Tamar Adler - An Everlasting Meal

Praise for An Everlasting Meal

Thought-provoking ideas and practical advice about food, cooking, and eating. Its hard to imagine a more elegant book on the subject. A worthy companion to M. F. K. Fisher.

Michael Ruhlman, author of Ratio and Ruhlmans Twenty

To listen to Ms. Adler talk about cooking is to be drawn into a rhythmic dance where each stepfrom washing and chopping vegetables to cooking and seasoning the mealflows effortlessly into the next.

Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times

Reads less like a cookbook than like a recipe for a delicious life.

New York magazine

Simultaneously more practical and more poetic than any food writing in recent memory.

Edible Brooklyn

Everything here works to sate the souland the stomach.

Booklist

Adler proves herself an adept essayist in this extended discourse on instinctive home cooking. Though highly personal, its much less a food memoir than a kind of cooking tao.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is a book of beautifully written essays, simultaneously meditative and practical, about how to appreciate and use what you have.

The Austin Chronicle

Ill return to An Everlasting Meal over and over... because it reminds me why I began to love to cook in the first place.

Monica Strawbridge, The Huffington Post

The writing is bright and beautiful and draws the reader in the way a good novel does. Read it, if you care about food or cookingor, for that matter, eating.

The Montreal Gazette

[ An Everlasting Meal ] is not in its essence a book about how to cook. Cooking is a means to an end. What it really is is a book about how to live a good life.... The fact youll learn to be a great cook is just a bonus.

Forbes.com

From time to time you see a food writer compared to M. F. K. Fisher.... In my book there is only one person following in those large footsteps, and that person is Tamar Adler.

Tara Austen Weaver, author of The Butcher and the Vegetarian

Reading this book feels much like learning to cook from a grandmother or friendlong, caring conversation leads to simple instructions on how to make a homey stew or excellent appetizer. Adlers tone is relaxing and warm, with few expectations placed upon the reader to consistently produce haute cuisine from her humble kitchen.

Seriouseats.com

I love [Adlers] writing stylecareful, full, beautiful... reading the book is like having a cooking teacher whispering suggestions in your ear.

Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

Cooking, as Adler describes it in intricately crafted essays... 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.

San Francisco Examiner

Mark my words, An Everlasting Meal is a modern classic.

Dr. Jennifer Berg, director, Graduate Program in Food Studies, NYU

It can be tricky, in this age of ethically charged supermarket choices, to remember that eating is an act of celebration. Tamar Adlers terrific book wisely presents itself as a series of how-tosHow to Boil Water, How to Have Balance, How to Live Wellwith the suggestion that its not only possible to do all these things but in fact a pleasure. An Everlasting Meal provides the very best kind of lesson (reminding us we enjoy being taught), that there is real joy to be had in eating, and eating well.

Dan Barber, chef/co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Tamar Adler understands a simple truth that seems to evade a lot of cookbook writers and self-proclaimed foodies: cooking well isnt about special equipment or exotic condiments or overtested recipes (and it sure isnt about quickfire challenges or kicking it up a notch). Its about learning some basics, respecting the ingredients, and developing a little culinary intuition, or maybe just plain common sense. A book cant necessarily teach you how to do that, but An Everlasting Meal will almost certainly inspire you to teach yourself.

Colman Andrews, author of The Country Cooking of Italy and editorial director of TheDailyMeal.com

An Everlasting Meal is a great thrill to read. Anyone who cooks is engaged in a re-creation of the Enlightenment Agebeginning with alchemy and mystery, always grasping toward chemistry and a tasty supper. With this book, Tamar Adler has chronicled our epic. Her tone manages to make the reader almost feel like he is thinking out loud. A marvelous accomplishment.

Jack Hitt, contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine

In this beautiful book, Tamar Adler explores the difference between frugal and resourceful cooking. Few people can turn the act of boiling water into poetry. Adler does. By the time you savor the last page, your kitchen will have transformed into a playground, a boudoir, and a wide-open field. An Everlasting Meal deserves to be an instant and everlasting culinary classic.

Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved

Content

For my mother, my brother, and my father, and all amateur cooks

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

Foreword

Alice Waters

I met Tamar Adler in 2007 when she first came to work in the Chez Panisse kitchen and wove herself into the fabric of the restaurant with easy grace. She was only twenty-nine at the time, and I was instantly struck by her preternatural poise and presence. Tamar had never had formal culinary training, but she grew up cooking all the time, opened a restaurant in Georgia with friends, and came to Chez Panisse from there: she made a profession of her amateur cooking.

Tamar has an instinctive gift for cooking, an almost effortless way of creating mealsand as I quickly learned, she is an extraordinary writer: tremendously talented, with an unswerving commitment to the philosophy of honest food.

What is remarkable about An Everlasting Meal is how true it is to Tamars spirit. The book is beautifully intimate, approaching 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. How rare and wonderful it is to have a book grounded in instinct, prompting the reader to examine the world around him- or herself differently, allowing cooking to become a continuous, integrative process that flows from meal to meal.

In this way, the book is profoundly economical; it is predicated upon the idea that nothing should be wasted, that cooking well is built upon a deep, preservative impulse. Tamar knows that when you cook you are left with scraps that, instead of being discarded, can make the perfect beginnings of another meal: the skins and tops of onions for soups and beans, bones for stock, orange peels for marmalade.

Rather than a heady, lofty affair full of absolutes and inflexible recipes, the book is resolutely practical, a celebration of the malleability of cooking. Tamar champions the amateur cook, empowering readers to embrace the process, including the mistakes along the way. In her wonderful chapter How to Snatch Victory from the Jaws of Defeat, she deals with just that: overcooked meat becomes a Thai meat and toasted rice salad ( laarb ), or crispy lardons, or meat and vegetable hash; burned zucchini becomes a delicious variation on a smoky baba ghanoush. She sees the frustrations and challenges that home cooks face every day, and then shows them how to meet these challenges smilingly. She is teaching people not just how to cook but how to love to cook.