What's Cooking?

11:28Naomi Fry:Like how does cooking serve me, serve my family, how I can make for myself a kind of reality that I create, right? So we did say that we would focus on good things, the Samin Nasrat cookbook that just came out. And maybe one of you guys will give us a little bit of a primer on Samin and tell us who she is.

11:54Vinson Cunningham:So Samin Nasrat is known as the author of the mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega bestselling Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which I believe has sold something like one and a half million copies, which is a huge number of copies.

12:09Alexandra Schwartz:Unreal. That's crazy.

12:11Vinson Cunningham:Unreal.

12:11Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

12:12Vinson Cunningham:And there was a Netflix show that was also called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Four episodes, each one devoted to one of those elements of cooking because that was the theory that she put forward in that book, which came out in 2017. That these are the four elements you need to cook and adjusting these elements will give you any number of delicious things to eat. And mastering these elements will help you cook without a recipe, which she kind of positioned as the ultimate goal. And one thing that made that book and the show so appealing, and I rewatched the Fat episode last night, is that she has a joie de vivre and a very, like, earthy way of being that I think is, it is aspirational, but it's also quite relatable.

12:56Vinson Cunningham:You know, she's not like the perfect chef showing you exactly how to do everything and here it's going to look so elegant and beautiful. She just loves tasting and eating. She gets that kind of like tactility and pleasure and I think can really transmit that to people.

13:10Naomi Fry:And salt, fat, acid, heat, as you said, Alex, very much stress the letting go of recipes, right? Like you don't need to sort of like ploddingly or very particularly follow a set of instructions, but you can learn how to improvise by thinking about these different groups or building blocks. Building blocks.

13:33Vinson Cunningham:It's like critical thinking for cooking. If you, you know, know the grammar of cooking, you can write your own sentences, I think is kind of the idea.

13:40Naomi Fry:So what happens in this book in Good Things? Because it has a slightly different relationship. I mean, it builds. It's another building block kind of in her own language as a cook. But it has a slightly different relationship to the recipe.

13:54Alexandra Schwartz:Well, this is part of the logic of good things is that it is partly narrative. There are these section heading essays that sort of lead into a bunch of recipes. And part of it is precisely this. She talks about not only her depression. She talks about the pandemic being a big part in this after salt, fat, acid, heat came out. and wanting to step away from the exacting standards that she had already, especially from her training at Chez Panisse that she had internalized, and understanding for the first time that there really is a difference, not just in degree but like in kind, between restaurant preparation of food and home cooking.

14:34Alexandra Schwartz:There's a really, I thought, really interesting part where she was like, I had such high standards for just the making of a dressing that she had turned in her mind salad into a special occasion food because she had erected all these barriers between herself and the making of a salad. So part of the logic of this book is I didn't think I wanted to do a cookbook partially because of these standards that I have. And all of a sudden I realized that I did have recipes because of things that over the years I've developed in my own cooking.

15:04Naomi Fry:Much like you, Vincent.

15:05Alexandra Schwartz:I did find myself relating. and interestingly because of her real interest in specific dishes produce and this weird line between the totally exacting and the kind of freewheeling in her personality the alice waters thing i'm like yeah it's just my table and i'm gonna wear a loose flowy white shirt and i'm gonna bring things to a you know a wooden table that's kind of outside under i have a vision you know um on the other hand there's so much like exact and she's like interestingly skirting that line in this book, I think.

15:36Naomi Fry:So you guys, we tried something we haven't tried before in the Critics at Large universe, and we each chose a recipe to prepare at home so we could bring our impressions to the class and share them with our friends. We had a deconstructed dinner party. We had a bit of a deconstructed dinner party.

15:58Alexandra Schwartz:I'll go first.

15:59Vinson Cunningham:Go ahead, Vincent. I want to know.

16:01Alexandra Schwartz:So true to what I mentioned before about individual things. That's what I like about this book is that she's really teaching you like, here's how to make my favorite garlic labneh. Here's how to make all these little things. True to my ethos, it was like, oh, I've been thinking about eggplant for a while. I like eggplant, but how am I going to do mine?

16:18Naomi Fry:A famously tricky vegetable, by the way.

