Poor Man's Feast —

photograph by Dan Kim

It seems to me that when you occupy the vast universe of writing about anything having to do with food and eating, the consumer world — hell-bent upon labeling you for quick and easy intellectual consumption — will stick you into one of two camps. There’s the recipe camp, with its headnotes and process instructions, its ingredients lists and precision-driven weights and measures. And then there’s the narrative camp, inhabited by apparent devil-may-careists who write about food and the more fluid process and practice of cooking that comes with instinct and comfort; this camp is nearly always pigeonholed as being too advanced for the beginner cook, or not right for the mom-with-three-kids-and-two-jobs who just wants to be told how to make that freezer-to-table casserole, or, just too esoteric for the average American with little time, less money, and not a whole lot of interest in standing in the kitchen after a hard day at work. Naturally, it’s precisely these people who would best benefit from understanding how to cook instinctively.

It’s ironic that, in a world where many people can’t boil an egg, we’re bombarded with malls crammed with cookware stores, and television shows that let us perch, vicariously, on the shoulders of restaurant chefs clawing each other’s eyes out so as not to get “chopped.” The intensely personal, wildly sensual act of cooking has been commoditized, and its very essence — comprised of instinct, grace, economy and what Alice Waters calls malleability — diluted to a sound bite. Which is why, more than ever, we need Tamar Adler, former cook at Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune, Waters’ iconic Chez Panisse, heir apparent to M.F.K. Fisher and author of the remarkable An Everlasting Meal which, says Waters, approaches cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking. Indeed.

I was delighted and honored to speak recently with Adler.

For as long as I can remember — at least as far back as the late 1980s, when North Point Press (and Jack Shoemaker) reissued all of M.F.K. Fisher’s work in those lovely little jacketed paperbacks that made her writing widely available again — readers have been drawing comparisons to her work. To be sure, there is a lot of glorious writing out there; still, few have evoked the same kind of nearly emotional and physical response that Fisher’s work does, until now. When I read An Everlasting Meal, it left me breathless and hungry, and I find myself highlighting it like a complete lunatic. Tell me how you came to write it — what motivated you to impart this message of cooking with instinct and simplicity?

I had felt [since I read M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf] like somebody had to breathe life back into Fisher’s messages, which were, very simply, that cooking wasn’t something that made life harder, but something that made life easier. And that at its very worst, life could be improved by paying attention to the fact that not only are we born with appetites, but we’re born with an ability to satisfy those appetites. It’s easy to forget this when things are hard, and amid the noise of life; it was particularly difficult when Fisher wrote the book in 1942, during an actual war. And I started to feel, even in my mid-twenties, that today, when there are all sorts of wars — both internal and external — that we have allowed those truths about our appetites and our potential to satisfy them to become inverted. I started to feel as though our appetites were simply a longing and need that was becoming harder and harder to meet. But I didn’t have the actual technical ability to write this book until I began to cook professionally; I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to say.

How to Cook a Wolf obviously uses wartime cooking as its lens; people were literally trying to figure out how to feed themselves and their families on rations. This need to learn how to feed ourselves didn’t seem to me to be explicit until I worked at Chez Panisse, when I realized that there was a missing skill set that wasn’t being talked about. Food is so polarized into fancy/elaborate and cheap/poor/bad/easy. Somebody needed to step between those poles and say that cooking and eating well are not hard to accomplish, and they are what makes life easier.

In an interview you did a little while ago with my friend Kurt Michael Friese, you talked about the professionalization of cooking — the fact that we’re living in an environment now where we either don’t cook at all, or we don’t have any interest in it. We think of food as fuel, or conversely, that we’re all supposed to be chefs. I’ve often said that the last thing the world needs is another cookware catalog trying to convince us that we really must have that home foamer when most of us can’t even make a basic stock. So there seems to be an enormous gap between what home cooks think we should be able to do, and what we really ought to be doing to feed ourselves and our families real food that’s simple, honest, and direct. Do you think this is a cultural thing?

I draw misinformed and under-informed conclusions all the time, so that’s my caveat; anything I say is bound to be at least narrow in scope. I do think a lot about whether there is a particularly American quality to the over-aestheticization of food. And I do think that we are made to feel as if to be good citizens, we must be consumers. We are surrounded by this message, and it seems like this fact has infused most of American life. There is an overemphasis on the newness and aesthetic perfection. In European cultures there is a sense of value to things being old; you walk around every day and see buildings that have been there since the Middle Ages and a good amount of government money goes to their upkeep. In terms of culinary tradition, you go to any Italian household and the best possible chicken dish is one that one’s grandmother or mother made. This is the opposite of what the very best chicken dish would be in an American household; here, the best dish would be a completely different one, and that simple difference between the “best” being a replication versus the “best” being a new creation is, I think, certainly one of the factors in our rather perverse understanding of what cooking is.

