Pam Anderson - Three Many Cooks: One Mom, Two Daughters: Their Shared Stories of Food, Faith & Family

Three Many Cooks
(with Maggy Keet and Sharon Damelio)

Cook Without a Book: Meatless Meals

Perfect One-Dish Dinners

The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Eating Great

Perfect Recipes for Having People Over

CookSmart

How to Cook Without a Book

The Perfect Recipe

Copyright 2015 by Pam Anderson,
Maggy Keet, and Sharon Damelio

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Anderson, Pam.
Three many cooks : one mom, two daughters : their shared stories of food, faith & family / Pam Anderson, Maggy Keet, Sharon Damelio.
pages cm
ISBN 9780804178952 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-8041-7897-6 (eBook)
1. Anderson, Pam, 1957 2. Keet, Maggy. 3. Damelio, Sharon.
4. CooksUnited StatesBiography. 5. CookingAnecdotes.
I. Keet, Maggie. II. Damelio, Sharon. III. Title.
TX649.A1A53 2015
641.50922dc23 2014038602

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman

v3.1_r1

TO OUR PARTNERS IN LIFE
AND IN THE KITCHEN:

DAVID ANDERSON: husband, father, editor,
and consummate dishwasher

ANDY KEET: kitchen playlist guru, comic relief,
and guacamole king

ANTHONY DAMELIO: Italian expert, ber mixologist,
and master of efficiency

S ome people plan what they are going to do when they get together; our family plans what we are going to eat. Pam and her husband, David, both grew up in households where food was revered and big meals were the main event. Then they had Maggy and Sharon, who happily clung to their mothers apron strings, eating and learning in her busy kitchen. Maggy married Andy, Sharon married Anthony, and the love affair with cooking and eating became a family passion.

Last Memorial Day, the six of us were going to be together for the first time in six months. We had three days and four nights together just waiting to be filled with great food, sublime wines, and killer cocktails. Since half the pleasure is in the yearning, we began plotting and relishing each breakfast, lunch, cocktail hour, and dinner.

Pam, who was hosting the whole group, started the email chain weeks in advance, inviting ideas and cravings. After an initial flurry of food fantasies, Sharon cut and pasted everything into a Word document, which started whizzing back and forth with edits. Bargaining commenced.

Can we switch fried chicken to Saturday dinner? No one wants to eat cold chicken at a picnic.

Wild mushroom chowder feels heavy for our first night, so what about Italian Wedding Soup?

Gin and tonics are boring and Ive got loads of fresh mint. Lets make juleps for Fridays cocktail hour.

Fifty-three. Thats how many emails it takes three cooksa mother and her two adult daughtersto figure out what they are going to make and savor over one long weekend.

Perhaps we are slightly obsessive about eating and drinking. Maybe we need a shrink to tell us that letting food shape every aspect of our lives together and apart isnt normal. But its probably too late for therapy. We love food, period. Pam is a veteran cookbook author, and all three of us run the food blog Three Many Cooks. But its more than that.

We cook (and eat!) because it brings us incredible joy. Because sitting down to a meal weve madewhether its Southern fried chicken, quinoa salad, or a dry martini and a pile of cheese and crackersgives us plain and simple pleasure. We cook because nothing compares to the scent of onions and garlic sauting in olive oil, and because we secretly love the scars on our hands (and the accompanying stories) that prove were culinary warriors. We cook because the best conversations always happen when weve got a piece of counter space, a sharp knife, a stiff drink, and a job to do. And because somehow the ability to nourish ourselves and others makes us feel humble and powerful at the same time.

We cook because we come from a long line of men and women who showed us the value of good food shared, people whodespite our flaws and differencescould always find common ground cutting into a homemade cake and having a cup of coffee. When were in the kitchen making the dishes they taught us from memory, we can feel that cloud of witnesses hovering over usreminding us to leave the butter in the freezer just a little bit longer before making that piecrust, giving us the side-eye when we try to make it too fancy, smiling as we wash our ziplock bags to reuse them (again), and urging us to just get in there and do it, already when we dont feel like cooking much of anything.

We cook, finally, because we feel a deep need to do it. We are women with an innate desire to feed people, and of that we are not ashamed.

This book is a collection of stories about our incredible, messy, hilarious, powerful, screwed-up, delicious, and life-changing love affair with food, with one another, and with the people we have come to cherish. Its full of stories that explore our past and present, from the sweltering farms of central Alabama and the white dunes of the Florida Panhandle to the quiet woods of Bucks County, Pennsylvania; from the humming streets of Chicago and New York City to the sunny strangeness of southern France and Malawi. Over a handful of decades and in dozens of kitchens, we have made the moments and the meals that have shaped us. Along with our stories, we offer the recipes that really mean something to usthe ones we cant live without, the ones we cant wait to share, the ones that are so simple it seems silly, and the ones that we still cant believe we have mastered.

Glorious food is sometimes the most important aspect of an experience. More often its little more than the catalyst for the really good stuffgreat laughs, long talks, strong relationships. As diligently as we planned that Memorial Day weekend, life intervened. When Sharon and Anthonys flight got delayed first by minutes, then by hours, and then finally diverted to another airport, we resigned ourselves to the fact that the cozy and relaxing evening of homemade soup, bread, fresh fruit, and plentiful wine was a fantasy.

When everyone finally arrived bleary-eyed at the house it was close to midnight. We could have simply opted to collapse into our beds and save the celebrating for more civil hours, but we didnt. We all knew our parts in this ongoing story, and we got to work. Pam and Maggy went to the kitchen to assemble a gorgeous board of cheeses, olives, and meats. David set to work washing the prep dishes, while Andy cued up some good music. Sharon started unpacking the goodies shed brought from down South, and Anthony headed straight for the bar to start mixing up cocktails for the group.

By the time we all gathered around the coffee table by the fireplace, half of us sitting on couches and the other half on the floor, it was nearly 1:00 A . M . Fatigue be damned, we all raised a glass to making plans and breaking them and to all the meals, great and small, that bring us together.