Cookery by the Book

Crave: Recipes Arranged by Flavour, to Suit Your Mood and AppetiteBy Ed Smith Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Ed Smith: Hello, I'm Ed Smith. I am a cook and a food writer, and this is my third cookbook. It's called Crave: Recipes Arranged by Flavour to Suit Your Mood and Appetite.Suzy Chase: You dedicated this cookbook to anyone who is currently thinking about their next meal, but can't decide in which direction to turn. Most of us ponder what we're going to eat next by what's in our fridge or pantry, but you've realized the ingredients are the building blocks, not the answer. I'd love for you to share your philosophy around our next meal.Ed Smith: Crave is organized by six flavor profiles, which we can go into in a minute, but I think I did that because I do spend all of my time thinking about what I'm going to eat next. I think when you do that, if you are a hungry person, your mind can get flooded with ideas, with inspiration from over the internet, things you read, things you see on TV. It's just really easy, I think, to get in a muddle and also what I call menu paralysis, that you just don't know what to cook next. You end up cooking the same five or six things over and over and over again.Ed Smith: I just realized that whilst I do often base my food on the ingredients that I see in front of me that are in peak in the season at that time, or walk into a butcher's or a green grocers, where I live in London, there's loads of really inspiring places, actually, the times that I'm most successful in what I decide to cook, actually it's because I've cooked something that suited the flavor that I was craving at the time. Does that make sense?Suzy Chase: Totally, totally.Ed Smith: It may make more sense if I tell what the six different flavors are.Suzy Chase: Yes, would you do that?Ed Smith: All right. I felt that they were fresh and fragrant, tart and sour, chili and heat, spiced and curried, rich and savory, and cheesy and creamy.Suzy Chase: Somewhere I think I read or I heard you say that you crave the fresh and fragrant profile most. Talk to me about that one.Ed Smith: About the craving in particular or my craving for it? I think-Suzy Chase: Well, describe the profile first and then what's appealing, because I think I'm a rich and savory and a cheesy and creamy gal.Ed Smith: Fresh and fragrant is green verdant things, so leaves, things that crunch, that are cooling. It's fresh cheeses, ricotta and feta, it's vegetables that are crunchy. It's things that often don't take much cooking to get to the plate, salads and assemblies and platters and stuff that made you feel good when you eat it. It's often not really taking the ingredients much beyond their raw state, because I think that's the freshness, isn't it? Herbs used in abundance, not just as a little garnishes, herbs like a salad leaf, citrus, all that sort of stuff. I want those things when I want to feel good, I want to feel light, I want to feel happy. I might already be feeling happy or I might be in a grump, but I just know that a fresh and fragrant meal is going to pull me out of it.Ed Smith: In the cookbook, some things are literal salads, there's just a ham hock, tarragon, radish and asparagus salad, but also slow-cooked courgettes but with fresh cheese and run through loads of white beans with loads of oil and some fresh herbs. Just nice things, and I think that I do crave that a lot because it covers so much of what I've said, it's whether it is already hot and I'm feeling happy, or whether I'm feeling in a grump and I want to feel lighter and happier.Suzy Chase: Yeah. You talked about in the book how it's important to eat food that feels appropriate to what's going on outside.Ed Smith: Yeah. I think maybe the genesis for this book, or at least one of the things that started me thinking about, is that I'd written a seasonal cookbook and there are lots of seasonal cookbooks and they're all great and I do think that we often can eat really well if we concentrate on the food that's at its peak at the certain time of the year and be inspired by that, but I also think that seasonal cooking means cooking according to the season and what you feel like cooking, which goes to that point about fresh and fragrant and things being assemblies and salads. If it's really hot, you don't want to spend all your time in the kitchen, slaving over a hot stove. You want to just cut a few things up and sit around the table.Ed Smith: That's sort of started and then I realized that, and certainly in the UK, the seasons are really mixed actually. We're so used to talking about four seasons, but right now I'm sitting here is the end of June, and normally that's when Wimbledon's about to start, it might be some years that it's a bit wet, but it is warm and strawberries are coming through and all these lovely things and you're really starting to think that summer's here. But having had a mini heat wave for a week, we're suddenly in literally autumn, autumnal weather, and the things I've been craving today and the things that I want to eat right now are not summery things. They're bean stews and various meats and vegetable gratins and stuff, and that is not what you'd see in the summer section of a seasonal cookbook. That got me thinking that weather is perhaps more important than season, in terms of what you crave, everything flows from there.Suzy Chase: At the end of two of the flavor profiles, you have a page called A Quick Fix, which is so brilliant. Can you talk a little bit about that?Ed Smith: I think, off of my head, are rich and savory and cheesy and creamy. I think that I had the little Quick Fix section at the end, because I guess maybe that started with the cheesy and creamy section as I was writing that, because ultimately for me the best way to get fixed if you're craving cheese is to have a piece of really good cheese and you can't write a recipe for that. I think I started with that and then just simply grilled cheese. How better can you get a fix for things like that? They're just little ideas that everyone knows about already, but sometimes if you're reading a cookbook, there are lots of things you already know, but sometimes you want to have your memory jogged.Ed Smith: That was kind of the same with the savory section. Some things that hit the spot very quickly with the savory might be anchovies on toast with lots of butter or a really good cup of miso soup made with an instant dashi and a blob of miso. It's sometimes useful in a cookbook, I think, to state the obvious, because not everything has to be new. Fortunately, people buy cookbooks to read them as well as put on their coffee table, and it's good to have your memory jogged and to feel like you're on the right track as well.Suzy Chase: There are recipes in this cookbook that I've never seen before, like scrag and root and miso broth, and pork belly butter beans and deli olives, and your linguine with lemon and sriracha. Talk a little bit about your process for developing a recipe.Ed Smith: I don't think there's many things that are in cookbooks or that anyone cooks that someone hasn't cooked before, so I