We eat with our eyes first!

There’s a question we’ve been going back and forth on across the last twelve books we’ve made: will anyone actually make the recipe if there’s no picture of it?

Recipes have worked for centuries without photographs, we kept telling ourselves. A reader can take “roast until the edges catch” and know roughly what that looks like, the same way a reader of novels can take a description of a face and picture one. No photograph required. So - do we always really need one?

Some good dishes over the years have suffered for the lack of one - not left out of the books, just without a picture that did them justice. Sometimes an image lacks sheen, or shape, or simply has nothing for the eye to land on. And the dishes that suffer most tend to be the easiest ones to love - the simplest, the least fussy, the ones that need no convincing to eat. Cruelly, those are often the hardest to photograph well.

I suspect social media has trained us into needing this more and more. A whole generation has learned to scroll through food before they’ve ever tasted any of it - recipes judged in a fraction of a second. We eat with our eyes before anything else, and a brilliant photo of a dish is almost do or die: it holds the greatest power there is in capturing a food’s story, more than the words ever manage on their own.

Which is maybe why I love food photography as much as I do, and - I probably shouldn’t admit to playing favourites - why the photoshoot is my favourite part of making a cookbook.

Two years of testing and writing happens quietly, mostly alone or in twos, in our Test Kitchen. Then, for three weeks, once every couple of years, all of it gets one shot at becoming something someone can actually see: off the spreadsheets, onto plates, lights, camera, action. One shot at becoming a series of images seductive enough to make someone get cooking.

Chaya and Verena, along with our other Test Kitchen colleagues, prep every dish first - and more often than not, seeing a dish plated properly for the first time throws up a final round of notes and small changes to the recipe itself, right at the very end of the process. Verena and I will style each and every dish for the shoot. There’s a lot of trust between the two of us by this point: what plate should it be on? Should it be messy? Does it need hands and spoons? What’s the focal point?

All the platters, bowls, fabrics and marble tops come from our prop stylist, Wei Tang, who has the best eye in the business. If the shoot is my favourite part of making a cookbook, Wei’s delivery day might be my favourite part of that - box after box of her collection turning up, each one more beautiful than the last, putting my so-called ceramic collection to shame.

And then our wonderful photographer, Jonathan Lovekin, who’s shot almost all of our books. There’s a shorthand between all of us now. He knows what an Ottolenghi photograph is meant to feel like almost as well as we do.

Our shoots feel more like a reunion now. Friends coming together for three chaotic weeks, full of energy and fun and an alarming number of leftovers. Our food styling and photography has shifted over the years, but the main idea stays the same: food wants to look like food. The moment it starts looking like a still life, it’s lost the thing that made it worth eating.

My main food styling tip: whatever you’re about to add next - the extra herb or the last adjustment - don’t. Leave it exactly as it landed.

There’s one image from Simple Too I love so much: a double-page spread, grilled asparagus with miso, olives and pine nuts in a white retro oval bowl with a rim of faint leafy green pattern (one of Wei’s), alongside a pile of charred French beans in a citrusy dressing with crushed sesame, on an olive-green ceramic plate. The whole spread is a study in green.

So - does a recipe need a picture? Not to work, no. But we’ve learned, again and again, that to actually get cooked, it very much does.

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