Divided Beginnings

Luisa Weiss was born in Berlin, Germany, to an Italian mother and an American father. She grew up in a multilingual family, commuting back and forth between Boston and Berlin, with yearly trips to her mother's house in a small village near Urbino. Luisa's main (well, only, let's be honest) childhood interest was reading. She was never, ever, ever without a book, whether on a car ride, on a sidewalk, under a dining table, or on vacation. This would end up defining her life.

Luisa went to college at Tufts University, graduating with a double major in English and French literature. The summer after graduation, Luisa traveled from Medford to Cambridge for the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a formative event. And although she subsequently moved to Paris in an ill-fated attempt to attend graduate school, it was only a matter of time before Luisa pivoted to working at the French publishing company Flammarion as a slush-pile reader and editorial intern.

Hello New York!

Ready to make a go of book publishing in earnest, Luisa left Europe for New York City, starting out as the assistant to the publisher at Simon & Schuster. At S&S, Luisa learned how to field Hunter S. Thompson's phone calls, take meticulous meeting minutes, and how to create a P&L sheet. Two out of three of these skills still serve her well today.

Thanks to a fellow Radcliffe alum and Upper West Side roommate, Luisa first found out about literary scouting, a mostly under-the-radar career path in book publishing that seemed to combine everything that defined Luisa: foreign languages, an interest in international book markets, obsessive reading, and overseas travel.

Luisa worked at Bettina Schrewe Literary Scouting for five years, reading multiple manuscripts a week, writing book reports for foreign clients, organizing endless book fair schedules, traveling to the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs, working up her nerves to cold-call agents and editors almost every day, and pinching herself repeatedly that this was actually a job for which she was getting paid.

A Double Life

Except, and this is maybe a little awkward, but Luisa had secretly started a food blog. It was the summer of 2005. There were at least twenty-five food blogs out in the universe already. Luisa was sure - convinced, in fact! - that she was the last one to the food blog party. It would be a fun little hobby. No one would need to know about it. She called it The Wednesday Chef.

Luisa kept her blog strictly anonymous at first, figuring no one besides her father and a few friends would ever read it. But to her immense surprise, Luisa soon had more readers than she'd ever expected. Before long, The Wednesday Chef was being mentioned in national newspapers, and Luisa was making friends with other food bloggers, connecting with readers, and feeling like she'd stumbled onto the most wonderful little world. One day, Luisa decided it was time to drop the act and own up to her hobby that had come to dominate whatever free time she had. Luisa was the Wednesday Chef. The Wednesday Chef was Luisa.

When the publisher of a publishing company approached Luisa about transitioning from book scouting to cookbook editing, it was the most logical next step. During her time at Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Luisa acquired and edited authors like Kim Boyce, Renato Poliafito and Matt Lewis, Jacques Torres, Alton Brown and Liana Krissoff.

It was during this period that Luisa's personal life went through a bit of turmoil. As much as she loved living in New York and her career, Luisa grew more and more homesick for Berlin. She missed it so much that she found herself incapable of committing to life in New York. This led to all sorts of complications and eventually Luisa decided to pull the plug on her life in New York. If that sounds dramatic, it was! You can read all about it in her first book, My Berlin Kitchen, which she sold on proposal in a pre-empt to Viking two months before moving to Berlin.

At Home At Last

In Berlin, Luisa became a full-time writer, publishing My Berlin Kitchen in the fall of 2012. In the book, she wrote about her childhood in Berlin, the homesickness she battled through cooking, trying to find her way as an adult, and how she finally came full circle by moving back home and falling in love with the man she'd go on to marry. Luisa filled the book with her favorite recipes from her three countries: roasted Brussels sprouts and braised chicken from New York, bracioline siciliane and chickpea soup from summers in Italy, and Pflaumenmus and Rote Grütze from her kitchen in Berlin. The book was also published in Germany, Poland, Holland and Brazil.

Shall we speed things up here? The same year that My Berlin Kitchen was published, Luisa and her husband Max had a little boy named Hugo. Luisa became the food columnist for Harper's Bazaar Germany (the only Harper's Bazaar publication worldwide with a food column, incidentally), then wrote another book, a cookbook called Classic German Baking, and dreamed that she had a second child named Bruno. A dream that, like magic, came true.

Classic German Baking, published in 2016, is a rigorously tested collection of beloved German, Austrian and Swiss baking recipes. From classics like Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte and Sachertorte to lesser known gems like Swabian Seelen and traditional yeasted Gugelhupf, Luisa's goal was to gather together the best of the baking tradition from German-speaking countries where home baking is still a huge part of everyday life. Classic German Baking was considered one of the best baking books of the year by both the Washington Post and the New York Times. Search the #classicgermanbaking hashtag on Instagram to see all the wonderful things being baked from the book across the world.

Luisa's writing on everything from food to motherhood has been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. the Guardian, Cup of Jo, Food52, Publisher's Weekly, The Kitchn, and Epicurious, among many other places.

These days, in addition to her writing, child-wrangling and home-cooking, Luisa also works as a translator (from German to English) for clients like Netflix, Warner Bros and Axel Springer GmbH. She has worked as a freelance editor and proofreader for companies like Hyperion and Workman, and has done a few cookbook Americanizations. Luisa has taught food writing classes in Berlin and at the Anna Tasca Lanza School in Sicily. She holds baking workshops on subjects like yeasted cakes and Christmas cookies, and has filmed a series of cooking videos for Chefkoch.de. Luisa has spoken at blogging conferences on subjects like personal productivity and cookbook publishing, and she's currently working on her first novel.

And still, wherever she goes, she's got a book by her side.