wouldn't say that I've done something for the first time. In my cookbook and the way that I write recipes for magazines and my cookbooks and everything else that goes in between is that I am a good curator of recipes and ideas and traditions and cuisines and flavors, so that for cookbooks, I make, I hope, a useful resource that isn't pretending to only give you stuff you've never had before been. Bun cha, a Vietnamese salad with pork patties, my thing is that it's definitely my recipe for that patty, but I'm not laying claimed to bun cha, that's Vietnam. But there are some things in there, which I think are my ideas, and I guess that pork belly is a slow braised pork belly with just some white beans, really not difficult, loads of people have done it before, and then the twist is for marinaded olives. I think if you just chop that up, you make yourself a quick and easy sauce over the top. That's all that is, it's just a simple dish.Ed Smith: The sriracha spaghetti with lemon is really pretty similar to, I'm going to say this wrong, aglio e olio, an Italian pasta dish with just olive oil, garlic that's very, very gently cooked down into it and some chili flakes, but I just added quite a large squirt of sriracha, which is Southeast Asian chili sauce. People love sriracha, people love noodle dishes, as in spaghetti, good squeeze of lemon. Then I added a pangrattato on the top, which is normally a breadcrumb thing that's fried with garlic and other stuff. But again, if you add chili flakes and sriracha to that, then suddenly you've got a tangy, chili, hot thing that's just going to suit your chili and heat craving.Suzy Chase: You're a bit of a recipe maestro.Ed Smith: You think?Suzy Chase: I would never think of putting sriracha in linguini.Ed Smith: Thank you. I think there's a rich history of cultures making very, very simple but delicious dishes with either a spaghetti or an Italian style pasta or noodles from China, Japan and elsewhere. Nigella, she does a Marmite pasta, I think, and that's kind of like a twist on Chinese sesame noodle situation. It's kind of the savory coating gloss, a very, very simple thing and adding a bit of Marmite. I think in my mind, I had the sriracha as a similar condiment, that it makes a very quick, easy thing.Suzy Chase: Speaking of Nigella, you talk about the word crave, which is usually associated with sweet and fatty decadence. I had her on the podcast a few episodes ago and she was talking about her distaste for the term guilty pleasure. In her latest cookbook, she has a whole chapter called pleasures because she says the term guilty pleasures warps your sense of what you're seeking in food. Then there's comfort eating, which is a whole other episode. But you mentioned that the research suggests that many crave healthy rather than guilty food when they need comfort.Ed Smith: One of the subject areas that's got a huge amount of stuff written about it is comfort food. That is something that I think has two connotations that I write about often, is the idea that people seek comfort in a tub of ice cream, that's that classic movie thing, isn't it? You break up with your partner and you just sink into the sofa with a tub of ice cream. Also, comfort food tends to be written about in the UK and US press as roast chicken or chicken soup, things that are wholesome and savory. In fact, both of those things, the seeking solace in ice cream or seeking solace in savory things, it's just a tiny fraction of what people really want as comfort.Ed Smith: Quite often, more often than you'd think people that are either feeling like they are hungry or they're unhappy or they're ill or they are in a bad mood, many, many people realize that the thing that is going to get them out of that slump is not a guilty pleasure. Something that's fresh, something that makes you feel good and makes you feel happy and that makes you bounce out of that slump. Comfort food is different things to different people, quite frequently, this different thing, it takes you back to your happy place. Often, for many, not everyone, that's your childhood and obviously people's heritages. We have reduced comfort food in media to a tiny fraction of what it really is.Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's so funny because I grew up in Kansas with little or no pasta, and so I never crave pasta and people think I'm crazy.Ed Smith: Do you have a different kind of carb that you attach your cravings to? When you really want something, is it potatoes, is it rice, is it-Suzy Chase: Yeah, I think it would be potato.Ed Smith: Yeah. Corn?Suzy Chase: Corn, potato and steak.Ed Smith: Right. I mean, that's good. Is that something you go back to when you do want something for comfort?Suzy Chase: Yes.Ed Smith: Home food, home cooked food, food from the childhood.Suzy Chase: What do you go back to in your childhood?Ed Smith: Probably is a roast dinner, which is such a British thing to say, isn't it? Mum cooked everything from scratch. We had a really good upbringing in terms of learning how to cook and to cook nice things. By no means were her meals, or even the best meals, roast dinners, but I think something about a roast chicken with all the veg on a cold wet Sunday, that does sort of bring things back.Suzy Chase: For lunch, I made your recipe for chopped kale, dill and chick pea salad with smoked trout, on page 32. Can you describe this dish?Ed Smith: That's in the fresh and fragrant section. The fragrance comes from lots and lots and lots of dill, a little bit of citrus. The freshness comes from both the taste and also the cold, chilled texture of cucumber in that dish is dressed with yogurt and dill, lots of chopped salad that's been chopped and salted, and a bit of citrus so that it breaks down the kale. There are chickpeas in there that are just cooked and there are chickpeas in there that have been baked, so they're crispy. There's loads of textures going on. Then it's finished with some flaked smoked trout. That all comes together with the freshness of the kale, the cucumbers, the yogurt dressing, dill, smoked fish, just to make it interesting,Suzy Chase: It was a lovely summer lunch, and yes, I love trout so much.Ed Smith: It's lovely, isn't it? I think it's really good. I think that is a good lunch dish and one that isn't wildly difficult to put together, hopefully the ingredients are pretty accessible. If you did have a craving for fresh and fragrant at 9:00 in the morning and either you had most of those ingredients in the fridge or store cupboard or you could pop out to the shop and get it, then you could hopefully satisfy that craving pretty quickly.