709: Kitchen Advice and Meditations with Tamar Adler

27:54Yeah, and even the list of reasons to cook, that was because somebody emails you and asked, why do people cook? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And at first I was like, I'm not going to answer this. And then I would just walk around, like, doing my daily life and find myself saying out loud, this is why. This is why. This is why people cook. Do you remember some of the reasons why that you gave? Yeah, I do. One reason was to get to appreciate certain magical ingredients. I mean, I make lists of them. But, like, there's no way to get close to wild mushrooms other than by cooking. And then another one is so that you can make your child scones first thing in the morning.

28:45And another one is to have something to do with your body, with the sack of meat that you carry around. Yeah.

28:55And for the cheapest, easiest way to gather a lot of people. Yeah. Those are some. Yeah, I resonate with all of those. I think the one about getting close to ingredients made me pause because I didn't think about it in that way. But it's so true. Even like quince smells incredible. Yeah. You can't eat it raw, really. You can't get close to quince. Exactly. I wish that were in there, but that's perfect. There's no—it just stays—it's like a Zeno's paradox of an encounter because the closer—you can hold it right up against your face. Smells so good. But you can't actually do anything with that, and you can't, like, put it in your mouth.

29:32And then—but if you cook, the crazy thing about quince is that it actually tastes—when you make quince paste, it tastes as magical as it smells. It tastes like petals, like flowers and like honey and like all these crazy things. And there's no other entry point. And I feel like that also, there's a lot of cone cabbage in this book. I think there's three cone cabbages. There are three cone cabbages. But that was another one where I was like, I just find that such a charming plant. Such a joyous, funny, charming plant. And unless you're doing something with it, all you can do is kind of like look at it and be charmed.

30:17But if you're cooking, then you similarly get to kind of like engage with the cone cabbage. Engage with the cone cabbage. Yeah, you have a lot of beans in the book also. And I think that's almost the reverse. Like some beans are so beautiful when they're dried. And then when you cook them, they lose all of that beauty. But then, I don't know, maybe it goes inside of them and they taste delicious. They're beautiful on the inside. Yeah, but you know when you get like those beautiful heirloom dried beans, I kind of like hoard them like precious gems because I know that they're not going to be as beautiful anymore.

30:49Yeah, but I feel like you can – well, this is a perfect – okay, this is a perfect feast on your life exercise. Okay. I think that probably before writing this book, I would have been like, these are really beautiful now. It kind of stinks that after I cook them, they're going to be brown. and then while I was reading this book I would be like I am enjoying the heck out of looking at these beans and then I would look more closely at the beans and be like what a startling pink like how does that pink end up on a bean and how does it get painted in those slashes across some of them and then like why does that one have a constellation on it I'm looking at a bean with a constellation on it and um and then like i'd put them into a pot and as i was putting into the pot be like how could something that's so beautiful also sound so beautiful like you know the clicks as they drop into a pot and then how as you fill a pot of beans with water and just just when the water rises above the level of the beans you kind of hear them shimmy back and forth inside the pot a little bit.

31:57And then I would like see them as they started to turn from, you know, like as their colors started to like bleed into the past. And by the time I was done with all of that, it was like they didn't, they hadn't lost their color and turned brown. You know, I had gotten all of that. And that was the practice of the year that became this book, was this sense of not, sort of not losing things as quickly as I had felt like I was losing them because I noticed them so minutely that, and then recorded it. Yeah, I love this kind of meditation of making beans. I think we're talking a lot about the things we love about cooking, but another thing I liked in this book, which is something I think you did in An Everlasting Meal, is the list of tricks for making cooking appealing when it isn't.

32:49I feel like that's a very relatable other side to cooking is like you realize I have to do this all the time for the rest of my life. Could you maybe give me some advice on some ways I can make cooking appealing when I'm in that headspace? Yeah. Definitely. There are a lot of them in the book. And it was the first time I had ever written down kind of every time I didn't want to cook. And it's a lot of the time. You know, like I'm not some special, I think, I think one could imagine that people who cook a lot and write about cooking just want to do it all the time. But I don't, I don't want to do it all the time.

33:28One of my strategies, so the strategies I gave or the ones I remember from an everlasting meal are like reading, reading a little bit about food, but not necessarily in a cookbook. just reading beautiful descriptions and how sometimes that can like shake something free inside of you. And it just kind of engages your creative and literary and soft self. And another one is changing the format of a meal so that it's not like it doesn't have to be the same. It doesn't have to be like a dinner that you have at a table. Have a picnic. Have grilled cheese. Be like, okay, it's sandwich night. or let's have breakfast.

