Christopher Hirsheimer (left) and Melissa Hamilton are the proprietors of Canal House, where they cook and style their own dishes and design and sell the resulting cookbooks.
(Teresa Hopkin)
G FORCE | CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER AND MELISSA HAMILTON
DIY cookbooks
Christopher Hirsheimer (left) and Melissa Hamilton are the proprietors of Canal House, where they cook and style their own dishes and design and sell the resulting cookbooks.
(Teresa Hopkin)
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton have all the skills between them to publish their own cookbooks. Hirsheimer (she’s a she) was a founder of Saveur magazine, has written a number of books, and shoots food photos for Jacques Pepin, Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali, and Rick Bayless. Melissa Hamilton is a chef, food stylist, and recipe developer. She worked for Martha Stewart Living and Cook’s Illustrated, and was food editor of Saveur. The two opened their own studio, Canal House, in Lambertville, N.J., a couple of years ago, and just published the first in the “Canal House Cooking’’ series, beginning with a 122-page soft-cover book ($19.95). The pair developed, cooked, styled, and wrote the recipes; they also designed the pages. Hirsheimer was the photographer, Hamilton the illustrator, and a printer put the books together. No big-name publisher was involved.
Q. What’s your plan for the series?
C.H. We’re planning three books a year. They’ll be seasonal recipes. We just came out with summer, the next is late fall and the holidays - it will have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. The next book will be winter and spring and then we’ll start again.
Q. Are there other cookbooks like this?
C.H. There was no model for it. We’ve always been in editorial. We’ve always been a little on the forefront, which can be good and bad. This just seemed like a need. We shoot a lot of cookbooks for chefs and writers; we’re now into designing them. We cook every day, we’re primarily cooks, so it’s just natural that we should write down what we cook.
Q. How has food styling changed since you got into it?
C.H. When I first started, everyone was in a dark room, the windows shut, everything was lit. Food styling was creating something that would sit under the lights happily for a few hours. When I started doing it, I really wasn’t a food stylist. Basically I just make food and I keep replenishing it.
Q. What do you call the style?
C.H. I don’t know what to call it. It’s real. It used to be that everything was perfect. We saw the beauty in the real, the half-eaten thing was wonderful, the messy plate.
M.H. The word authentic was used all the time. And now the word has been bastardized.
Q. You work with publishers all the time. Why not for this?
C.H. A publisher does like a model. We knew that we’d really never be given the creative freedom.
Q. Now that you’ve published your own book, what about the copy-cat factor?
M.H. Tell us!
C.H. What can we do? It’s a compliment.
Q. Are you actually packing books in boxes yourself?
M.H. Yes. We might say, “Myrtle is taking care of the shipping order’’ or “Matilda is here.’’ We’ll get a little help.
Q. Are book sales online only?
M.H. We’re selling it at independent bookstores and through our website [www.thecanalhouse.com] and on 
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