Senior Designer Henry Petrides tells us how he designed a unique cover for Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake – a collection of classic authors’ favourite recipes.

It was an exciting moment to be given my first cookbook cover to design, especially one as unique as Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake – a collection of classic authors’ favourite recipes.

The brief asked for something whimsical and playful, and my mind immediately went to some of mid-century cookbooks I had spotted when visiting the Faber archive.

It then dawned on me that one of Faber’s most famous book jackets, Good Dishes from Tinned Foods by Ambrose Heath, designed by Berthold Wolpe, would be the perfect cover to pay homage to. It could be as if the central tin had been swiped from the kitchen cupboard and transformed into Plath’s titular tomatoey treat.

Once the layout was approved, and the appropriate amount of oozing icing refined, I decided to linocut the whole design to reintroduce some warmth and really play in to the vintage, literary feel.

This involved transferring a mirrored version of the illustration on to a sheet of lino using carbon paper, before carving out the design by hand, rolling the sheet with ink, and pressing it to create the final print. I’m definitely no expert at linocut, but luckily this worked with the slightly wobbly aesthetic I was after.

As a final touch, I commissioned the incredible artist Joe McLaren to design title pages and endpapers inspired by Edward Bawden’s unusual and witty illustrations for Ambrose Heath’s cookbooks. Joe nailed it, and really helped pull the whole project together.

Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake is out now.