Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

Karen Page is an American culinary writer and researcher who, with her husband Andrew Dornenburg, has documented the creative process of America's leading chefs.

Karen Page and her husband Andrew Dornenburg have written together since the early 1990s, interviewing and documenting the work of leading American chefs with the thoroughness of biographers and the curiosity of food lovers. Their early books — Becoming a Chef (1995) and Culinary Artistry (1996) — were the first serious journalistic treatments of American fine dining as a creative and professional discipline.

The Flavor Bible (2008) is their most widely used work: a comprehensive reference guide to flavor affinities, based on interviews with hundreds of professional chefs about which ingredients naturally complement each other and why. The book contains no recipes but provides, for each of hundreds of ingredients, a detailed list of compatible partners — from the obvious to the surprising — along with the voices of the chefs who use them. It is the reference book that sits closest to the professional cook’s workstation.

The Vegetarian Flavor Bible (2014) applied the same methodology to plant-based cooking, arriving at a moment of growing interest in vegetable-forward cuisine and becoming equally essential to its audience. Page and Dornenburg represent a distinctive approach to food writing: less interested in performing knowledge than in accurately documenting what practitioners actually know.