I think the thing here might be "of the results".

Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ...

For me that revelation explains a lot.

I know a food stylist and a food photographer (both work / have worked for major UK newspapers) and this is nonsense. They cook and photograph every recipe.

Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else.

(And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)

I've almost never seen a recipe book that didn't have at least one recipe where some aspect of the picture didn't blatantly contradict the recipe; i.e. it was just a stock photo.

You should probably try buying better quality cookbooks? I don't think I have ever seen a stock image in a cookbook.

AI generated photos would probably look good enough for the book to be successful.

Cannot say for recipe books, but for illustrations for ads and/or for restaurant posters, the "traditional" way was to not use food at all, or use only partially actual food, the rest being artificial.

Very likely this has changed but once there were specialized artists that made mock-ups (often using wax, but not only), besides the ready-made props (usually plastic).

And then there is an endless list of non-food ingredients that are used because they come out great in photography, example:

https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...

I'm inclined to give food photographers a pass on the "non-food ingredients" thing. Most of these fall into the category of "make something which looks like food but lasts longer" -- fake ice cream which doesn't melt, fake milk which doesn't soak into cereal, fake syrup which doesn't soak into pancakes, et cetera. It's not a matter of making something which looks better than real food -- it's just that photoshoots have a unique need when it comes to how long the food lasts. If you're eating pancakes, they should never stay on your plate for the amount of time a professional photographer would want to spend with them.

Sure, nothing against the practice, food photographers do what is needed to do to obtain a good result, it was only to explain why often times what you actually cook looks quite different from the photos, a part is to be attributed to (less) capabilities of the cook, but a part comes from the sheer fact that the photo does not represent the actual output of the recipe.

I know someone who was a cook for a food photographer. they always made 10x what was called for. For one salad in the photo she made 10 so they could choose the best looking one, then a lot of time was spent adjusting exactly where each tomato was. Likewise make 10 pies, take a slice our of each, then the artist uses a rubber scrapper to put the right lines in the side of each slice, then choose the best to photograph. It was all real food.

I'm not saying that they don't also do fake food, but a lot of real food is used as well.

The Leith’s books don’t have many photos, great recipes though as you’d expect from a genuine cooking school.

That's a pretty modern development. Older cookbooks, including classics that are just as good or better than anything being written now, don't have photos, and rarely have illustrations.