Review: Celebrity Cookbooks

Review: Celebrity Cookbooks

Many famous chefs have created cookbooks with their expertise. However, there are many celebrities with little to no cooking experience who have created cookbooks. I decided to check out a few of these celebrity cookbooks from the library to see what the big rage is. The big question I was wondering: why do people trust celebrities more than famous chefs when it comes to cooking? What do these celebrities have to offer that the chefs do not?

I took out Cravings by Chrissy Teigen, If It Makes You Healthy by Sheryl Crow and Chuck White, It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow and The Seasoned Life by Ayesha Curry. As you can tell from the title, Cravings by Chrissy Teigen contains many recipes that we crave. My mouth watered just looking at the pictures of these calorie-filled delights. What is surprising though is that Chrissy Teigen is a supermodel. I would assume that her diet would be mainly healthy foods. But this is not the case. Her recipes match her personality that she shows us through her Twitter page and her interviews. On Twitter, she is full of sass and humor, and in her interviews, she is relatable and down to earth. Some of her recipes include French Toast Casserole with Salted Frosted Flakes, and Armadillo Cheesy Garlic Bread. She also includes her delicious Butternut Squash Soup with Prosciutto Crisps, and Pepper’s Spicy Clams and Pasta. Pepper is her mom, and I loved how she added a personal touch with her family. The highlight of this cookbook for me was her quirky reflections that she added to each recipe. Rather than simply providing the recipe, she displayed the hard work she put into this cookbook with a thoughtful paragraph before each recipe. She would say what the recipe goes well with, when she likes to eat it, why she loves it, etc.

Teigen’s cookbook method was similar to what Ayesha Curry did in The Seasoned Life. After a thoughtful introduction about her own life and experience with food, Ayesha Curry also provided her own advice for perfecting a dish at the end of each recipe. Ayesha’s recipes are on the healthier side, especially compared with Chrissy Teigen’s, but they still look equally as delicious. She added some recipes from her Mom’s heritage, Thai, which adds a more personal touch to her cookbook. Additionally, throughout the book there are Q&A’s with her kids and her husband, Steph Curry. Although I wish there were more pictures of their adorable kids, I enjoyed reading the Q&A’s and her reflections. This cookbook was my Mom’s favorite because Ayesha’s recipes are both healthy and delicious, a balance that is hard to achieve and hard to please when feeding eight kids dinner every night. Those two cookbooks were definitely my favorites, or maybe I am just partial to them both as celebrities.

If it Makes You Healthy, by Sheryl Crow and Chuck White is full of extremely healthy recipes, as the title suggests. One of them adds a few sentences before each recipe. Also, some of their recipes are vegan which would benefit those who have that diet. A cool aspect that they added to their cookbook is that it is divided by the seasons that also relate to the events of their lives. The first section is On the Road: Spring and Summer, and the second section is In the Studio: Fall and Winter. Sheryl was inspired to write this cookbook because she was diagnosed with Breast Cancer, and was consequently forced to eat more healthy. This also adds a more personal touch to her cookbook.

It’s All Good by Gwenyth Paltrow is also full of healthy options. Like Sheryl, her motive to write a cookbook was from her own health problems. She is anemic and had an incident where she almost passed out from over-indulging as a result of stress. Although she writes less introduction to each recipe, she provides different hints for eating at different times of the day and cooking certain foods.

Each of these celebrity cookbooks are unique in their own way, but what makes them so attractive if they don’t really have backgrounds in cuisine? Personally, I was most interested in Chrissy Teigen and Ayesha Curry’s cookbooks because I admire them as celebrities. We see people in the media whom we admire and in turn we want to be like them. So, if they create something that gives insight into their lifestyle, perhaps that will entice us to buy them.

Oftentimes, fans of celebrities only see into their lives as far as social media and interviews. But when a fan’s favorite celebrity creates a book, or in this case a cookbook, it is a tangible thing that their favorite celebrity has made and a new glimpse into that celebrity’s life. Not only do I recommend reading these cookbooks, but I also recommend finding cookbooks of the celebrities that you love. Show them to your parents and maybe your lives will become a little bit more like your favorite celebrity. Happy Fangirling!