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Ed Smith: Do you know what? I feel both happy and a little bit cringingly embarrassed to say that I genuinely had the sriracha and lemon spaghetti last night. I had just driven for about five hours back from a different part of the country, dropped my wife off in the middle of London who went to a work event and then drove my son a little bit further, unpacked the car, did all these things. Suddenly, it was 9:30 at night and obviously we hadn't got any food at home except, as always, bagged spaghetti, some garlic, some old bread, some sriracha. It hit the spot absolutely because I was tired and I was ready for some pasta, but more importantly, I think probably having been driving for five hours in the rain, pretty ready to have a little bit more excitement in my day, it was just what I needed.Suzy Chase: I'm excited because I'm making it tomorrow night.Ed Smith: Are you? Oh great.Suzy Chase: I have clams that I need to make and I think they're alive in my fridge so I need to make them tonight, but tomorrow I'm making that linguine and I can't wait.Ed Smith: I really hope you like it. My dad actually called me the weekend to say that he'd made it, he rarely cooks. He said he thought I'd put too much the chili sauce in, but I reminded him that the tablespoon was a genuine measurement, not just the biggest spoon you can find in the kitchen for that. Also, I suspect that he might well have a different tolerance to heat than me. Hopefully you like it, depending on all those factors.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Ed Smith: Rocket & Squash, @rocketandsquash, as in I was going to say the salad leaf, but you call it arugula I think, don't you?Suzy Chase: Yes.Ed Smith: The rocket as in a space rocket, and squash, which is also the name of my blog, rocketandsquash.com, that's me. I write all over the place for lots of magazines and newspapers, but I suppose most active these days on Instagram and a little bit on my blog.Suzy Chase: Well, this has been an enlightening conversation. Thanks so much, Ed, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Ed Smith: My pleasure, thanks so much for having me.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

monk: Light and Shadow on the Philosopher's PathBy Yoshihiro Imai Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Emmy Reis: My name is Emmy Reis. I am one of the translators along with Naomi Reis who translated Chef Yoshihiro Imai's monk: Light and Shadow on The Philosopher's Path.Suzy Chase: Emmy, you live in Brooklyn, but you're originally from Kyoto. How do you know Chef Imai, and how were you involved with this book?Emmy Reis: Sure. It's actually a funny story. Chef Imai and I met at a very random bar in the pub district in Kyoto. We were each meeting work clients and then they happened to be going to this very random hole-in-the-wall bar. We just happened to sit next to each other at this bar. We were both feeling very awkward, and then we got talking and he talked about his first book, Circle, which he was carrying in his bag. Right off the bat, I don't know, we connected. So yeah, we've been good friends. He's had this vision of this book for a really long time, and so yeah, I was really happy to be involved in the translation of it.Suzy Chase: Monk is the story of your 14-seat, seasonally inspired restaurant. I want to kick things off talking about the word path.Emmy Reis: I think the motif of a path is a really big theme for monk, and of course the book in many ways. It's also in the subtitle, Light and Shadow on the Philosopher's Path. The Philosopher's Path is the actual name of the small path where monk is located. It's such a perfect name because it's named after the various philosophers and writers that are said to have walked on this path to ruminate about life, et cetera. The vibe of the path hasn't changed much today. It's still a quiet, tranquil pass along a small canal. It's very calming and meditative to walk this path.Emmy Reis: I think this image of philosopher walking on a path day after day connects to this idea in Chef Imai's work, where each day is this meditation, repetition and accumulation of a communion with nature and the ingredients that it provides. It sums up to the larger picture, which is a journey and an exploration, as you said, and one that is ongoing.Emmy Reis: His daily ritual of traveling up north, out of Kyoto city to the countryside of Ohara, where he gathers his vegetables, herbs, and flowers of the day. It's definitely a practical ritual in the sense that he gets his ingredients, but it's definitely much more than that. It's about feeling the energy and the breath of the natural environment, and then bringing that back with the ingredients and keeping that intact in the dishes that he makes so that it can be shared and felt by the guests as well.Emmy Reis: His approach is very much about being receptive to nature, and so going to the farms and fields where he can feel that is an essential part of his practice. That's basically what guides his path.Suzy Chase: Chef Imai seems to epitomize the definition of creativity, although he's uncomfortable using the word, how come?Emmy Reis: I think, well, he's expressed that he's always surprised and deeply moved by the beauty and wonder of nature, which is created by nature itself and the elements within that. We can't create anything without that ourselves, or even exist. I think that in the course of his life, he felt and understood this idea in very visceral ways, both in specific moments and over time. You can get a sense of that through the essays and stories he tells in the book.Emmy Reis: After that, once he have that realization, he says he almost felt ashamed to use that word, not because the word creative or using the word creative is inherently bad in any way, but because of the way it's been used in certain contexts in a maybe entitled or capitalistic ways. I think it just doesn't feel right to him within his relationship with nature, as a chef and as a person, to put it that way. He prefers just being with nature with deep respect, and that's monk in a nutshell. This also means the dishes reflect seasonality and sense of space, sense of place, and the environment and the changes that come with each day and moment. That's the most important thing, and the menu and dishes evolve each day because of that.Suzy Chase: For those of us who don't have a garden, we're here in New York City, or we can't forage, we go to the grocery store. Does he think there's a way for us to tap into the awe and respect that bubbles up for him every morning on his commute to the farmer's market?Emmy Reis: Yeah, definitely, there's still a way to tap into that. He suggests going to the grocery store or farmer's market without deciding what you're making beforehand. Just go there with a neutral mind and open your eyes and your heart to what they have and see what ingredients speak to you or seem most vital. Think about what's in season right now. Even in a grocery store in the city, there should be a larger stock of seasonal things that are perhaps less expensive and are pure, fresh and vital. Once you have one or two, or maybe many ingredients if you're lucky like that, from there, you can think about what you're going to make. That's kind of the same thing as what he does in the farmer's market and out in the fields every morning.Suzy Chase: Chef Imai's primary aim is for his guests to enjoy a delicious and pleasurable time at monk. What is his deeper takeaway for his guests?Emmy Reis: It's a really huge pleasure for him to see the guests have a delicious and fun time, but he also