16:20Alexandra Schwartz:Tricky vegetable. So I'm like, okay, she's got a recipe for, first she just tells you about roasting or grilling vegetables. And then having established that, she moves on to, here's some of the things he can do. So it's just like, here's an Italian style marinated eggplant. And I have no marinade game. So I'm like, this is my foray. And all it is, all the recipe is, is, you know, roasting an eggplant in the oven and then subjecting it to this marinade, letting it sit in the marinade. But, you know, you just realize at the beginning of the book, she's like, here's some things that you need in your kitchen.

16:57Alexandra Schwartz:One of them is a brush for all of other things. I mean, it wasn't the Odyssey, but it was an Odyssey.

17:03Vinson Cunningham:Did you have a brush or did you have to get the brush?

17:05Alexandra Schwartz:I have no brush. Okay. So I'm drizzling. Did you use your paws? And then using my washed paws to sort of smear so that I could create the impression of brushing.

17:15Vinson Cunningham:You did a drizzle and smear. Interesting.

17:17Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, you know, just get a jar with a screw top. I don't have those sitting around. I considered using a baby bottle to make my marinade. Love it. I later found something else. So every step I'm like, OK, there's a whole like lifestyle behind. Yes. Every time I'm like, am I going to be one of those assholes? And then New York Times recipe comments where it's like, well, I changed every single thing about the recipe and I made it gluten free, but it didn't work. What the fuck? So I was like, OK, am I how much am I deviating? How did it turn out? It was delicious. It was step one in my in your journey, my eggplant journey.

17:51Vinson Cunningham:Wow. You had to confront so much about yourself to get that bowl of eggplant. And that's what it's all about, folks. That's what it's all about.

17:57Naomi Fry:So I was a little, I have to say, we didn't talk about my cooking history. It's not that interesting. I do need a recipe. I'm a bit of an improviser, but I need some sort of guideline. And so I was looking among the available recipes on the book. I was like, I'm going to start slow. I'm not a great cook. There are a couple of things I know how to make well, among them chicken, which is good. But I'm interested in expanding. So I was like, I'm going to start small. there was a kind of a condiment recipe it was for crispy shallots and i made it and i was like oh this seems to have turned out okay i tasted it a little bit but i was like oh i need something to put it on and i was like before going to do the podcast i'll have it with some yogurt and i wasn't home last night i approached the box this morning to sprinkle some in my yogurt and i see that it's Almost all gone.

18:54Naomi Fry:And there are like very few strands of golden crispy shallots. And I'm like, we have a friend visiting. So Ohad, my husband and her last night apparently ate almost all of it with mashed potatoes. Which I was, I thought it was great. Creamy and crunchy. Sounds great. And so I sprinkled the meager remains on my yogurt. It was quite good, but I felt gratified. I was like, I'm feeding the family.

19:21Vinson Cunningham:You fed loved ones. That's beautiful.

19:24Naomi Fry:Yeah, so that's my story. So I thought that went well.

19:27Vinson Cunningham:People ate it. That sounds great. Yeah. That's a dream. It sounds like it was a smash hit. Well, I'll just quickly tell you guys, I made simple soba salad from page 174. It serves four. I made a serving for one, me, for lunch yesterday as my child slept because I have, I need quick recipes right now. I need stuff that is really like low effort, potentially high reward. And it's very simple. It's just boiling soba noodles. I already had scallions chopped up in my fridge from something I'd made earlier in the week. I did toast some sesame seeds. I had cilantro around. And then I made this peanut ginger dressing.

20:02Vinson Cunningham:Is it supposed to go with it? Yes. And I put that on and I had some shrimp in my fridge that I cooked. I had a lovely lunch. That sounds really good. It sounds good. And later I realized what I'd made, I'd made cold sesame noodles. That's what it was. Delicious. And it was definitely good. And I will be making soba noodles again.

20:17Alexandra Schwartz:Amazing.

20:19Vinson Cunningham:Amazing.

20:19Alexandra Schwartz:Thank you, Samin.

20:24Naomi Fry:Samin Nasrat's pared-down approach to recipes feels like a real change for what we've been seeing. After the break, Helen Rosner joins us to talk about the landscape today on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Thank you.

21:05Cline, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, Chloe Mou, and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, Chomenadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

21:39Naomi Fry:Hey, guys, good news. We're preparing an episode of our favorite series, I Need a Critic.

