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osprey_archerLo these many years ago, I signed up for a challenge to write a hundred posts about a topic of my choice – in my case, 100 Books That Influenced Me. After limping, years later, to the halfway mark, I decided that 50 Books That Influenced Me would simply have to be enough and called it a day.
Well, I’ve decided to try to finish the challenge after all, a decision brought to you by the fact that I spend much of yesterday evening removing every box of books from my closet – a side note here; I just moved in, I’m likely to be moving again in a few months, and I made an executive decision not to unpack all my books.
But here I was, taking out the boxes, (the cats kept climbing on the exact next box that I needed, of course), opening each box and checking its contents, until at the very bottom of the very last box in the bottom left hand corner of the closet, I found the book I’d been looking for: Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.
Adler’s writing has as much economy and grace as her cooking. A lot of twenty-first century books are shaped, inevitably, by the way that one writes on the internet: short and pithy, not too many sentences in a paragraph, anything to avoid big blocks of text. Although An Everlasting Meal was published in 2011, the book feels somehow unmoored from time, old-fashioned in the best way, with the clarity and flow of the best mid-twentieth century essayists. Adler’s sentences expand and breathe.
“It is as wise to be prepared for an impractical meal as for a practical one. If something so good or so bad has happened that only buttered toast and cuttlefish, or delicately whipped liver, or goose neck, or pate are appropriate, as long as you keep your pantry stocked with a few lovely, uncommon things, you can open it and be as well set up to celebrate as to survive.”
The Everlasting Meal of the title is what you might call a theory of kitchen management: of seeing in yesterday’s leftovers the seed for today’s meal, and in today’s leftovers the beginning for tomorrow’s, and so forth, so that a bit of stale bread becomes breadcrumbs that you sprinkle on a pasta dish, and the leftovers get made into a pasta frittata, and the last of the pasta frittata becomes the filling for a sandwich, cut from a loaf which will, in time, yield more stale bread…
This is cooking as a rhythm, a braid, an ongoing practice where each meal feeds into the next. “I have always found that recipes make food preparation staccato,” Adler muses, and “cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.” Leftovers are not served again as a mere lesser version of their earlier selves, but viewed as ingredients that will become delicious again as they are incorporated into the next meal. And the age of those ingredients, “lovingly neglected by skilled hands,” will make that meal better than if all the ingredients had come to it shiny and new.
This attitude suffuses the book. Soups and stews, Adler notes, don’t come into their own till the second day. “Pots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It’s the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days’ sitting, gorged and swelled…” There is an entire chapter of recipes for stale bread. “(Thank heavens for the occasional, calculable superiority of old things)”, Adler writes, in a parenthetical note on the superiority of day-old rice for fried rice.
Adler has a gift for these parenthetical notes. “(No rules apply to beets. Beets have their own way of cooking and their own way of being.)” This is not merely a method of cooking, but a way of being in the world: an ethic of paying close attention, and working with what you have. And if what you have is beets, you bend to the beet way.
I must confess that the first time I read this book, back around when it came out, it was utterly beyond me. It felt impossible to manage my kitchen in this way. And did I really want to? Adler uses so many vegetables. Sure, she makes them sound delicious, but that just made me suspicious. And the more poetical passages struck me as suspicious, too. Beets have their own way of being? What does that mean?
So I gave the book away. Then a few years later I asked for another copy for Christmas, and read it again, and began to try; and then for various reasons gave it up in late 2021. But now that I’ve got my own kitchen, I’m ready to try again.
Well, I’ve decided to try to finish the challenge after all, a decision brought to you by the fact that I spend much of yesterday evening removing every box of books from my closet – a side note here; I just moved in, I’m likely to be moving again in a few months, and I made an executive decision not to unpack all my books.
But here I was, taking out the boxes, (the cats kept climbing on the exact next box that I needed, of course), opening each box and checking its contents, until at the very bottom of the very last box in the bottom left hand corner of the closet, I found the book I’d been looking for: Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.
Adler’s writing has as much economy and grace as her cooking. A lot of twenty-first century books are shaped, inevitably, by the way that one writes on the internet: short and pithy, not too many sentences in a paragraph, anything to avoid big blocks of text. Although An Everlasting Meal was published in 2011, the book feels somehow unmoored from time, old-fashioned in the best way, with the clarity and flow of the best mid-twentieth century essayists. Adler’s sentences expand and breathe.
“It is as wise to be prepared for an impractical meal as for a practical one. If something so good or so bad has happened that only buttered toast and cuttlefish, or delicately whipped liver, or goose neck, or pate are appropriate, as long as you keep your pantry stocked with a few lovely, uncommon things, you can open it and be as well set up to celebrate as to survive.”