hopes to resonate with someone's heart on a really deep level, in a way that remains imprinted in their memory, not just in the mind, but of course, in a way that's connected to the senses and the body. What he's always thinking about and talking about with his staff is to imagine what type of feeling the guests would be taking home after dinner. If you have a clear sense of that, you can have a strong sense of what to do and how. Restaurants have many elements, like interior design, flowers, music, lighting, conversations that happen, and the food's just one of those elements. He's always thinking about what the guests might feel and the whole experience of the restaurant and how that might reverberate for them as they return back to their daily lives.Suzy Chase: I'd love to hear about his search for the perfect spot for monk that's situated on the Philosopher's Path.Emmy Reis: Yeah. it took him a long time to find the right place, I think he said almost eight months. He had a really clear vision of a location close to nature and ideally next to a river or stream, running water. He told some real estate companies, but they didn't get his image really, or they just didn't have anything like that. But he also didn't want to settle, so he just kept trying. Finally, one company that got his vision got back to him four months after he brought this up and they told him about this place. It was right at the foot of the mountains, kind of away from the city, next to flowing water, so it was perfect. There was a really special energy. It feels very protected and secluded and closer to nature. But the building itself was super old, so he was a little unsure when he walked in, but something about the vibe just clicked so he went with it.Suzy Chase: His work at Monk is a direct reflection of how he lives everyday life. I would love to hear about that.Emmy Reis: Yeah. I think that when someone does this kind of work, daily life and work become almost seamless. First of all, you're working very closely with your senses, your intuition, your philosophy, and you can't turn that off. The two have to meet in sync. Then secondly, the work of a restaurant is around the clock. It starts very early in the morning and goes into late night, so definitely the condition of the body and soul is very important. He always says if that's out of balance, you can't move someone's heart. He's very dedicated to keeping himself healthy and happy and making sure he can spend time with his family doing some light yoga on his breaks and stuff like that. That's part of his work as well. By the way, his wife, Ena, is a really amazing yoga instructor. They use the second floor above the restaurant as her studio.Emmy Reis: The dishes come to life because of his routine of going to the farmer's market and the farm, so it's very important what he sees and feels there. He says it sometimes almost feels like the dishes are a diary that he's writing.Suzy Chase: I'm so interested to hear about the connection between music style and taste.Emmy Reis: Yeah. He would say there's definitely a connection between music style and taste in the ways they're structured and also in the ways they might make you feel. Like maybe the rich and textured sounds of the symphony might compare to the atmosphere and labor-intensive techniques of classic old cuisine in a French restaurant, and then maybe the way pop music is embellished with different kinds of sounds or synthesized in certain ways can be compared to contemporary gastronomy.Emmy Reis: Chef Imai himself enjoys a wide variety, both in music and in cooking. I know he listens to a lot of hip hop, Japanese hip hop, and jazz when he's driving, but the type of music he really resonates with on a deeper level is pretty simple, like solo piano performances or minimalistic combinations of vocals and acoustic guitar. I think this really shows in his approach to cooking as well.Suzy Chase: While attending university, Chef Imai would travel around alone on his breaks, like backpacking across Asia and Europe. One particular winter in Canada, he had a home stay experience where the mother of the family made pizza at home. Can you talk a little bit about that?Emmy Reis: He talks about this memory as something that has been deeply imprinted in his mind and how, looking back, it's one of the pivotal moments for sure that connects in this line with where he is now, because pizza was a chance meaning for him and this was definitely one of those things that pulled him in that direction.Suzy Chase: Almost all the cooking at monk is done in a wood-fired oven, imported from Italy. That's the heartbeat of the restaurant. First, I'd love for you to describe how the open flame takes to vegetables.Emmy Reis: The infrared heat of the oven can gently cook the vegetables in a way that really encapsulates their essence and goodness. He really believes this is the best way to eat vegetables, and especially seasonal vegetables, and capture that umami. The assorted grilled vegetable dish is always part of the omakase course, and it's a major highlight of the meal. It seems really simple, and it is simple, but because of that simplicity, it also involves a lot of craft and skill because the vegetables have to be cut, grilled and salted very precisely so that they really shine. It's also about, I think, the experience of seeing the flames cook the ingredients right before your eyes and the way that connects with something very primal within us.Suzy Chase: Then I'm so curious about the tasting menu that starts and ends with pizza.Emmy Reis: The first course is a simple combination of a seasonal vegetable potage soup and grilled pizza crust, which Chef Imai calls suyaki, su meaning as is or natural, and yaki meaning grilled. It's just grilled really quick in the oven and topped with olive oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The idea is to deliver the bare essence of the restaurant, and it's inspired by traditional Cha-kaiseki cuisine, or also known as tea ceremony kaiseki, where the course starts with a simple soup and just small bite of cooked rice.Emmy Reis: Then the meal moves on to series of small appetizer-sized dishes, using daily vegetables combined with dairy or seafood. These have a lot of freedom and really shift with the ingredients of the day. They're often accentuated with fresh herbs or fermented foods. The fifth dish after that is one of the highlights, which we talked about, the assorted roasted vegetables, followed by a meat dish. Then the second highlight of course is a pizza that comes after the meat dish.Emmy Reis: In Japanese cuisine, there's a concept we call shūryō which means end or close, and it refers to a warm and filling very wholesome meal, most often carb-based, so it will probably be something like noodles or rice. So ending with pizza connects to this idea of shūryō. It made sense to Chef Imai to close the meal on this happy and wholesome way. Lastly, of course, is the dessert, which usually features herbs or grilled seasonal fruit, so the night can end on a really bright, light, uplifting and refreshing note.Suzy Chase: Why pizza?Emmy Reis: Yeah, this