As I was reading An Everlasting Meal, I found that there were certain ingredients and processes that bubble to the surface as bedrocks of simple, graceful cooking, and even a simple, graceful and tender sort of life. From a culinary standpoint, you talk about the simplicity of noodles, rice, cheese, good eggs, bread, broth, bacon. But what made me smile is when you talked about your cookware, which is old and dinged. And your single knife. We can talk about the fact that it is a societal, cultural, distinctly American construct to want newer and flashier things. How do we actually get people away from the concept of excess — in the kitchen and in life — and away from the idea of more as being preferable.

I don’t think it ever works to pull people away from anything, because eventually they’ll look back at what you pulled them away from and wonder why they left it. But I do think that when people slow down, they find themselves casting about less frequently from something different or new. I’ve noticed that in the cooking classes I’ve taught, what really seems to be gravitational for people is learning how to cook simply. I’ve taught a few classes called How to Boil Water, and after each one, I’ve gotten notes from students saying “I just didn’t realize I was approaching cooking in a way that was really intimidating, and left me feeling that I knew less.” And I think that part of the reason that people keep looking for new kitchen stuff is that they need to make themselves feel like than can do it. So it makes sense to me that people listen to the media message that they need a different pot, or they need a better nonstick pan, because whatever they’re trying isn’t working. What I’ve been hearing after these classes is “I left your class feeling like I knew more, so I actually need less—I feel like I already have the tools.” That’s a very long answer to your question.

The short answer is that when people learn to cook, they don’t feel like they need as much. I do want to be wary of sounding overly austere. But for many people, this isn’t true: I’ve been in dozens of beautiful kitchens with gleaming All Clad pots and pans, and they’ve just never been used.

Of course, the flipside is this: my friend Allison just got married. I was cooking in her kitchen last night, and she has two beautiful sets of Le Creuset — beautiful Dutch ovens and gorgeous roasting dishes — and it was incredible to cook in them. I made a really simple meal of greens, and poached eggs, and all of these beautiful different colored mushrooms that I crisped, and a Meyer lemon gremolata. And it was so much fun to use all of Allison’s cute kitchen stuff. My kitchen and tools, on the other hand, are hilarious. I don’t have and I don’t want anything different because I think my food tastes the same whether I have them or not. But Allison and I were talking about all this great stuff that was really fun to use, and she made a good point when she said that it gets her really excited to cook when she comes into the kitchen and sees all these beautiful nesting terra cotta roasting dishes.

My partner is a Yankee through and through, and her favorite cookware is a nesting set of cast iron that she inherited from her aunt, who had gotten it as a wedding present in 1932. It’s the older, seasoned (literally, and not) cookware with life and legs and warmth and history to it that tends to find its way into our home. It feels to me that there’s a certain amount of tenderness involved when you cook with tools like that. And when I was reading your book, I was struck by the sense that it is very much about what I would call kind and tender cooking, and kind and tender living. Kind and tender cooking is something that those of us in the food world never seem to talk about; it’s a sort of complicated concept to harness. We talk about quantifiable things like organics, and non-GMOs, and getting real food into the mouths of those who don’t have access to it, but nobody ever talks about the fact that without kindness and tenderness, the act of cooking is purely mechanical, and can become drudgery, and a chore. How did you get to this place where the act of cooking is so naturally steeped in kindness and tenderness?

That’s a good question — I’ve had different conversations that skirt around that terminology, one of them with the wonderful writer, Jack Hitt. He and I have talked a lot about sustainable cooking — real sustainable cooking — not simply sustainably raised ingredients, but the kind of cooking that’s required if we’re going to be responsible eaters, which means using everything. Practically and inevitably, if you use all of something, you’re completely changing the impact your consumption has on the world. You become an incredibly low-impact eater if you start using your stems and peels and stale bread. And I feel — as I said about drawing people away from something — that drawing people to a good practice that would inevitably move them away from bad practices is better than saying, “to eat sustainably you need to use all of everything.” Using everything, as opposed to seeing what you have and thinking about what you’re missing is what we’re talking about as kind and tender cooking. That difference in perspective is at the heart of all kindness and tenderness — right? It’s the fact of having, versus the fact of having and thinking you still need something else.

