Speaking at a recent conference, Mollie Katzen of Moosewood Cookbook fame wondered, "Where did cooking go? And can we search for and rescue it?"
Well, for anyone who thinks the clues to its rediscovery can be found in the pages of glossy cooking magazines, fancy cookbooks or in the hands of celebrity chefs on the Cooking Channel, Tamar Adler, in her new book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, presents a very different idea. Follow the narrative thread through An Everlasting Meal and you'll find it in your own kitchen. Alongside your old saucepan and trusty wooden spoon where it's been all along, patiently waiting for you to show up.
Modeled on M.F.K. Fisher’s 1942 How to Cook a Wolf, An Everlasting Meal reveals how limitation can be an opportunity for innovation and the instincts for cooking can be easily cultivated.
Adler says right up front -- and you should know -- this is not a cookbook, although there are recipes included. As she explains in her introduction, "This is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about eating affordably, responsibly, and well, and because doing so relies on cooking, it is mostly about that."
And cooking, as Adler describes it in intricately crafted essays with titles such as How to Boil Water, How to Teach an Egg to Fly and How to Catch Your Tail, is not some esoteric discipline only to be truly enjoyed by the high priests and priestesses of the professional kitchen. No, cooking is what hungry people do. Naturally. In their own kitchens, with basic ingredients and unpretentious implements.
Cooking. Apparently it's that beautifully simple.
For Adler that understanding has come through experience. While working at Harper's Magazine several years ago, she started cooking at Prune restaurant on her days off. She subsequently assisted Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, opened a farm-to-table restaurant in Georgia with friends, and cooked at Chez Panisse here in the Bay Area. She also comes from a family of amateur cooks.
You can find out more about all of this on Friday, October 28, 2011, when Adler will be reading from An Everlasting Meal at Book Passage in San Francisco.
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
Friday, Oct. 28, 2011
6:00 p.m.
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building
San Francisco 94111
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For more information, see:
Having an everlasting meal with Tamar Adler (video clip)
tamareadler.com
molliekatzen.com
How To Cook a Wolf, by M.F.K. Fisher
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