34:11We have scrambled eggs and toast a lot in my house at dinner time. Breakfast for dinner. Yeah, breakfast for dinner. And then in this book I had, there was one day when I had to make lunch over a school break for my son and me. And it was like, I can't tell you how much I didn't want to. I was like, this is impossible because I just have to feed both of us and I don't. But it was cold outside. I was not going to go out to a store and buy something and, like, waste all this money when I knew, you know. I was just like, I don't want to do it. And then I pictured the things that I had done recently.

34:52I pictured myself as a stranger. I pictured myself as, like, a friend that I hadn't, you know, that I didn't know well. And I kind of observed what I had done recently, which was do my absolute best to make it off a ski jump. And I was so proud of myself. I was like, I really felt like I cleared. Like, I was like an Olympian. I was like, I basically am ready to enter the Olympics. And then I asked my son, and he was like, I didn't see any space between your skis and the jump. I mean, that's the least of it, the kind of brutality that I'm exposed to on a daily basis. But I was like, I really did feel like a million bucks.

35:31But just, I was just, I didn't want to make food. And then I was like, you know what? But the lady who did that is rad. Like, just cook for her. Cook for the lady who was like, yeah, I'll go off the jumps with you. And then did it and then landed and then was like and felt good about it and didn't say bad things about myself. I just said great things about myself. Like, I should enter the Olympics. Right. And after that kind of repositioning of the person I was cooking for, I totally did want to cook. I wanted to make her a sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a great new one. I like that. I like pretending to be someone else as a method of cooking.

36:09I should be doing that more often. Sometimes I do the like chopped competition school of it where I look at the things in my pantry that have been there for the longest time or that need to be used most imminently and then try to come up with a whole meal around that without going to the store. Amazing. Can you think of one that you have done recently? What did I do last night? Because it was somehow along this line. Last night was leftovers, but the night before I made soup with some cabbage that was in the fridge and some chicken stock that was in the freezer. And I didn't have like a potato or anything to put in it, but I had a bag of like Korean rice cakes in the freezer.

36:46So I simmered them in the soup. That was really good. That sounds great. It was really good. Delicious. And you can probably never recreate it. I mean, I'm going to try to recreate it like probably tomorrow because it was so good. But I think about soft textures similar to what you were saying about tofu before. I think like eating a squishy soft thing, it always sounds like a good idea to me. So maybe that's like the jumping off point. Yeah, but I love, right, right. What soft squishy thing can I serve myself today? Exactly. In what form will it be? Yeah. I think of you as somebody who has a lot of appreciation for leftovers.

37:19You wrote a whole book kind of around this idea of using up leftovers. is that still kind of a way that you shape your cooking, especially maybe now that you're in Spain in a different place? Totally. I can't. The very beginning of living in Spain was so hard because I didn't have leftovers. And because my pots were really small. Yeah. So like I, the pots weren't big enough. The pots and pans weren't big enough for me to cook enough to have leftovers. So I had like a real kind of identity crisis because I didn't know what to make. I couldn't remember how I cooked. I was like, how do I usually do this?

37:57I'm sure I usually do this because we all eat. And then I bought the two biggest pots in Spain where the guy at my local hardware store had to climb up on a ladder into this special dusty area. And he was like, you don't want a pot this big. I mean, it's not very big. It's like, I'm not good at the quart thing. But one is like six quarts. One is ten quarts or something. But he was like, nobody wants a pot this big. And I was like, I'll take both of them. And as soon as I had them, I could make amounts of food where I could have food left over. And as soon as there are leftovers, I'm like off to the races.

38:35Right. And when we say leftovers, it's not necessarily like a whole composed dish. It's beans or grains or something like that that becomes the basis for something else. Like leftover rice, got to be that. Some leftover cooked vegetable. there's usually leftover vinaigrette. Yeah, just, you know, one chicken thigh, like stuff like that where you're like, okay, I see you, we're going to dance. Can I give you like a leftovers conundrum I've been facing recently? Yes. Well, maybe the answer is obvious, but I feel like you said leftover vinaigrette. I often have like two teaspoons of leftover vinaigrette.

39:11Like if I added it to my salad, it would make it too soggy, but it feels like a silly amount to be saving. But then I save it and then I just make more vinaigrette with that as the basis. Is that the best I can be doing with that? Or is there some like untapped potential I should be reaching for? I mean, you can't do that ad infinitum. You can't do that ad infinitum, especially because garlic, the taste of garlic changes dramatically. It really does. I don't like leftover garlic. No, not good. But what I like to do with that, so I often use a little bit to make the next one, unless it's garlic.

39:46I really won't do that. All I taste is old garlic when I have that. But I really like to, like, drizzle it over if I'm heating up rice for lunch, even if it's a different kind of rice or, like, I just drizzle it over. It gives it – everything can use that little amount of acid and fat and onion or, you know, whatever. So I just use it as a general, like, moistener or, you know, kind of – or like if I'm having a fried egg on toast, which I often have that for lunch. I just drizzle the vinaigrette over the fried egg. Just expand what it can go on. Yeah. The other thing I have is a huge quantity of bacon fat in my fridge.