21:47Vinson Cunningham:But we cannot do it without you and your cultural conundrums.

21:51Naomi Fry:Conundra?

21:53Alexandra Schwartz:Could be conundra. So if you have a burning, I mean, life-altering cultural question that you just can't solve, let us help.

22:04Naomi Fry:The lines, my friends, are open. Email us at themail at newyorker.com with critics and the subject line. Yep, that's themail at newyorker.com.

22:15Alexandra Schwartz:We're here to help.

22:21Naomi Fry:So we've been talking about our own forays into home cooking, but we're not the experts here. So we've invited our beloved colleague, Helen Rosner, a food critic at The New Yorker, to help explain this whole landscape to us. She's edited cookbooks. She's reviewed restaurants. She, like Samin, is a James Beard Award winner. And she's walking into the studio right now. Hi. Hi, Helen. How's it going?

22:44Vinson Cunningham:It's going good. Just for you.

22:46Alexandra Schwartz:So excited to have you.

22:47Naomi Fry:I know. We're really excited. This is the first time we're having Helen on our show. And we're happy to have her here because it's just delightful to have a smart guest. But specifically, we're excited to talk to you today, Helen, about the landscape of recipes and cookbooks and trends in home cooking. And obviously, this is your area of expertise. We are just visitors in this world. So maybe we can start by you helping us place Samin Nasrat's new cookbook in kind of the recent pantheon of cookbooks, recipes, right now at this moment. What are the main things that people should know about how recipes are being written and disseminated now for the home cook?

23:29Oh, my God. I mean, I know this is a huge question. Yeah, and this is an enormous question because I think talking about cookbooks and cooking and recipes, it's like talking about fiction. Like it is an enormous landscape. But I want to pick up on something you said when you were introducing me, which is that you're so pleased to have an expert here because it sounds wishy-washy. But the truth is that I think one of the secret facts about cooking and home cooking in particular, and one of the things that I think makes good things, I mean, cookbooks so great and salt, fat, acid, heat as well, is that everyone is in a very real way an expert about cooking and food and eating because it is such an intimate thing to eat.

24:07We take it into our bodies. You know, like you listen to music, you read a book, you go see a play. That is a largely external engagement with something that gives you pleasure or thought. But you eat food and then you digest it and, like, you feel it digesting if things go wrong. You poop it out seven hours later. Like, it is a deeply personal thing. And I think one of the reasons that Samin's approach to cooking has been so resonant with people, that people love her, besides her inherent phenomenal charisma and her writing skills and things like that, is that she communicates in subtle but unignorable ways that cooking is not as hard as you think it is, and you can do it, but also that you should do it because it will help you connect to yourself and to your world and to your community and to your body in a way that you already fundamentally, in some inherent way, know how to do.

24:58So what Samin is doing is gently and elegantly showing you that not just that it's not that hard, but that it is a fundamental extension of things you are already doing in your life. It doesn't have to be a new skill.

25:10Vinson Cunningham:It's so interesting that you say that because, you know, this book has a couple of origin stories that she puts out, and one of them is about, I feel like, Samin herself struggling with exactly what you're talking about and trying to braise a ton of pork and failing at her braise and feeling like she's failing. And a friend of hers happens to call and just says, like, oh, come bring it to my house. And we can just eat it. Yeah. Or we can do it together. Yeah, exactly. The idea of community. Yeah. I think one thing that makes her an appealing figure and a good avatar for what you're describing, Helen, is that she, like, owns up to it herself.

25:43Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. And I think I fundamentally distrust on certain levels professional home cooks performing through cookbooks or through video or whatever it might be who are only ever happy and only ever love doing it. Because the sales pitch inside virtually every cookbook is you kind of hate doing this. This is an obligation, right? Like we have to feed ourselves multiple times a day when you become a parent or you're taking care of other people. You have to feed other people. You have to do the budgeting. You have to do the shopping. You have to do the goddamn cleaning up. Like it is infinite and perpetual.