is a really great question and something that also comes up in the book, because of course everyone is so curious and asking him that all the time. In fact, there is a essay in the book with that exact title, Why Pizza? There are many reasons, which the book reveals more about as it unfolds, but this is something Chef Imai himself has thought about a lot, as would anyone who has dedicated so much of their life to a specific craft. I think there's always a philosophical, maybe even existential, question of why am I doing this specific thing?Emmy Reis: In the essay, Chef Imai talks about how maybe it could have been architecture or music or something else instead of pizza, but this idea of path comes up again. On the specific path he happened to be on, pizza was what showed up for him in a very profound way in his early twenties. This experience of eating it at that moment was a very visceral thing that spoke to the core of his being. In that moment, he just knew that he wanted to replicate that for others and that was kind of it. Pizza also just happens to be this wonderful template in which he can both play homage to traditional Japanese cuisine and local ingredients and the changing seasons, while also opening a space that is flexible, playful and experimental and not bound to conventions or certain expectations.Suzy Chase: There are three pizzas in the book that I would love for you to describe. The first is the fresh nori pizza.Emmy Reis: Yeah, the fresh nori pizza is a very simple combination of fresh nori, mozzarella and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. The nori here is not the sheet nori that you think about when you hear nori. It's a raw variety of seaweed called aosa lettuce. It's got a paste-like consistency, and it comes out in the very beginning of the spring. This is a dish to celebrate the arrival of spring. It has a really nice minerally, salty flavor, so it's best to keep it simple in this way.Suzy Chase: The next one is the eggplant pizza.Emmy Reis: Ayu and Kamo-nasu eggplant pizza.Suzy Chase: Yes.Emmy Reis: Yep. This one is a half-and-half pizza with a traditional Kyoto variety eggplant called Kamo-nasu, it's very meaty and juicy, and ayu, which is a summer freshwater river fish known for a very pleasant, bitter flavor. These are ingredients that signal the beginning of summer. The ayu is prepared as a confit and the liver is made into a sauce to add a deep accent to the flavor. The eggplant is roasted in the wood-fired oven and pureed.Suzy Chase: God, that sounds great.Emmy Reis: It is.Suzy Chase: Then the next is the kōtake mushroom pizza.Emmy Reis: This is a pizza that is very close conceptually to sushi. It's the minimal combination of a carbohydrate and an ingredient, and this really allows the seasonal mushrooms to shine. The mushrooms are foraged by his forager friend, Mr. Sasaki, who lives up north in Iwate. They're quite special and this is a really nice way to enjoy them.Suzy Chase: Monk is housed in an old 100-year-old residence with traditional blue roof tiles. Would you please describe the interior? I am dying to go here, by the way.Emmy Reis: Yeah. It's a combination of Japanese and Scandinavian modern, simple but refined, and yet also very warm, inviting, and comfortable. It's minimal in a way that isn't uptight and it just soothes and relaxes your eyes and heart. The beams and pillars are the original wood and the dome-shaped window with cast iron frames looks out onto the tree-lined Philosopher's Path.Emmy Reis: The pizza oven and counter is the first thing you see when you come into the dining space. The floor is one level throughout and the kitchen counter, where all the food prep happens, is right there. That, and the warm lighting, make it feel very intimate. The vegetables and flowers picked fresh in the morning and the farms adorn the kitchen counter and stove top spaces, and that brings you a sense of the vital energy from nature that morning.Suzy Chase: Chef Imai seems to approach everything in his life with an artist's eye, even down to how the firewood is stacked. Could you please tell me the story of the cover and the physical design of this cookbook?Emmy Reis: The photographer, Yuka Yanazume, who did all the photography is a high school friend of Chef Imai. They've worked on an independent book project together before this. Her photos are just stunning, so Chef Imai knew from the beginning he wanted to with her. She really did a fantastic job of capturing the vibrance of the dishes and the nature. The designer, Julia Hasting, also did such an amazing job. The design of the book really speaks to the aesthetics of the restaurant. It's dynamic and tranquil all at the same time, in a way that evokes not just Monk, but also the vibe of Japan, and specifically Kyoto, but in a really refreshing and just genuine and natural way.Emmy Reis: It was really important that the book didn't cater to some kind of pre-existing or packaged idea of Japan or Kyoto and maybe conventional imagery or narrative within that. This book really needed to be its own thing, free to express what Monk embodies, and Julia really allowed that to come through, which is so amazing.Emmy Reis: Another important thing is the theme of light and shadow, which is in the subtitle of this book. It's definitely expressed in the design, layout and photos throughout the book, which is organized by the four seasons, beginning with spring. In terms of the theme of light and shadow in this book, there's an ongoing play between smaller moments of tension and contrast between light and shadow, like in the individual photos, and then there's a larger cycle that happens over the course of a year and the seasons, starting with this rising bright energy of spring that's full of light and vibrant colors and then ending with a certain darkness or quietness, deeper tones of color, which gives the book closure, but also a sense of renewal and rebirth beyond that.Emmy Reis: The cover was rendered from a photo taken by Yuka, in which the leaves from the trees on the Philosopher's Path were casting these beautiful moving shadows on the Monk exterior wall. It gives a really tactile sense of that warmth and carries that theme of light and shadow. It was a really beautiful and perfect cover for this book. It also has this feeling that those shadows could move or change at any moment, and that's also something that pulls you in deeper. So yeah.Suzy Chase: Where can we find Monk on the web and social media?Emmy Reis: You can find his website at restaurant-monk.com, and also on Instagram, his handle is yoshihiroimai. There's also a recording of the online release event, I think you can find it on his Instagram. It's one of the newest posts. That's a really great way to get a sense of the book as well.Suzy Chase: This cookbook is truly a work of art. Thank you so much, Emmy, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast for Chef Imai. This is certainly something I've never done before and I loved talking to you.Emmy Reis: Thank you so much, Suzy. This was a total pleasure and I'm so excited to be talking with you.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram, and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

