Cookbooks May Be Lost at Sea

Two new cookbooks may be literally lost at sea, and now fans will have to wait a few more months to dig into them, People reports. Containers collapsed on a cargo ship headed to New York, presumably sending new copies of Melissa Clark's Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals and Mason Hereford's Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin' in New Orleans to the bottom of the Atlantic. Both books are published by Penguin Random House, per NPR. Copies were stored on containers on the Madrid Bridge ship that originated from Taiwan, but the ship encountered a storm near the Azores of Europe on Jan. 15. Sixty containers tumbled overboard, and another 80 were damaged. It will take days to determine whether Clark’s and Hereford’s cookbooks were actually lost at sea, so Penguin Random House has changed Clark's release date to Sept. 6 and Hereford's to June 21.

Both authors seemed to take the news in stride on Instagram. Hereford posted an edited image with the infamous naked baby Nirvana album cover, using captions along with a tiny image of his cookbook to cover the infant’s genitals. The restauranteur turned author used more humor in his post: "The good news is that there were no critical injuries, as can happen in these situations … the link in my bio sends you to articles about the collapse, which is perhaps the most hilariously 2022 thing to happen yet this year." Clark, also a food columnist for the New York Times, posted an image of a shark trying to eat her cookbook and made a few jokes as well. "I like to think that if the books are at the bottom of the ocean, they’re teaching whole schools of fish some very tasty recipes," she wrote. "Poseidon and his nereids are dining in style." (More strange stuff stories.)