26:11And unlike virtually any other cultural avenue, if you don't do it, you die. So the stakes are incredibly high. And that kind of sucks after a while. And I think that this sort of—

26:22Naomi Fry:And you've written about it yourself. Yeah, like you're in 2020, late 2020, you wrote about your burnout as a home cook. You know, it was a deep pandemic. and I was cooking a lot. And on some level, it should have been the most joyful and phenomenal cooking experience of my life. I was staying in my uncle's house that has one of the most incredible home kitchens that I've ever cooked in. We were using beautiful ingredients and everything was just like pastoral and lovely within the nightmarish chaos of the first year of the pandemic. And yet, like relentlessness of cooking was just wearing me down.

26:54And along with that was also this messaging that I was getting that I think everybody gets all the time. but at that moment it was so acute that cooking should be an outlet. It should be an escape. It should be a release. It should be a form of artistic or creative expression or stress release. Like kneading the sourdough is like a place to put out your anger. And it's like, I don't want to knead the sourdough. I want to not be angry. Yeah. You know, and I love that about Samin. And she's not the only cookbook author, I think, who connects in that way. I think a big part of Alison Roman's success, for example, to bring up another incredibly popular contemporary cookbook author, is that she's really open about what she likes and she doesn't like.

27:28She's kind of bitchy in a way that's relatable, not in a way that feels mean. She's like, I'm not going to put rice in any of my cookbooks. I don't like rice. Dislike is just sort of a different form of dissatisfaction. And that's true and real. Why would I cook something I don't like?

27:44Naomi Fry:Yeah. So we have Samin. We have Alison Roman. Yeah. So who are some of the other kind of like key icons of this landscape? Well, it's an interestingly fragmented landscape. And I was recently reading Ruby Tando's new book, All Consuming, which is a collection of essays about food culture. And she's so insightful. It's really great. Yeah. And she deeply reported all the essays in this book. But there's also just so much tremendous, like, analysis and insight. And she breaks down cookbooks into three categories. She says that cookbooks are either self-improvement, which are sort of health-oriented, diet cookbooks, special diets, things like that.

28:17They are problem solvers, like get dinner on the table really quickly. I have to feed my family. Everything is going to chaos. Or they are aspirational. aspirational. So this is like a dream meal that I might not ever want to make, or it's the food of a place that I might not ever go, but I want to go there. And that was a really interesting way to break this down for me because personally, in my many years of consuming cookbooks, I always thought of cookbooks as either descriptive or prescriptive, right? They're cookbooks that are telling you what's happening somewhere in a restaurant, in a place.

28:43They're documentary, or they're cookbooks that are telling you how to make something in your home. But when we're talking about prescriptive cookbooks, you should actually be making this combined with like maybe a hybrid of rupees second and third categories, we're going to solve a problem, which is you think you should be a person who cooks. And also her third category, which is, you know, dreamy, inspirational stuff. That's where I think the real sweet spot in cookbook world lives. And that's Samin Nosrat, Alison Roman, Wishbone Kitchen is a really fantastic example. Meredith Hayden. Meredith Hayden.

29:17Naomi Fry:What's she about? Yeah, because I keep hearing Wishbone Kitchen, Wishbone Kitchen. So she's a fascinating figure. And, like, I put her directly in the lineage of an Ina Garten. Ina Garten is the undisputed monarch of the cookbook world. Ina Garten lives in the Hamptons in this exquisite, picture-perfect compound. She lives with her husband, Jeffrey, who is charming. She has friends dropping by all the time who she's cooking for, cocktail parties, garden parties. She has this life that is just rich in found and chosen family, but also the Hamptons. And then we come to Wishbone Kitchen, who's a younger woman.

29:53She's, I think, in her late 20s. She also is in the Hamptons. She recently, in the last year, bought and created an extraordinary compound in the Hamptons full of hydrangeas and long-flowing lawns and whitewashed walls. I need to write a fucking cookbook.

30:07Alexandra Schwartz:God damn it. Anyway, come to me. No, it's hugely aspirational. Hugely aspirational. So she kind of came to extraordinary fame through social media, which is an avenue that is distinct from the Samin path. She amassed an extraordinarily large following on Instagram and TikTok because her life is beautiful. She is beautiful. She's thin. She's blonde. She's lovely. She's compelling. And she cooks food that looks lovely. She started out as a private chef, right? Actually, and I think that's a really important part of this, right? Because I think that private chefing, which is itself a tremendously successful niche within TikTok and Instagram cooking videos, is I'm a private chef.

