From the New York Times food editor and former restaurant critic comes a cookbook to help us rediscover the art of Sunday supper and the joy of gathering with friends and family
“People are lonely,” Sam Sifton writes. “They want to be part of something, even when they can’t identify that longing as a need. They show up. Feed them. It isn’t much more complicated than that.” Regular dinners with family and friends, he argues, are a metaphor for connection, a space where memories can be shared as easily as salt or hot sauce, where deliciousness reigns. The point of Sunday supper is to gather around a table with good company and eat.
From years spent talking to restaurant chefs, cookbook authors, and home cooks in connection with his daily work at The New York Times, Sam Sifton’s See You on Sunday is a book to make those dinners possible. It is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though everything here can be scaled down, or up). The recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive (“You are not a feudal landowner entertaining the serfs”), and they derive from decades spent cooking for family and groups ranging from six to sixty.
From big meats to big pots, with a few words on salad, and a diatribe on the needless complexity of desserts, See You on Sunday is an indispensable addition to any home cook’s library. From how to shuck an oyster to the perfection of Mallomars with flutes of milk, from the joys of grilled eggplant to those of gumbo and bog, this book is devoted to the preparation of delicious proteins and grains, vegetables and desserts, taco nights and pizza parties.
WRITER WITH PLATFORM: Prior to becoming food editor of The New York Times and founding editor of NYT Cooking, the newspaper’s award-winning recipe site and app, Sifton was the newspaper’s national news editor, its lead restaurant critic and the culture editor. He also writes a regular food column in The New York Times Magazine.
HUGE SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE: Sifton has 175K Twitter followers and 28K on Instagram.
EXTREMELY DELICIOUS, MAKEABLE RECIPES: Five different ways to make roast pork; nine different ways to prepare rice and beans; how to prepare the perfect pie crust and the juiciest beer-can chicken: over 150+ of Sifton’s timeless and time-tested recipes are included here.
BROAD APPEAL: Sifton’s simple, straightforward structure is accessible to a wide range of home cooks. 14 chapters from Birds to Seafood, Pasta, and Veggies. 40+ sidebars topics like how to stock your kitchen, how to stretch a lobster, how to carve a ham, and do you really need to wash a chicken?
COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS THROUGHOUT, highlighting recipes and Sam’s presentation.
Sam Sifton is the food editor of The New York Times, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and the founding editor of the Times’s Cooking section, an award-winning digital cookbook and cooking school. Formerly the newspaper’s national news editor, chief restaurant critic, and culture editor, he is also the author of Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
Author Residence: Brooklyn, NY
Author Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Marketing: Pre-pub consumer outreach and review push
Online marketing outreach
Social media campaign
Targeted email marketing
Random House e-newsletters and websites
Library and Academic outreach
Social media strategy leveraging the author’s significant platform (174k Twitter; 27k Instagram)
Cross promotion with NYT food newsletter
Tie-in with national day of unplugging (March 1-2) to encourage in-person and distraction-free connections
Video creation
Outreach to meetup groups
Online advertising targeting food sites such as Food52
Influencer campaign
Bookseller outreach
Hashtag campaign around #yoursundaysupper to encourage user-generated content
Creation of suggested playlist for cooking
Publicity: National media attention
National/local review and feature print attention
National/local radio attention
Online review and feature attention
NPR campaign
Local author promotion: New York
Social Media Campaign
Targeted blogger outreach