ColombianaBy Mariana Velásquez Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Mariana Velásquez: Hello, my name is Mariana Velásquez and my most recent cookbook is called Colombiana. A rediscovery of recipes and rituals from the soul of Colombia.Suzy Chase: You're a James Beard award-winning recipe developer, a food stylist and native of Bogotá. This is your first cookbook devoted solely to Colombian food. Could you please read the author's note on page 295?Mariana Velásquez: This manuscript was submitted to Harper Collins on April 7th, 2020 during the first COVID 19 lockdown from our home in South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. More than ever, cooking has become a source of comfort and care, learning to cope with uncertainty certainly gave me the courage to write from a more personal place. Seclusion even inspired my husband Diego to cook by following recipes for the very first time. A newly found appreciation for the essential beauty and gifts of everyday, illuminates these pages. The vision of going on a 10 day road trip, from Bogatá to Cartagena, to photograph, the places food and people transformed, into shooting the book entirely in Brooklyn, due to a pandemic. Creative challenges can bring unexpected results. It is my wish, that these recipes give you as much comfort and joy as they gave us. Hopefully in brighter times.Suzy Chase: Creative challenges can bring unexpected results. You wrote this exactly a year ago.Mariana Velásquez: It's crazy to I mean, think about it, you know, to think how as a first time, as an adult to not know, you know, to not know know was going to happen next, nobody knew, you know, and so it was very raw and real and scary at the time.Suzy Chase: That was the worst part that you couldn't call anyone and say, Hey, what's going on? No one knew.Mariana Velásquez: Yeah, no one knew. I kept hoping somebody would know (laughs) ;and I kept hoping a wise friend would have some insights.Suzy Chase: Yeah, I kept asking my husband every night. He's really smart. And I kept saying, Bob, okay, what's going on? And he'd say, I don't know. I'm like, no! You have to know, this is awful.Mariana Velásquez: Oh my god, yeah.Suzy Chase: So what is one unexpected thing that came out of this cookbook?Mariana Velásquez: You know, the vision was to go to Colombia and photograph, and tell these stories of women who are essentially the carriers of our culinary traditions. And on these road trips that we had planned, I had already found incredible makers and cooks and chefs and we couldn't visit them. And so I thought, how about we find women here in New York who are Colombian, who tell this story of our country, through their food and celebrate them. And that was really unexpected, because I had such a different vision and a completely different plan. And that was a great gift because, it's the Colombiana's who are here and their story and, and what they share. So that was very special to me.Suzy Chase: I couldn't do this interview without asking about Aura Salcedo...Mariana Velásquez: Yes. Oh my gosh.Mariana Velásquez: She, Aura, has been with me, accompanying me, testing recipes, cooking up a storm with me every time, teaching me all of her tricks and Sazón and the way that she cooks is so it's so authentic. It's so real. There's no fuss. You know, she cuts up a plantain in the fastest way. She knows when are you guys in the perfect place to multitask. Like no one else. Yeah. That was incredible. And is, you know, I continue to work with her often.Suzy Chase: It's your first cooking job in America and you cook eggs and potatoes at the same time, in one pot, when the chef yells, who did this? Take me back to that moment.Mariana Velásquez: So can you imagine, I'm 17 years old in this very, very high-end kitchen and there's a million pots boiling over, there were port reductions and broths and soups, everything was being made. And it was kind of, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes before service began. And the chef ordered me to make the accompaniments for the caviar, which were these beautiful new potatoes and some hard-boiled eggs, that then you would separate the white from the yolk and pass them through a very fine strainer. So they would become powder. And my grandmother always cooked the potatoes and the eggs in the same pot, (laughs) because she was a very practical woman. She was a great cook and there was no need to dirty up two pots. So I did that, thinking I was being very efficient. And to my surprise, after chef Craig asked me, you know, ask who did this. And I was like, I did. He said, never stop doing it this way. He loved that. It was kind of, I don't know. It made sense to me.Suzy Chase: Imagine if he would have been angry, that would have changed your whole path of cooking.Mariana Velásquez: Completely, completely because it was, you know, it's, it's that thing that you feel it was instinct... Instinctual. That was the word I was looking for. So he celebrated that and I, you know, I'm forever grateful.Suzy Chase: What restaurant was this?Mariana Velásquez: This was Sierra Mar in Big Sur in California, in this beautiful hotel called the Post Ranch Inn. And Suzy, it was a magical place. You know, it was a new menu every day. This is 1999. When the expression "Farm to Table" was not even that, you know, it wasn't even called that, this restaurant had incredible ingredients, locally grown. We had our own garden, this lady would make our bread. Kids would come to the back of the kitchen with backpacks filled with Chanterelles and Morels, that they had foraged. It was really an exquisite first experience in the kitchen.Suzy Chase: So, you learned method and the minutiae that goes into making a recipe trustworthy at Eating Well and Saveur magazines. How is the recipe development in a restaurant, different from recipe development for a food magazine?Mariana Velásquez: Well, for food magazine, it has to be tried and tried and adjusted. And it has to be really exact, you know, it's so disappointing when a magazine publishes something that doesn't work, right? I mean, especially if it's something that you bake and the cake doesn't rise, or it implodes, it's different because you are giving the person instructions without you being there. You know, at a restaurant, things can change. Things can be replaced by ingredients that are in season or each moment that you go to a restaurant. You may have that food, but it's influenced by so many other elements. You know, it doesn't always have to be exactly the same, but when you're doing it for a magazine, it has to be precise. So there's so much more that goes into it specifically because of that. And the way that you explained the recipes and give directions.Suzy Chase: I'm curious about how you use your country as a muse for your cuisine?Mariana Velásquez: So, Colombia is all about color is all about bounty, et cetera, fruits and traditions and music. And for me, cooking is not just cooking, you know, it's everything that goes around it. It's the ritual of the table it's the