30:46Here's what I've cooked for today. It's cooking for someone. And private chefing is a fascinating middle ground between restaurant cooking and home cooking. If you think about, like, if we, like, rewind way, way back and sort of think about the fundamental kind of gender dynamic and home economic elements of having one adult in a household who cooks for everybody and other adults who do other things, cooking three meals a day for a bunch of people is a full-time job. Like, it is a total fiction that you can do the sort of have-it-all 90s power mom narrative, right? And the private chef exists to cook for everybody and to follow their whims, but also to make things feel special.

31:26And, you know, now that you say that, it is all coming together for me. I'm having an amazing revelation right here in the podcast studio. That's what we're here for, yeah. Which is, I think that maybe part of why Wishbone Kitchen doesn't speak to me personally is because it is private chef-y cooking. It is cooking as performance, not necessarily cooking to be consumed by the person doing the cooking.

31:42Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. You know, I'm thinking back to my generation's cooking milestones. We are post Ina Garten. I mean, obviously, Ina Garten is she's still going strong, but she was not the big figure. We're post Martha Stewart. She was not the big figure. The first real cookbook moment I remember where everybody in their early 20s was like, let's have a dinner party. I'm cooking from Yotam Adelengi. Oh, my God. Jerusalem. I got a copy of Jerusalem, which is now spattered with so many different tomato sauces and olive oils and this and that. And to me, that book is really that hybrid creation of Yotam Adelenghi is a restaurateur.

32:22Vinson Cunningham:All of his recipes comically involve so many different prep steps that he later created a cookbook called Simple, I think. Which is a great book, but not simple. Exactly. Even though it says it on the cover. That's actually a good rule of thumb, by the way. Any cookbook that advertises it as simple has no concept of what simplicity actually is. I mean, I remember just being over my kitchen with Jerusalem, just craving this particular chicken that involves so many Jerusalem artichokes. And then I discovered, oh, my God, I have to boil these things. I have to cut them up. I have to do this. I have to do that.

32:50Vinson Cunningham:And then I made the chicken many times, but I never used the Jerusalem artichokes again because I couldn't stand it. I never made a single thing from that book, even though I bought it, of course. But my theory is this. I do think that we hop from the Ottolenghi to the Alison Roman of it all. Alison Roman's books are called Dining In. nothing fancy. Like that becomes this kind of glamour of like, you know, for another my generation milestone cooking moment, when Alison Roman made her video with the New York Times of her Thanksgiving meal in her, at the time, absolutely tiny kitchen. Teeny, tiny apartment.

33:21Vinson Cunningham:With a stove and an oven. You couldn't even imagine that more than half a sheet pan would fit inside of it. And she's cooking this whole Thanksgiving meal. You know, I, like a member of my generation, creative class, whatever, said like, I shall cook this very Thanksgiving meal for my entire family. and that's what I did. 100%. So why? And how did it turn out? Great, it was delicious. Oh, great. But I want to know why. I want to know why this is our idea of glamour. Gosh. Tell us, Helen.

33:45Naomi Fry:Sorry. No pressure, though. No pressure. I think that the dinner party as a touchstone, which is the cornerstone of so many cookbooks, one of my favorite cookbooks that just came out, it's called Let's Party by Dan Pelosi, and it's his second book. He's grossly Pelosi on social media. Oh, yeah. Like, I love him. I love his recipes. His recipes work. Samin's recipes work. Alice and Roman's recipes work. They do work. And there's also...

34:07Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, that's shallot jam. Oh. Anyway. Why is that glamorous? Okay, so the dinner party, the reason I brought up all this stuff, the dinner party, I think, has become a touchstone of, I hate to use this word, adulting. Like, I have a home. I have a table. I have a tablecloth. Like, you put together the dinner party as a form of performance. The lighting, you know, the sets, the music, the soundtrack, it's a way of throwing a party that is not just like a rager. And it's also a sort of statement of sophistication, of connection, of community. And there's a little bit of a tail wagging the dog on this.

