Library Director’s Notebook
March, 2012
Most people choose cook books for the recipes, right? Cookbooks that feature Italian, vegetarian, or low calorie recipes etc. usually offer hundreds of recipes, often with mouthwatering photos. It is rather unusual however, to choose a cook book more for the pleasure of reading it than for the recipes it provides. Such a cook book is An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler.
For such a young woman, (she looks to be in her early 30’s from the book’s jacket photo), Tamar Adler has certainly earned a lot of credibility as a chef. She has cooked at two famous restaurants, Chez Panisse and Prune, and has been a founder and chef of the restaurant Farm 255 in Athens, Georgia. She knows how to cook for a crowd and how to cook for herself; and in her book she makes both tasks seem delightful.
For Adler it all starts with the ingredients. She treats ingredients we might normally take for granted, such as onions, eggs, and bread as if they were priceless gifts from the gods. Reading this book, you discover what it is to savor the very simplest of meals, whether it is a boiled egg or a tossed salad and feel as if you’ve discovered both for the very first time.
To paraphrase Will Rogers, it seems Adler has never met a leftover potato or a stale piece of bread that she hasn’t liked. In fact, the whole theme of An Everlasting Meal is to buy food with the intent of making many good meals out of whatever ingredients you have left over or happen to have at hand or pick up on sale. Like all good cooks, Adler advises her readers to choose the best vegetables and fruits and to eat these in season, varying your recipes as different produce goes in and out of season. Her recipe for minestrone for example is heavy on beans in the winter and moves to the use of seasonal greens in the spring and summer.
Waste not, want not would seem to be her slogan, for she saves scraps and bones and bits of fat and grizzle that most of us would toss and instead uses them to make broths, gravies, and soups to be consumed at once or frozen for future enjoyment. Her sense of humor and wry appreciation of her own mistakes makes reading her book a delight. She can write about cooking eggs in such a way that you want to leap up and cook a dozen eggs, a dozen ways, just for the fun of it!
If she were not a chef, writing about food, Adler could be a poet, and probably is, when she has the time. Here are a few of her memorable thoughts:
“ A gently but sincerely cooked egg tells us all we need to know about divinity.”
“If there are no onions or cabbage or celery and no stale bread and no chance of getting any, the odds of eating well seem bleak.”
“I can think of no better way to get good, healthy vegetables, lush, and in season to the middle of your plate than to let them balance on freshly toasted bread”.
If you’re getting tired of cooking or just want to approach cooking in a revitalized way, read An Everlasting Meal.