music you listen to when you invite people over, it's the dress you wear. It's how you decorate your home, and Colombia, because we're a country that's so biodiverse. We have all the climates, we have, we have so much abundance in culture that I take all of that and translate it into my cooking. So, I like to say that more is more but not in excess, but just generosity and flavor.Suzy Chase: From Argentina to the Philippines, to Ecuador, to Colombia, the empanada is the same. You say making empanadas is a simple process. Can you walk me through it?Mariana Velásquez: I think it's all about getting organized. You know, you make your filling and it could be chicken. It could be beef, it could be just cheese. It could be jam. So you have your filling and you make your dough. And the only thing that is a little bit more labor intensive is putting the empanadas together. And that's when I suggest having people over to help you do so, you know, and having an empanada party, kind of like having a dumpling party, one person rolls out the dough. The other person cuts it, everybody helps fill and assemble and you can bake them or deep fry them. And you can have some as you're there and then freeze the rest.Suzy Chase: Okay, that sounds easy. I can do it. If you had to pick a Colombian feast to make and eat forever, what would it be?Mariana Velásquez: I would say the food from the Caribbean Coast because of our Syrian and Lebanese immigrants and the communities that have settled there, and have really taken those flavors and combined them with the local cuisine, with the indigenous food, with the Afro Colombian food. And to me, it's my favorite because imagine it's braised meat and the sweet and savory sauce, sweet plantains in coconut milk, very crisp cucumbers with herbs. I just love it.Suzy Chase: Arepas are corn meal patties that resemble an English muffin that are now widely popular, both in Colombian cuisine and American. Can you talk a little bit about the dough and the fillings?Mariana Velásquez: Yes. So in Colombia arepas are usually only stuffed with cheese, but when we do, we use it as a vessel for butter, for salt, and they accompany other savory foods, uh, arepas are usually in for breakfast. And in the book, I actually give a couple of recipes, one for sweet corn arepas, arepas chocolate, uh, which are my favorite because the corn is very, very sweet. They're yellow and they're delicious. And then I give a recipe using pre cooked masa, which is very quick. And you just add water and form the dough. You can do a little salt, a little oil or a little butter. And then the third option is when you buy the corn, that's been dried and then you cook it and then grind it and form the arepas yourself as well. So different stages, different versions, but arepas are such a common, they're kind of like a unifying factor in Colombia. I was explaining in the book that Colombian cuisine is very, very regional, but arepas is one of those foods that you see across the country. And I really love this poem by a Columbian scholar. And he says, arepas means family, means mom, means Homeland and means history. It means strength. It means perseverance. And that's an excerpt of something he wrote. And I imagine that that's what arepas means in our country. It's all of that.Suzy Chase: Are you familiar with the arepa lady who used to have a cart under the seven train in Jackson Heights?Mariana Velásquez: Yes, Yes, yes. I've read her stories on the papers for years and talk about a Colombiana, a very persevering Colombiana.Suzy Chase: Yes. I wonder what she's doing now. I hope she's doing okay.Mariana Velásquez: I hope so.Suzy Chase: So Colombia is a country with rich biodiversity, as well as cultural diversity. Bogota, where you're from in particular is an epicenter of the diverse food traditions from all over Colombia. What are some of your favorite street foods?Mariana Velásquez: I absolutely love Merengon, which is a meringue like pavlova-ish dessert that you find on, on the roads on the streets and basically the square meringue with cream and strawberries. And it's so simple and so delicious. So, you know, when I go for my hunting for fabric or for flowers in this one neighborhood in Bogota called San Andresito, like little San Andres, they have these roast pork sandwiches that are heavenly, you know, the pork is roasted very slowly and it's a little bit sweet and then they slice it really thin and serve it in these sweet rolls sandwich with kind of like a cucumber relish, but it's delicious. And it always makes me think or fabric hunting in Bogota.Suzy Chase: Over the weekend I made your recipe for smoky lentils with chorizo on page 95.Mariana Velásquez: Yay!Suzy Chase: Lentejas ahumadas con chorizo?Mariana Velásquez: Perfecto!Suzy Chase: What? Really?Mariana Velásquez: Yes!Suzy Chase: So on that recipe, you write lentils tend to be either loved or hated and your husband hates them, which made me laugh.Mariana Velásquez: Yeah, Diego hates them. I have to wait for him to travel, to make lentejas. You know, because it's kind of hard to make, just lentils for yourself. Right. I mean, you kind of have to make a large pot.Suzy Chase: It's a lot..Mariana Velásquez: I also don't want to eat lentils all week so I have to wait for him to be away.Suzy Chase: I'm dying to know why he doesn't like lentils.Mariana Velásquez: He associates them with kind of boring food.Suzy Chase: Mmmm, yeah! So in this recipe I thought the smokiness of the lentils and the saltiness of the chorizo worked so well together.Mariana Velásquez: Oh, thank you. And you know, this was a recipe I really enjoyed putting together because it's that satisfying tastes of the smoke that makes them different and, and really yummy. And they, you know, they're the kind of food where you can invite many people. You can have plenty, it's generous. So I love it.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called "Last Night's Dinner," where I ask you what you had last night for dinner?Mariana Velásquez: Oh, great. So last night we had friends over and I made roasted cod with asparagus and zucchini and some herbs, not very Colombian at all, but then to start, I made a cold soup. I made, I gazpacho with papaya and tomato, which is in the book. And it was a hit, you know, last night was so warm in New York city that it was a great appetizer.Suzy Chase: You collaborated on more than 20 cookbooks, probably most notably with Michelle Obama. But I noticed that you worked on Red, White, and Que by Karen Adler and Judith Fertig, and I used to be Karen Adler's cookbook publicist at her cookbook publishing house called Pig Out Publications in Kansas City and I credit her with my love of cookbooks, and I actually had them on my podcast to chat about that cookbook.Mariana Velásquez: That's amazing. And, you know, as a stylist, when I have worked with different authors to prepare their food, to style their food, for their book project, I mean, I know how intimate and personal it is, and it must be hard to have someone else make your food for images that will remain forever. It's always kind of like getting, getting to see how they