Oprah to enter celeb cookbook fray in early 2017
Make room in the kitchen, Gwyneth and Chrissy: Oprah's coming.
Celebrity cookbooks are all the rage, and now Winfrey is throwing her chef’s hat into the ring.
Her cookbook, Food, Health and Happiness: ‘On Point’ Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life, will arrive on Jan. 3 under her new, as-yet unnamed publishing imprint.
Expect it to be a recipe for best-selling success, based on Winfrey’s known ability to sell millions of books through her book club.
And while this is the first cookbook with Oprah's byline, she was involved with one by her personal chef Rosie Daley in 1994. In the Kitchen with Rosie spent a remarkable 16 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Paste BN’s Best-Selling Books list.
In the new cookbook, Winfrey will discuss her “lifelong relationship with food and share recipes for the meals she loves,” according to publisher Flatiron, a division of MacMillan.
Winfrey, who has famously battled her weight for years, bought a 10 percent stake in Weight Watchers last year.
“In the past several months on Weight Watchers, I have worked with wonderful chefs to make healthier versions of my favorite meals,” Winfrey said in a statement. “When people come to my house for lunch or dinner, the number one thing they ask is, ‘How is this so delicious and still healthy?’ So I decided to answer that question with recipes everyone can enjoy.”
The public has shown an appetite for celebrity cookbooks this year.
Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings: Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat was an instant best-seller when it was released in February. It was the first cookbook to ever land at No. 1 on Paste BN’s list, and it spent 12 weeks in the top 150. (In the Kitchen with Rosie made its debut at No. 7 on April 21, 1994.)
After Teigen, Gwyneth Paltrow had a hit with It’s All Easy, her cookbook which hit No. 16 on Paste BN’s list in April.
Not every celebrity cookbook released this year has been an automatic best seller. Back to the Kitchen by actor Freddie Prinze Jr., released last week, failed to make Paste BN’s top 150 this week.
Winfrey's cookbook will replace her planned memoir as the first book to be published under her imprint, which was announced last year. Flatiron has postponed the release date for The Life You Want. Those titles will be joined by several non-fiction books each year, which will be handpicked by Winfrey.
Contributing : Mary Cadden