The Everlasting Meal of the title is what you might call a theory of kitchen management: of seeing in yesterday’s leftovers the seed for today’s meal, and in today’s leftovers the beginning for tomorrow’s, and so forth, so that a bit of stale bread becomes breadcrumbs that you sprinkle on a pasta dish, and the leftovers get made into a pasta frittata, and the last of the pasta frittata becomes the filling for a sandwich, cut from a loaf which will, in time, yield more stale bread…
This is cooking as a rhythm, a braid, an ongoing practice where each meal feeds into the next. “I have always found that recipes make food preparation staccato,” Adler muses, and “cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.” Leftovers are not served again as a mere lesser version of their earlier selves, but viewed as ingredients that will become delicious again as they are incorporated into the next meal. And the age of those ingredients, “lovingly neglected by skilled hands,” will make that meal better than if all the ingredients had come to it shiny and new.
This attitude suffuses the book. Soups and stews, Adler notes, don’t come into their own till the second day. “Pots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It’s the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days’ sitting, gorged and swelled…” There is an entire chapter of recipes for stale bread. “(Thank heavens for the occasional, calculable superiority of old things)”, Adler writes, in a parenthetical note on the superiority of day-old rice for fried rice.
Adler has a gift for these parenthetical notes. “(No rules apply to beets. Beets have their own way of cooking and their own way of being.)” This is not merely a method of cooking, but a way of being in the world: an ethic of paying close attention, and working with what you have. And if what you have is beets, you bend to the beet way.
I must confess that the first time I read this book, back around when it came out, it was utterly beyond me. It felt impossible to manage my kitchen in this way. And did I really want to? Adler uses so many vegetables. Sure, she makes them sound delicious, but that just made me suspicious. And the more poetical passages struck me as suspicious, too. Beets have their own way of being? What does that mean?
So I gave the book away. Then a few years later I asked for another copy for Christmas, and read it again, and began to try; and then for various reasons gave it up in late 2021. But now that I’ve got my own kitchen, I’m ready to try again.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-07 02:37 pm (UTC)I was thinking about what you were saying about short, pithy internet writing, because while I find your observations to absolutely fit for most blog posts one runs across, I feel like the opposite is true of people writing on, say, Medium or Substack or forums like that. There, I see essays blob out long and amorphously in an "and that's another thing! this problem we're having with transit ties back in to how ADHD is addressed in the schools! I've always thought that..." fashion. In other words, they start out talking about one thing but drift with the writer's particular idiosyncrasy to something else, spending a long time on the way on personal examples or recounting a long argument seen on Tumblr and their opinion of it. And why not: it's their platform, they can say what they want... but if they were writing for a magazine, or with an editor looking over their shoulder, they might have chosen to focus more, or if they were going to talk about both transit and how ADHD is treated, they might have brought forward how these things interact in the beginning, so the reader was prepared for the branching of the conversation.
It doesn't sound like Adler does that, though: it sounds like she has very good control of her material and she knows exactly the sorts of points she wants to illustrate, and they all seem relevant in a more than personal way.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-07 03:27 pm (UTC)And yes, it IS true, there is an equal and opposite mode of internet writing which is Longer Than Anyone Would Let You Write in Print. Essays that meander like the Wabash River! Fanfics and/or original works that are five million words long! (War and Peace is half a million.)
But Adler has good control of her material, yes. Her style is quite different than C. S. Lewis, but it's like reading C. S. Lewis in that you always feel Adler knows exactly what she wants to say and is going to say it as gracefully as possible.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-07 04:14 pm (UTC)I think she's really onto something, and I love her philosophy. I also have a fridge full of leftovers and every so often I pull out whatever there is in there and make something nice with it. And I quite agree that beans in a stew are much better by the third day, when everything has taken on a nice amalgamated taste rather than not being fully combined yet.
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Date: 2024-01-08 11:32 pm (UTC)I also think it would be in the spirit of things if I had a compost heap to which I could add any disgracefully neglected leftovers, even though Adler doesn't discuss this directly. It just seems spiritually attuned with the rest of it.
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Date: 2024-01-09 05:04 am (UTC)I will say, though, that since we got compost I've gotten SO much less stressed about food waste. I don't know that I waste more or less because of it, but I say "oh well, back to the earth it goes!" to myself philosophically as I tip the disgracefully neglected leftovers into the compost bin with a mental apology to them, rather than wincing as I scrape them into the trash. A different kind of cycle! I hope your city rolls out something of the sort soon, if you would feel the same.
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