Food ghostwriters come in many different flavors, including the researchers who might spend days testing every possible method of cooking beans for Bobby Flay, the aproned assistants at the Food Network who frantically document everything that the “talent” does on camera in order to produce recipes for the Web site, and the (slightly) more literary work of writers who attempt to document a chef’s ideas, memories and vision in glossy cookbooks.

The rank beginners might be thanked in the acknowledgments of a book; the next step is being credited on the title page; at the very top of the profession, their names appear on the book’s cover. But getting up that pole can be a slippery business.

In the 1990s, when I was in the trenches, American chefs were not the thoughtful liberal-arts graduates who permeate the profession today. The idea that a chef would start an avant-garde literary food magazine, as David Chang did last year; create his own imprint at a publishing house, as Anthony Bourdain did; or appear on “Charlie Rose,” as Sean Brock of the restaurants Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., did last week, would have been laughable.

Many were brilliant and creative, and all were incredibly hardworking. But usually, nothing of the chef’s oeuvre had been written down except perhaps a master recipe for stock, designed for a trained kitchen staff and made in 40-gallon quantities.

Still, it did not matter if the chefs had no story to tell about why and what they were cooking: every last one of them wanted to publish a cookbook.

Andrew Friedman, who is currently writing with the chefs Michael White and Paul Liebrandt, said: “I’ve had chefs tear up reading the introduction to their own books. The job is to get them to the point where they verbalize their philosophy about food — even the ones who say they don’t have one.”

Years ago, there was a quaint trust among cookbook buyers that chefs personally wrote their books and tested their recipes, and a corresponding belief among chefs that to admit otherwise would mean giving someone else credit for the tiniest part of their work — unacceptable, in those macho and territorial times.