40:27Yeah. Which I use to like roast vegetables, but I can't use all of this that way. No. Nope. Bacon fat's hard. I like replacing half of the butter in cornbread with bacon fat. That's good. You can't do all of it. I mean, you can. I find all of it to be too... Bacon. bacon to bacon. But half is good. Yeah. I like that idea. I feel like I get overwhelmed looking at how much is there. So then I just kind of put it to the side. But cornbread is a favorite food of mine. So that's achievable as a goal. Great. Great. Okay. While we're talking about kitchen strategies, I wanted to ask you about classic dishes.

41:08Your book, Something Old, Something New, is kind of all about revitalizing classic dishes. I'm curious if there's a underrated classic dish that you think should be getting more attention and love? Definitely. Okay, so one is Petit Poise à la Frances. Can you break that down for me? Yeah, yeah. So I think this used to be a very common dish, like kale salad or, you know, roasted broccoli romenesco. And it's English peas, which can totally be, you know, frozen if you want, cooked with spring onion, a little bit of chicken stock or water, bacon lardon, and chiffonaded lettuce and butter. And it becomes a, like the lettuce just kind of becomes like a slightly wilted, like a really elegant little, if you've ever had something with like where they lay a thin slice of prosciutto over the top when it's warm and it kind of like melts into it, That sort of how it collapses.

42:12Yeah. The lettuce functions like that, but also retains a little bit of its crispness. So it's like, actually, it's a lot like thinly sliced prosciutto over, thinly sliced prosciutto over something. And the lardons just give it this like, the textures are a big part of it. Because there's like the chew of the lardin, the pop of the English pea, the kind of smoothness of the spring onion, and then that little like silkiness of the lettuce. And that is so good. It's just a fantastic dish. And cooked lettuce in general, to expand the category, not all lettuce and not cooked always, but cooked lettuce is great.

42:59And I have another recipe in Something Old, Something New for lettuce toasts where I just cook lettuce with butter and lemon zest and a tiny bit of chicken stock and then put it on toasted bread covered in anchovy butter. And it's insanely good. It sounds so good. It's so good. So, yeah, cooked lettuce. More people should be doing it. I feel like desserts are one of the categories of like older classic dishes that become revitalized more often than not. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's just about the fantasy of dessert that people are interested in kind of the nostalgia of it. Or I wonder if it's because they're so – desserts are so like aesthetically oriented.

43:44You know, like we're always looking at what desserts look like, I think, even more than we're looking at what they taste like. And that makes old ones really ripe for excavation because you can see pictures of them and then it's almost like looking at a dress, you know, like, oh, the bustle is back in, which it kind of is maybe back in right now. But like, so it's like that, you know, it's almost more fashion falls into the visual realm rather than the gustatory realm. Oh, I really like that point. I think that's totally right. And you can see even like baked Alaska being like 80s does 50s, the same thing with clothes happening right now.

44:21Yes, exactly. Exactly. Do you feel like living in Spain kind of gives you a different perspective on like the kinds of things people are eating in restaurants or making at home? Or do you feel like your appetites are kind of the same no matter wherever you are? Well, you know, in Spain, there are not that many vegetables. In Madrid, in the matrileño diet, there are not many vegetables other than potatoes, artichokes, which are one of my favorite foods, peppers, like padron peppers, and tomatoes. And so I get like kind of scurvy level yearnings for green vegetables in general. And like kale, which I'm like fine on kale.

45:18I like well-cooked sauteed kale. I'm not a raw kale person. But lettuce, kale. I like made a weird embarrassing sound when I finally found like really good fresh broccoli once. Okay. Because I was so, I think, needed it so badly. So that, I'm feeling, like, real yearning for vegetables. And I think actually in coming back here, I've noticed I don't think I've had meat since I got back to the U.S. for this week. So I think clearly, like, I love that the diet there is based on, like, eggs and pork and potatoes and tomatoes. I love those foods. Beer. Like, I'm so happy. I don't. I'm not like, oh, more ham.

46:02I'm like, great. Yeah. Love ham. My son's favorite dish right now is called huevos arrovos ibericos. And it's French fries topped with Iberian ham topped with fried eggs. And that's like a dish. Like you can just go in and get it. Which, like I was like, when I saw that, I was like, is this allowed? And it's allowed. He's like, I'm going to go have huevos arrojos. But, and I love it. But then when I come back, I want things that aren't potatoes, eggs, ham, and tomatoes. Yeah. The broccoli thing is funny to me because I used to work at the Park Slope Food Co-op doing, like, the produce restocking.

