speed Press on March 26, 2024.

And AND! If you pre-order it from San Antonio bookstore The Twig—support your indie bookstores y’all!—your copy will show up in March signed by both me and Steve.

But maybe you’d like to hear more about the book first?

Steve is a chef in San Antonio; the name of his first restaurant, Cured, has multiple meanings. Because Steve’s specialty is charcuterie, it’s “cured” like hams and other meats. But also this is the restaurant he dreamed up with his wife Sylvia while he was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma over a decade ago, a restaurant that would be a light at the end of the tunnel during treatment.

Cured now has another meaning: it’s a cookbook. Or it will be, when it comes out in March. And it’s one hell of a cookbook, at that. With over 150 recipes, Cured aims to teach home cooks how to cook with preserved foods. It has recipes for sauerkraut and pickles and jams, yes. But the bulk of the recipes are not for preserved foods, they use preserved foods. These are dishes that can be made with store-bought mustards and salad dressings and spice blends and sundried tomatoes. Because this is a book that is less about how to make preserved foods, and more about why.

After all, cooking with preserved foods is just a fancy, cheffy way of saying pantry cooking.

So why are chefs like Steve obsessed with preservation?! Plenty of cookbooks will tell you how to put food in a jar. This one will tell you what to do with it once you take off the lid—whether that lid reveals homegrown strawberry jam or a tub of supermarket strawberry ice cream. And once you’ve figured out that why? Our hope is