It’s been an interesting convergence for me over the last few weeks since reading and re-reading your book: for whatever strange cosmic reason, Fergus Henderson’s work has been appearing and showing up in my life at the same time. I’ve always been very conscious of his work, although I’ve never made to his restaurant. Initially, I found, on the front end of things, the act of using all of any animal to be rather brutish and trendy. There are a lot of people out there — we both know who they are — who eat that way for those reasons alone; they’ll go out and eat certain cuts, or offal, because that’s the cool, hot thing to do, but you’d never find them bringing trotters home to make for dinner. And so I found myself instinctively pulling away from that sort of eating. But in the last few weeks, reading your book and cooking from it, I found myself pulled straight back to Fergus’s work. I heard a quote from him the other day, where he said (I’m sure I’m mangling it) “It seems particularly cruel and unkind to bonk an animal on the head and not use absolutely all of it.”

Yes, Fergus is probably the tenderest cook I can think of. He really did predate the whole trend of eating the whole of an animal, and it always seemed to me that his approach to it is deeply respectful. He refuses to let a kidney be uneaten — it’s just as good as any other part of the animal. We’re able to sustain ourselves by eating that way, and his job seems to be to make it delicious.

It was interesting to get back to that place — to revisit that way of nose-to-tail eating as a result of reading An Everlasting Meal, and coming back to it from a point that isn’t necessarily based in trend, or style, or competitive eating. And I would hope that when people read Poor Man’s Feast and they say “oh, I’m probably going to learn how to make trotters or veal cheeks” that they realize that yes, it may be about some of that, but it’s more about cooking with kindness and respect and tenderness. I haven’t really been able to verbalize that until I read your book. Up until An Everlasting Meal came out, we really had no words for it.

Well thank you — that’s a great thing to be associated with.

I think you really can’t get to that place unless you slow down and prepare food thoughtfully, whether it’s a poached egg or something more elaborate. In your interview with Kurt Friese, you mentioned binding food to tenderness rather than passion — that says it all. Thank you, Tamar Adler, for this glorious book.

Tamar Adler will be speaking on Sunday March 25th at Stone Barns Center in Pocantico Hills, New York. For more information, visit http://www.stonebarnscenter.org/wintertide-tamar-adler/

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It was the very late nights — years ago — that I remember as being the most delicious; they almost always involved carbs, salt, grease, spice, egg, cheese, and a violent snowstorm of coarse black pepper ground in an ancient, light wood Peugot mill that I’d bought with my Dean & Deluca discount eight years earlier.

I lived alone with my cats (what else) in a small studio apartment on East 57th Street next door to one of the best high-end French Vietnamese restaurants in the city. I was single, and an editor, and a writer, and I went out four nights a week, not including weekends. My refrigerator, packed with a combination of high food (foie gras mousse, black caviar) and low trash (sliced white bread that my mother would leave for me during her unannounced visits while I was at work), always contained some sort of pungent sheep’s milk cheese — usually Roncal or Pecorino Stagionato — and eggs and a chunk of slab bacon. Boxes of DeCecco bucatini stood in the cabinet, lined up like dominoes. I’d come home famished in the wee hours — at three in the morning —after a night at Au Bar, place a too-small aluminum soup pot of water on my 24-inch apartment stove before I even took my coat off, and set about cooking myself a late supper.

It was a long time ago, in the ’90s; my stamina was better. Today, if I eat after ten pm, I have dreams about wind-up, cymbal-playing monkeys, and the IRS, and Heinrich Himmler showing up at my house. The next day, my ankles leach out over the sides of my shoes like small, overstuffed duffel bags. My fingers plump up like cervelas, and my narrow gold wedding ring cuts off the blood flow to my left hand.

Still, the notion of coming home starving after a night out and craving something elemental is unquestionably romantic; I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way — much has been written about this deeply personal of non-meal meals. It’s been fetishized the way good bread and a hunk of cheese has, and it usually involves things like Alia e Olio, or hay and straw, or Cacio e Pepe, or simple fried egg sandwiches. Way back when, if there was nothing of substance in my refrigerator, I’d sometimes make just that — I’d fry a single egg in a cast iron pan, plunk it between two pieces of the aforementioned disgusting white bread along with a slice of whatever cheese I had laying around (it acts like glue), and press it down with another cast iron pan until the bread turned golden and tight, and smooth as skating ice fresh from the Zamboni.

