Julia Child once called the Joy of Cooking “a fundamental resource for any American cook.” Originally self-published by St. Louis homemaker Irma Rombauer in 1931, and in print continuously since its original commercial publishing in 1936, Joy of Cooking is one of the most popular cookbooks to come out of the United States, and has been republished more times than any other, with more than 18 million copies sold. Rombauer’s great-grandson John Becker and his wife, Megan Scott, are the first of the family to be solely responsible for testing, revising, and updating the book since 1975, and their revised edition dropped in November 2019. They added 600 new recipes to the 4,000 it already included, bumping it up to an astounding 1,200 pages. They updated every section to reflect modern ingredients and techniques currently available to home cooks. Becker and Scott join Anna Brones (the local author/artist responsible for creating the paper cuts at the beginning of each chapter) in conversation at this special event held in support of Joy's latest revision. by Leilani Polk