34:42I think that very few people, and Ruby and Samin both talk about this in their books, very few people just throw a dinner party. Like a dinner party is almost always an incredibly affected thing. I love them. I love them. Invite me to all of your dinner parties. But there is nothing effortless, easy, organic, fitting into your daily life about a dinner party. However, what people like Alison Roman do, what people like Dan Pelosi do with extraordinary skill is make the act of feeding others in that found family, community, entertainment, we are all together just because it's a Thursday away, feel doable without having to have like a multi-tiered porcelain thing with grapes hanging down and, you know, beef wellington and all these things.

35:24It's just people together at a table.

35:26Vinson Cunningham:What you're saying is making something really click for me, which is that – and I also love Grossi Pelosi. And his lifestyle content on Instagram now includes this beautifully remade home that I gather is somewhere in the Hudson Valley. And I'm looking at all the colors in that house and thinking it's fabulous. It's so great. The Joseph Frank wallpaper. Yeah, it's a whole lifestyle that I want to buy into. And it's anti-beige. It's anti-refined. I mean it's refined. He's incredibly sophisticated, right? Like the level of taste he has is phenomenal. But it's joyful. And so many cookbooks are about misery and drudgery and telling you that you should like it.

35:58This is a nightmare. But if you're a good person and you love your children or you love your friends, you will bleed for them. And Dan Pelosi, Samin Nosrat, Alison Roman are all saying, no, man, don't bleed for your loved ones.

36:11Vinson Cunningham:Just feed them. The other thing you're making really click for me, Helen, about the appeal of this generation, and we're talking about fundamentally the millennial generation of cooks and cookbook writers. This is a form of adulting, as you say, for a generation that felt that adulthood was constantly being deferred because of the economic crisis that hit right around the time that everyone was getting out of college. Because of, you know, all these realities that have plagued millennials, the kinds of, you know, finger wagging, why are millennials sleeping on their parents' couches and still in the basement?

36:45Vinson Cunningham:Avocado toast. Avocado toast. That's why avocado toast is, I think, a fascinating thing that connects all of this because it is an intentionally constructed foodstuff. And it has an aesthetic component. And it is food that allows you to enjoy both its preparation and its consumption. And as a result, it is an embodiment of evil, right? Like it is like the anti-Protestant, like it is anything but spare. How dare you? How dare you enjoy this? How dare you indulge in visual pleasure when you should be suffering in poverty? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that there's an ethos around this idea of the dinner party, which is don't wait to have the napkins.

37:24Vinson Cunningham:Don't wait to have the plates, which, by the way, traditionally, when did you get those things? You got those things when you got married and you had a registry. And that's going to be the start of your adult life. No, for people of our generation, we're going to Ikea. We're getting the dishes ourselves. It's mismatched. It's whatever it's going to be because we're getting married later. We're living alone longer. We're just trying to work it out. And so these are dinner parties for, like, that's adulthood. now. You know, if you have to sit on a crate, sit on a crate. If you have to have your plate in your lap, have your plate in your lap.

37:53Vinson Cunningham:We're going to do this. This is fun. This is entertaining. And that's very appealing. Yeah, we're not going to put our lives on hold until we reach some totally fabricated and aspirational ideal of adulthood that is economically and socially not even feasible anymore.

38:11Helen.

38:12Alexandra Schwartz:You killed it. Thank you so much. This was so fun. Helen, thank you so much. This

38:15Naomi Fry:This was awesome. A delight. A delight.

38:22Naomi Fry:Samin Nosrat's mission is to free your readers from the recipe. But there are just so many recipes out there, and it's easy to become intimidated. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

38:39This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II,

38:55Naomi Fry:but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

39:21Naomi Fry:okay so we had helen here we talked about home cooking as a kind of cultural force as a lifestyle force how important it has become and one thing that we i guess maybe haven't talked about explicitly is how vast the numbers here are you know if we look specifically at the New York Times cooking vertical. Since 2014, they've published nearly 10 ,000 new recipes. They're now at more than 24 ,000, which is kind of an enormous number. I mean, think about the choice there, right? The website and the app attracted more than 456 million visits, individual visits last year. The cooking vertical now publishes 75 to 100 new recipes per month.