Part of why I don’t eat late like that anymore is the fact that I’m asleep long before the midnight dining hour rolls around; Susan and I, together for more than a decade, spend most Saturday evenings cooking elaborate meals for ourselves. Nine o’clock finds us listening to the radio on the living room love seat, surrounded by our snoring dogs. Ten o’clock, and we’re usually dozing off. By eleven, the dogs have been walked one last time, and the lights are out. It’s a sleepy, calm sort of life, and I love it, and waited a long time to find it. But when my schedule changes — when I have to travel for work — and I wind up coming home very late, anything can happen.

I was in Santa Barbara last week, to both attend and speak at the Edible Institute, an annual meeting involving scores of regional magazine publishers who produce the outstanding Edible Communities publications. Our meetings and conversations were, as they always are, inspiring and invigorating — it’s thrilling to be in the presence of so many people who have devoted their lives and careers to issues of local food, food justice, and sustainability. After three nights away from home, I flew back to the east coast, and at ten o’clock on Saturday night, Susan picked me up at JFK. I had been in the air for hours, wedged into a tiny blue vinyl seat; by the time I touched down, I was exhausted, and so I dozed on and off for the entire car ride home, which took nearly an hour and a half. When we walked through the front door — after the dogs calmed down, after the cats stopped having intimate relations with my luggage — I realized that I was hungry. Not hungry, but crazy hungry. Mad hungry, as Lucinda Scala Quinn would say. Famished.

Famished like it was 1996 all over again.

It was nearly one in the morning.

I’ll make you something, Susan said, her eyes at half-mast. I’d already taken down our six quart soup pot from the rack — stock pots just seem too big for late night cookery — and filled it. I salted the water heavily, and minutes later, it was at a full, violent boil.

You sit, I said to Susan, pulling over the little bentwood modern chair where she usually perches while I cook dinner on normal nights.

I can’t believe you’re doing this, she yawned. Are you really that hungry?

After six hours hurtling through the air in a metal tube, I was standing in the kitchen and browning cubed slab bacon in a big cast iron skillet until clouds of meaty smoke wafted up into the oven hood. The bucatini I unearthed from the bowels of the pantry was too long to fit into the soup pot, so I broke the rules and snapped it in half; while it boiled, I ladled out a cup or so of the pasta cooking water, and beat two eggs with a fork in a small white batter bowl.

I think I might be able to eat, Susan said, hovering over my shoulder while I lifted the pasta into the skillet, poured in the eggs and the bacon, and swirled it over and over to coat every strand with creamy goodness; I showered all of it with a strong grating of Parmigiana Reggiano, a handful of freshly cracked black pepper, and a rough chop of fresh parsley.

It was one thirty in the morning when we finally sat down at the dining room table, twirling thick coils of salty, smokey pasta around our forks; we sipped small glasses of red wine while the dogs slept at our feet.

The midnight dinners of necessity I ate alone, standing up, in my tiny Manhattan kitchen, were very good. But my late night meal with Susan, after a long ride home from the airport and three days and nights apart, was far more satisfying.

She looked up at me while she slurped her noodles.

This might be the very best thing ever, she said, sleepily. Ever.

We put our plates in the sink, went to bed, and slept until noon the next day.

Midnight Bucatini with Bacon and Eggs

Someone once said that it is not only what you eat that makes a meal great, but where and with whom you eat it, and they might be right; circumstance does count for a lot. On the face of it, the combination of pasta, eggs, bacon, and black pepper is a known quantity; ask any Roman what they eat when they want to be comforted and odds are, a version of this dish will be mentioned. But in the right conditions — late at night, when you’re starving and desperately need that combination of salt and smoke, fat and peppery warmth — it ceases being ubiquitous, and instead is utterly, mouthwateringly glorious.

Serves 2, with leftovers (which you will turn into a frittata the next day)

6 ounces bucatini

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup cubed slab bacon

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiana Reggiano

2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

flat leaf parsley, chopped (as much or as little as you like; I use quite a lot)

Bring a large soup pot of salted water to a boil, and cook the bucatini according to the package instructions, stirring it frequently.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a large cast iron skillet until it just barely ripples, and add the bacon; cook until just golden brown, about six minutes or so, and use a slotted spoon to remove to a small bowl. Wipe out all but a tablespoon of fat from the pan, and keep the pan warm over a low very flame. Ladle out a cup of pasta water from the soup pot, and reserve.

Using heavy tongs, lift the pasta directly from the soup pot to the skillet, and toss with the browned bacon. Slowly pour in the beaten egg, and combine it well, adding a tablespoon or two of reserved pasta water (or more, if necessary). Shower with cheese and black pepper and toss again, judiciously adding more water if the pasta seems too dry (the consistency should be slightly creamy). Sprinkle with parsley, and serve immediately, with more cheese, if desired.

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