I know most famous French chef books are written by ghosts. In the copyright notice, only publisher copyright, no text copyrights is ever mentioned. I personally know a cookbook ghost writer who wrote for Ducasse and other famous chefs. That writer is a serious food writer and has published several quality books under his own name. Working with big chefs wasn’t easy, they could be quite hostile and did not cooperate to give the authentic restaurant recipe. They tried to talk about fancy regional ingredients that nobody would have hands on them. Recently when watching Chef Table, I was surprised that some 2 stars chefs featured in those Netflix series, they had bought those overpriced French chef books and cooked from them. These book range from 160€ to 400€, up to a recent record: an Alléno book that costs 1500€.
Funny, I just discovered that one of the Robuchon book I bought (when it was heavily discounted) was translated into French from Japanese!
I don’t know the culture of other part of the world, at least the French chefs do not pretend they are writers, many start working at the age at 14 or 15 or are school dropouts.
Personally, I don’t care if books are ghost written or not. I just care if the recipes are tested and if they are good. Point. I owned the original French version Stéphane Raymond’s “Pork and Sons” before Phaidon translated it into English. The recipes are interesting, but there was basically no proofreading, tons of errors in orthography, sentences not finishing or error in ingredients. At times, the young kids in publishing house forgot that they are not making an internet website, that you can keep correcting the errors after pushing the publish button. (N.B. Stéphane Raymond is not a celebrity chef.)