40:07Naomi Fry:And this is just the times, right? We're not even talking about TikTok. We're not talking about Instagram. We're not talking about the extremely popular cookbooks. And so what does this mean to us, the fact that there is so much choice? You know, we had an episode about the glut of choice in modern life. This seems to me a particular landscape in which this issue is all too true. Of course, there's a lot of positive in it. But on the other hand, maybe there are certain things that aren't as positive about it.

40:41Vinson Cunningham:Alex, what do you think? I just think it's a fascinating window into the way we cook now, which also is, of course, a bigger window into the way we are now. Because as Helen was saying, cooking and eating is so fundamental to everyday life. You know, I'm thinking back to the time when I first started to get into cooking myself. And a book that I wanted at the time was Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. And the title of that book. I remember that. Totally. I remember. I got that book. Everything? Yeah. I wanted the knowledge. I wanted to know how to cook everything.

41:15Alexandra Schwartz:I don't know why. Wouldn't you want that?

41:16Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. I mean, how to cook. It just sounds like it could be you become all powerful if you could do that. So now I'm not looking at how to cook everything on any given night. I am indeed going into the Times app. On the one hand, it's definitely expanded my sense, my range of what's possible. There are certain recipe writers who I trust, Melissa Clark, Ali Slagle.

41:36Naomi Fry:Love Melissa Clark.

41:37Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. Just like I know it's going to be solid and good. And at the same time, you know, I do think that some of this having easy access to these specific recipes all the time made me into a little bit too much of a perfectionist recipe person. Like, oh, my God, I don't have the panko breadcrumb. My God, I only have the regular ones. I'm going to have to go out and get it. And I don't, you know, it's like, yeah, roll with it, Schwartz. Just roll with it. It's only dinner. Is this how you talk to yourself? Sometimes, yeah. Roll with it, Schwartz. Sometimes you got to just.

42:03Alexandra Schwartz:Are you a football coach to yourself and yourself only?

42:05Vinson Cunningham:Honestly, I try to be. That's good. And I think a lot of this is really great and world expanding. And I also think just as we discussed in The Glut of Choice, it can make you a little bit nutso.

42:13Naomi Fry:I really relate. Like the glut of choice thing, for me, it's weighed me down a little bit in my desire or like ability to like go for it. I'm so behind is my feeling. Like all of these people know so much, like they've made so much. And here I am with like the two things I know how to do. But I have to say that cooking from this book and just choosing, I know this is a little pathetic, like I chose like the crispy shallots. I was like, I'm going to choose something very smooth.

42:47Vinson Cunningham:I think it's adorable.

42:49Naomi Fry:But I was like, OK, my daughter is getting older. Maybe at some point I'll have kind of more time to take a self-care like two hour break and listen to a podcast and like try cooking something new. Like, wouldn't that be nice? like maybe I need to put aside my fears if there's too much and I'm so behind. I don't know. Vincent, what do you what do you feel?

43:12Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, it's just like going on Spotify and being weighed down with the whole history of music being right in front of you. That's a really good comparison. Yeah.

43:19Naomi Fry:It's like, oh, my God, I'm so behind. Right. And so I'm just going to stick to the one thing I know how to listen to like 20 years ago.

43:26Alexandra Schwartz:That's right. Or be on Instagram and looking through speaking of our algorithms, like trend after trend after trend in dressing. and therefore like all of a sudden like nobody has any style because they're just like pulling from every single – at a certain point, growing up is actually, to me, about looking at whatever number of options you have and then ruthless winnowing down. At some point we have to close some doors. This is how I cook. This is what I'm listening to. This is how I dress. Maybe the opposite of that is what we have started to call AI slop. It's just like everything all together all the time.

43:58Alexandra Schwartz:You know, never achieving expertise, but kind of just skimming among things. It seems to me that all of this is helpful insofar as, you know, you can make decisions about what fits into your life. This is what I like about the Samin Nasrat book. It's like, here's something you can make, and then it's just like around your house. And then it's part of a life that you've chosen.

44:17Naomi Fry:Right. Maybe a life, not a lifestyle, right? That's right. And that separation, that distinction between something that you're doing outwardly to look a certain way, to try to seem a certain way to others, even to yourself, rather than a life, which is like, yeah, I like enjoy eating this or whatever. This is a reliable way for me to go on living in a way that's also maybe a little pleasurable. I mean, Alex, I know you wanted to mention this Nora Ephron essay that we all read from 2006 from The New Yorker.