46:43And broccoli was easily the most in-demand vegetable, at least among the, like, Park Slope family set. But I feel like it was impossible to keep it stocked. It would always be gone. Wow. Have you ever done, like, a deep dive into that? Why broccoli? I mean, everybody thinks they know how to cook broccoli. So that's right. I think I know how to cook broccoli, but there are many ways to cook it. Well, but no, you have to cook it in a way that gets the salt into it, not in a way that doesn't get the salt into it. But I think like a lot of people when they become a mom feel like, OK, now it's my broccoli time.

47:19Yeah. And then they start cutting it up and steaming it. Yeah. I feel that. I like to take a knife and shave the top. I don't even know what to call the little balls. shave them like off and then peel the stem, cut that up and then you can like saute that in pasta or something. That sounds great. But I do think it is kind of like the childhood vegetable staple for whatever maybe because it looks like a little tree. Yeah. It's very pretty. That's cute. I don't want to blow up too many of your Madrid spots but I'm wondering if there is maybe a favorite that you would share. Yeah. There's a place called Hermanos Vinagre.

47:59I really don't know what to do with the, like, Spanish accent now that I'm back then. Because I definitely am not trying to, like, turn, you know. Hermanos. Hermanos. No, it's Hermanos Vinagre. Because the the is for C and Z. Yeah. But Hermanos Vinagre is a small chain. I think there are, like, two. There are either two or three of them. And it's amazing. It's, like, it's just small things like tapas. But, yeah, there are either two or three of them. And everything is very vinegar-based, as you can tell. Vinegar Brothers. Yeah, Vinegar Brothers. But my two favorite things there are, so the potato chips, every place has potato chips.

48:41But the potato chips there are kept warm, like just a little warm. So you get them and they're like, yeah, they're just warm potato chips, which is as good as it sounds. And then there's quail and escabeche, which is amazing. Like, you know, it's a blended escovecce sauce, so it's a smooth, tart sauce, and the quail is marinated in it. And you just have, like, those things and the vermouth. They have lots of different vermouths, and that's one place that I love. And there's a place on my corner called Bar Dolores, and the thing that they are—they don't have a kitchen. So it's just kind of whatever they can – they like open up cans and then they also do some – they marinate their own anchovies in-house.

49:30But what they're known for is matrimonio, which is bocoronas, which are – I mean all anchovies are the same animal. There's no two anchovies. But bocoronas are marinated in vinegar and the brown kind are cured in salt and then put in – and then marinated in olive oil. This place's, like, you know, famous dish is just a plate of both the white ones and the brown ones. And then you put one of each on a potato chip. That sounds so good to me. It's so good. I love that. Yeah. And that's called matrimonial? Oh, so like the two are becoming wedded together. They're becoming wedded. That's very sweet.

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52:46For nearly a decade, ButcherBox has led the industry with meat and seafood that's antibiotic-free. As an exclusive offer, our listeners can get free protein in every box for a year, plus$20 off your first box when you go to butcherbox.com slash taste. Visit butcherbox.com slash taste to get this limited time offer and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash taste. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. Okay, I wanted to luxuriate in your Spain recs, but now to close, I want to do a rapid fire. So I'm going to make you play some favorites and you can tell me the first answer that comes to mind.

53:24Oh my God. It's going to be great. Deep breath. Okay. A favorite cookbook right now that's not one of your own. Foods of Sichuan. Fuchsia Dunlop. Three things that are always in your fridge. Eggs. Parmesan. Milk. That's boring. That's classics. That's true. That's good. Your go-to breakfast when you're having breakfast. Granola and yogurt. Your favorite late night snack. Corn nuts. Like a flavored kind? No. Good. Hard no. No. I don't like flavored things. Like, I'm not a ranch. No. No barbecue, just pure. Yeah. Not even jalapeno. Okay. Like, just the thing. Salt, salty fried thing itself. Keep everything else over in its corner, please.

54:19Your favorite season for cooking? Oh, right, like harvest season, right fall, when there's still eggplant and there's also squash. Your favorite bookstore? oh my god the pressure is impossible i'm not gonna do one okay in spain it's secret kingdoms in the west village it's three lives in rockefeller center it's um the one i was just at mcnally um for cookbooks it's bonnie slotnik and omnivore oh and um there's an all climbing and adventure-based bookstore called Des Nivelles in Madrid that is unbelievable. That's so cool. A restaurant that you wish you could be a regular at? Isodi. Finally, a fictional food scene, like from a book or movie, something made up that you wish you could magically eat in real life?

55:16The first feast that you see served in, is it called Eat, Drink, Man, Woman? Yeah. The Ang Lee movie? Yeah. The first scene cooked in that, I need to—that's what I'm going to eat when I'm, like, on my deathbed. It might have to be intravenous. It's a great scene. I watched that movie because somebody told me the food when it was so incredible. And it's an incredible movie, but I'll be thinking about that for lunch for a long time. Tamara, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. This was so fun. It was so fun.

55:55This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergang Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skurzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste.