Nail art is a new trend in cookbooks

“I’ve always loved doing my nails,” says chef and cooking instructor Nini Nguyen. Although she couldn’t devote as much time to doing her nails while working daily in the kitchens, her New role as cookbook author It has opened up some flexibility.

In In her first cookbook, co-written with Sarah Zorn, Nguyen has gone all out with her nails: On one page, you’ll find a pointy blue-and-white manicure designed to resemble the melamine dinnerware her family used when she was growing up; on another, sharp blue tips are adorned with hearts and sparkles. In images of Nguyen’s hands pulling apart bánh bao, or dipping mango into nước mắm đường, nails also feature prominently.

Pretty nails are something that is often considered in food photography. Usually, that means relatively nondescript manicures: short and perhaps a fun color. Much like wearing jewelry while cooking, nails can be polarizing for spectators For reasons of perceived hygiene, the fact that the viewer is not actually eating the food they are looking at does not seem to matter compared to the principle. Consequently, the implicit goal of so many nails in cookbook photos seems to be to look polished and clean, without drawing too much attention to themselves.

But a handful of new cookbooks are making nails (painted, long, exaggerated) a priority, making them as much a part of the style as the tableware on which the food is served. For their authors, nails are essential to telling the story.

In Alyse Whitney Published in April, Nail Art emphasizes the book’s maximalist and kitsch styles, which are an extension of Whitney. whimsical personal styleOne manicure features a bowl of sauce and portraits of Whitney’s dogs against a landscape resembling the bottom of a Hidden Valley Ranch bottle; another spells out the book’s title in bold, colorful letters. The nails complete the impression of who Whitney is.

Nails also help establish Shannon Martinez’s aesthetic sensibility. which is due out in November. This is made evident from the cover, which shows a hand wearing ornate gold rings and long, pointed, red nails. The combination is reminiscent of the recently dubbed “mob wife“aesthetics; it is no wonder that the book’s marketing materials refer to Scarface as inspiration.

For Nguyen, nails in Special go beyond the visual to the broader story I wanted to tell with the book. Special is an ode to the Vietnamese community, especially Nguyen’s hometown of New Orleans. “My love for nails comes from my family,” she says. Between her mother, her aunts and her grandparents, “everyone worked in nail salons.”

Vietnamese workers, mostly women, make up more than half of the nail salon workforce in the United States, according to a study 2018 Report from the UCLA Labor Center. So, Nguyen says, “it’s something I felt Vietnamese people were ashamed of,” particularly the idea that nail techs were some sort of “reserve career.”

With SpecialNguyen wanted to change that perception—to celebrate nails as one of the Vietnamese community’s contributions to mainstream American culture and to appreciate the people who do them. In addition to highlighting her family’s work in nail salons, Nguyen thanks her nail technicians in the book’s credits. “I think it’s one step closer to making sure we matter,” she says. “I want people to be proud of the things we do.” (Intricate manicures also appear in Tuệ Nguyen’s upcoming Vietnamese cookbook.) .)

And because of the title of the book, Specialrefers to what’s fancy, special or extra, Nguyen wanted intricate details, like the nails, to assert the over-the-top style. The hands holding the po’ boy-inspired banh mi have perhaps the most đặc biệt manicure: pointed and painted with chiles, limes and shrimp. Dangling from the middle fingers are two charms, one shaped like a shrimp and the other shaped like a lime wedge.

This idea of ​​nails as representation is also important to recipe creator and chef Kia Damon. Damon is working on her first cookbook, a tribute to his home state entitled Cooking with Florida Water (Recipes, Stories, and the History of the Forgotten South)Damon has been thinking about what kind of hands she wants to see in her pages. “A lot of this book is about the cultural aspects of Florida, which is very black and very Southern,” Damon says. “I need to have people with different hands in the photos, but also hands with painted nails, hands with acrylics.”

For Damon, this inclusion is about creating a cookbook that represents reality. Because, as much as critics have something to say about the cleanliness of cooking with long nails, “your mother or your sister or, regardless of gender, your friend who likes to do her nails is probably still cooking at home,” she says. She sees this resistance to long, colorful nails, particularly in the professional realm, as rooted in respectability politics and an anti-womenmisogynistic perspective. In Damon’s view, “people couldn’t understand if they opened a cookbook about Florida and saw nothing but plain nails; that’s not our world.”

In cookbooks, doing justice to representation involves taking into account considerations like these – details that may seem small on their own, but are important to those who make and buy cookbooks. Whether through the nails, the plates, or the backgrounds (like Vietnamese newspapers and lacquered tapestries) on which the dishes are placed, Nguyen wanted everything to feel like a meaningful representation. “It’s not just about Vietnamese food, but also about the food itself.” [also] “I really wanted to represent Vietnamese culture,” he says.

For Nguyen, the nails also reflect the feeling she wanted to convey with the book. In other cookbooks, “hands look very boring,” she says. “I want my hands to look as happy as my food.”