Last year, Tamar Adler—a former editor at Harper’s who went on to cook for Gabrielle Hamilton, at Prune, open a restaurant in Athens, Georgia, and work for Alice Waters, at Chez Panisse—published a book about home cooking called “An Everlasting Meal,” modelled on M. F. K. Fisher’s classic “How to Cook a Wolf.” The book is a lyrical collection of essays that starts with a chapter titled “How to Boil Water,” and goes on to offer unexpected and culinarily sound advice.
I cook most of the meals for my wife and young children, and last year I edited a collection of essays about dads in the kitchen, “Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers who Cook for Their Families,” in part in an effort to get more men to cook. Home cooking is too often viewed as either a high-stakes competition (think of the myriad cooking shows that are so popular now) or something so high-stress that it is impossible to master (think of the rise of take out and prepared and frozen foods that can be found at any supermarket these days). When the world and the major media (or the back of your mind) says to you, “cooking is impossible,” Adler’s book is an inspiring corrective.
The heart of the book is a chapter called “How to Build a Ship,” in which she addresses the question about cooking, “How do you fall in love with it again, or if it has never made you truly happy, fall in love with it for the first time?” In her typical fashion, she starts the chapter with a quote, in this case from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Her whole book creates an immense longing for good food in clever and immediate ways. “Let smells in,” she writes. “Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemons as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one.”
With the recent release of the paperback edition of the book, I took the time to talk briefly with Adler.
How did you learn to cook?
My mother cooked every meal we ate in our house, save the rare, utterly luxurious take-out pizza. She made our lunches, too, which were exotic to everyone else and familiar to us. And so, though my brother was the one who probably learned the most directly from her—I was reading, usually—when I woke up one day as a near-adult and realized I wanted to cook, it wasn’t hard. I knew when things were wrong, and it didn’t take much tinkering to figure out how to get them closer to right. Of course, what helped me along was the fact that I associated cooking with normalcy, and family, and generally good outcomes. I don’t have memories of smoking ovens and unintentionally charred cakes.
How do you get someone to start cooking, or to pick up your book, even if they’re not interested in food?
The book does seem to be a good entry point, because it’s undogmatic and non-neurotic. Much of the skepticism about cooking comes from how obsessively it’s dealt with. One way we get back to the stove is to treat food less fetishistically.
There was a woman I met a year or so ago who told me she was a “wannabe foodie.” We talked a bit about what that meant. I told her I could dub her a foodie, if that was what she wanted, but when we got down to it, what she wanted was to know something—access. Really, she needed to be told that it is not a private club, and that if there is a club, it’s got shoddy bottle service and a broken sauna.
I don’t know what “foodie” means, but it seems to me to mean something unbalanced. There is a difference, and should be, between being in the know about “in” restaurants, chefs, food trends and liking and feeling able to eat well. One thing that really matters is feeling as though one, and often only oneself, is able to completely freely satisfy one’s own appetite. That is a good reason to know how to cook.
I’ve often used the word “sovereignty” to refer to one thing it allows you. If you don’t know how to make rice, you’re bound to minute rice or no rice. If you don’t know that rice and pasta play similar roles in dishes, you’re bound to one or the other. If you don’t know how to cook dried beans, you’re in the woods if they’re ever all that’s there. I don’t mean to sound apocalyptic, but truly, we’ve forgotten that things are unpredictable, and that it is very good, especially when time and money are short, to be able to make choices based on actual circumstance.
I think that we often look at cooking as something that limits, and feel as though a great thing about Trader Joe’s, with its packaged foods (and all packaged foods) is how they provide limitless options. But by knowing how to cook, you actually have more options. In our ever-apotheosized individualism, there’s hardly anything better you could do that know how to personalize or customize everything.
It’s really as though no one ever says: it is very worth liking to cook, and you’ve not got to love it. Cooking doesn’t have to be a great production. Often the best meals are assemblages of what’s there. Half my book may be delicately, and hopefully enjoyably, worded permission to be the hungry people we are without feeling as though we’re forced to choose to be gourmands or ascetics.
Tonight, at Bubby’s restaurant in Tribeca, Adler is taking part in a panel discussion about M. F. K. Fisher’s influence, with Ruth Reichl, Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs, Gerry Marzorati, Ron Silver, and Jack Hitt. She also prepared a short video for us on how to poach an egg in oil, put it over pasta, and turn it into a complete meal. It’s a good example of her approach to cooking, and to life.