44:53Vinson Cunningham:Yes, I did want to mention this essay. This essay is called Serial Monogamy, and the subtitle is My Cookbook Crushes. And it's a bit of an autobiography through cooking and a journey towards, I think, what Vincent is describing, which is knowing yourself and knowing your own tastes and pleasures and being able to provide for yourself. And I love it because even though she's talking about 1962, it really reminded me of all the things we're talking about from now. Because cookbooks represent that. They represent aspiration. They represent this could be your table. If only you do this. You know, who is a genius at this?

45:28Vinson Cunningham:Martha Stewart. Not just giving you the food, but giving you every piece of the lifestyle that could come with it. Here's the special way to fold your napkin. Here's the way to arrange the flowers. I'm going to give you a whole life. And I think a lot of people who didn't make those recipes or fold those napkins still loved watching the show because how comforting to relax into someone else living that. But here is Nora. I'm just going to first name her. Here is Nora talking about going through the motions, just trying to imagine this lifestyle that she would be leading, starting to cook from Julia Child, all of this.

46:02Vinson Cunningham:And it's not that it's not working for her, but it's that she's kind of playing at these recipes in a way that doesn't feel fully integrated into the way she's actually living. And eventually she hits her stride and really discovers a kind of simplicity and I guess what we would call now authenticity in her style of cooking that clicks for her. That she feels she can embody and improvise with and that, you know, really is her own. And I love this essay because it's funny, because it doesn't take itself too seriously, which, by the way, is hugely important when you're cooking anything. Right, yeah.

46:37Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, stuff is going to burn. You're going to have an absolute disaster. And you're going to have a bunch of people waiting for dinner in the other room. And you're just going to open the oven and it's going to be a nightmare in there. And what are you going to do when that happens? You've got to kind of pick yourself up and keep going. But eventually, she reaches a place where she feels that she can cook in a way that she actually just enjoys. And like enjoyment is it. Again, going back to good things, I was very struck by the bibliography here, which is not just a cooking bibliography. I mean, there's everyone thanked in this thing from Annie Dillard to Abraham Joshua Heschel.

47:13Vinson Cunningham:Not Abraham Joshua Heschel. Yes, because this is a way of life and thinking about life.

47:20Alexandra Schwartz:And it reminds me that not only is cooking supposed to be a part of a life, but specifically it can be a part of the life of the mind. Like that what we do in this room like all the time, like I prefer this over that. I think that this can be something that a long running process of development that happens alongside your notions of the self, you know, that everything that's happening in your life can be connected to this act. act. Not that you're like always going to the farmer's market and picking out the perfect tomato, but your choices in the kitchen can be deeply connected to desires outside of the kitchen.

48:00Alexandra Schwartz:And therefore, not just self-expression, but self-nourishing can grow shoots in other aspects of life. That's really, I mean, I guess we've been saying aspirational a lot, but that is deeply connected to how I think about the rest of how we build identity over time.

48:15Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it's also the other set of aspirational, which is just practical reality, like the way you actually live, like just as you may always have a certain pair of reliable jeans in the closet that you know you're going to feel good when you wear. I will always have arugula in my fridge. It needs to be there. I will always have lemon and olive oil that I can eat it with and salt because I need a very lemony, oily, salty arugula salad as a reliable source of pleasure, especially to eat with something like a schnitzel. Or pizza. Yeah, the good stuff. Or roast chicken. Like, if I can just put a chicken in the oven and have an arugula salad, a citrusy arugula salad, everything is okay.

48:58Vinson Cunningham:That's my uniform. Everything is okay. I'll drink to that. And eat.

49:14Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O 'Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condonest's head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics.

49:51Is Wuthering Heights really a love story? Should you be afraid of Virginia Woolf? And most importantly, is Mr Darcy handsome enough to tempt you? This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer. And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer. In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics Everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved. We reveal their secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books. We show how they came into being, why they matter and how they changed the world. The deeper we go, the weirder the questions.

50:27Is George Orwell's 1984 on some level a comedy? Is Dracula the Freddie Mercury of horror? And why do so many literary honeymoons go wrong? Whether you're a committed book nerd or just curious about the history of ideas, The Secret Life of Books is the podcast for you.