Interest in cooking heats up in lousy economy

There's much greater interest in cookbooks, too, particularly those about slow cookers, value meals, canning and preserving, says Mary Davis, a spokeswoman for book retailer Borders Group Inc. The number of cookbooks sold in the past year rose 9 percent, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Money saved by eating in has given some the means and justification to invest in kitchen tools.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, says sales of housewares, including cooking and dining items and small appliances, were strong in February.

High-end kitchen retailer Sur La Table says sales at its established stores have risen 4.9 percent this year. The company recently sent an e-mail advertising a set of three Chicago Metallic pans priced at $24.99, down from the usual $55, and sold almost 600 sets in one day, spokeswoman Susanna Linse says.

Food Web sites — which offer tens of thousands of recipes, most of them free — also are seeing more traffic.

At Conde Nast's culinary site, Epicurious.com, traffic in January was up 10 percent over a year ago to 4.4 million from 4 million visitors a year earlier.

Editor-in-chief Tanya Wenman Steel says Epicurious' efforts to draw readers with weekly menu planners and recipes to feed families for less have paid off.

"Whenever we wrote a post about cooking for your family for less, we got a large number of comments," she says.

Cooking magazines generally are doing well even as softer advertising revenue has inflicted pain elsewhere in publishing.

Saveur, a food, wine and travel magazine published by Bonnier Corp., saw subscription sales rise 11 percent in March from the same month a year ago. Food Network Magazine, which launched late last year, hopes to boost circulation to 600,000 by October, up from the 300,000 of its first issue.

"Bon Appetit" executive editor Victoria von Biel says circulation is at an all-time high of 1.4 million. The magazine's January issue offered ideas on how to eat better for less, including how to host an inexpensive dinner party and how to cook a week's worth of dinners for under $100.

"Times are tough. Even our affluent readers are going home and nesting a little bit at the moment," she says.

Samir A. Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi whose focus is consumer magazines, estimates that there are between 70 and 90 new titles that appear every year, from magazines devoted entirely to cheese and others just about chicken.

"There's a big hunger out there, no pun intended, for do-it-yourself cooking," Husni says. "If you can't go to the restaurant, what better way is there to bring it to your home?"

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