put the recipes together, reading their head notes and plating that food to really honor what they envisioned.Suzy Chase: It's a lovely cookbook and Karen Adler, she's a real trailblazer.Mariana Velásquez: Oh, wow.Suzy Chase: Before we wrap up, I'd love to hear a little bit about your aprons and your podcasts.Mariana Velásquez: So our aprons, you know, I designed them because I wanted to wear something in the kitchen that was utilitarian and appropriate, but also something that made me feel put together and well dressed on set. You know, when you're in photo sets, you're with creatives, you're with the agencies, you're with clients. And so even though you're cooking and, and it's all very real cooking, I wanted something to make me feel organized. And so I designed these aprons many years ago and people always ask, is that an apron? Is that a dress? It's so pretty. It's just like a layer. And you know, it's across back apron that has a longer tail. My husband said, Marie, we should make these aprons. We should sell them. They're beautiful. And everybody always asks. So we started the company about seven years ago, it's called Lumanarium. And it's all about luxury for the kitchen. You know, something special that you wear when you're cooking, when you're working on your florals, when you're gardening. And it's a project that I, that is really dear to my heart. I really enjoy doing them.Suzy Chase: They're really pretty and super feminine.Mariana Velásquez: Yeah.Suzy Chase: And so tell me about your podcast?Mariana Velásquez: So our podcast is called Buenlimon Radio and we do it with heritage radio network. It's their first podcast in Spanish. And our idea was to really tell the stories of the backbone of the kitchens in the U.S you know, the cooks, the dishwashers, you know, the arepa lady, people who really do really hard work and don't really have a voice. Yeah. So when we recorded our podcast in the studio, we would have musical guests over and it was really, really fun, but this is a project that Diego and I have been doing for the last five years now. And we're taking a little break now through the book tour and everything this summer, and maybe we'll start over in the fall.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Mariana Velásquez: So, my Instagram is MarianaVelazquezV and lumanarium_ is my apron on Instagram. And through there, you'll find the links to my website, Marianavelasquez.com and our aprons lumanarium.comSuzy Chase: This cookbook teaches us creative challenges can bring unexpected results. Thank you so much Mariana for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Mariana Velásquez: Suzy, thank you so much. It was an honor.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Australia: The CookbookBy Ross Dobson Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authorsRoss Dobson: I'm Ross Dobson and my latest book is out in Australia: The Cookbook.Suzy Chase: In order to understand Australian cuisine I think we need to understand and know about Australian first peoples who have been there for at least 50,000 years, the longest continuous civilization during this time, Aboriginal Australians were creating and inventing dishes that boggle the mind. I'm curious to hear about a few of those dishes. And might I add you noted that many Australians are unaware of these dishes?Ross Dobson: This fascinated me when I started to research the book and look into it more. I think many Australians are not really aware of the contribution that the first peoples made prior to colonization, and they're finding more and more evidence to indicate that the First Peoples weren't just hunters and gatherers, they farmed fish, they grew seeds to make a flatbread of sorts and they certainly were eating a lot of the abundancy food that we have here, unique species, like our own lobster, Moreton Bay bugs and the Barramundi fish and there was a great recipe, which isn't in the book. A friend of mine who's an Aboriginal elder was talking about his tribe made what was like kind of a blood pudding of sorts using all parts of the kangaroo very similar to the blood puddings we see in parts of Europe and his tribe, that was their special dish. There's so many things like this fascinated me and we simply didn't learn about them, but working on the book really opened my eyes. And then we were lucky enough to have Jody Orcher who wrote a short essay in the book extolling the virtues of indigenous ingredients. So it's been a wonderful learning process.Suzy Chase: Yeah. I definitely want to hear about Jody Orcher, but first, can you describe the three main periods of Australian food?Ross Dobson: Writing the recipes for the book in a way was the easy part. I felt like the introduction was a real challenge to try and encapsulate what Australian food was about. And I was playing around with clumsy metaphors and wasn't really sure and I had one of those light bulb moments where I've sat up in bed one night and thought, well, let's history dictate what Australian food is all about and it's a timeline. The first people have been here for tens of thousands of years. So I divided the food of Australia in two, three epochs or periods and the first period is the tens of thousands of years. The first people who've been here, the colonists from Britain came over who mostly are the English military class or Irish convicts. They brought with them their food from 1788 onwards. And I must say a lot of that food for 150 years or so was quite repetitive and blend. That's not to say there aren't diamonds in the rough, there's amazing delicious recipes in there. But then the third period of Australian food comes in the 1950s when Australia opens its doors to immigrants, particularly from Southern Europe, Greece, and Italy, and they bring in coffee, coffee machines, Parmesan, basil, a whole range of ingredients. And the most important one was probably garlic because the Australians like the English loathed garlic, and they rarely cooked with it. And then moving forward a bit more into the 70s. We have a huge influx of mostly political asylum seekers coming to Australia in the early 70s. Mostly Vietnamese bringing their incredible fresh take on food. But I must note, during all this time, the Chinese had been here from the gold rush in the 1800s hundreds, and they were setting up camps, selling food in the gold rush camps and then cooking in the early 1900s. It's estimated that one third of all cooks in Australia were Chinese because this was the only job they could do legally. So we have this amazing rich culture of food that, although there are three periods, we now see a lot more of this overlapping appreciating First People's food. And of course we love the flavors of the Mediterranean Italy, Greece, and also Asian food. Australians are crazy for Asian ingredients.Suzy Chase: The First Peoples, the immigrants to Australia were so instrumental in setting up the food that you have today. Can you describe the hybrid Chinese/Australian cuisine that popped up in the mid 19th century?Ross Dobson: Again, fascinating stuff because the Chinese had been here working very hard, kind of in the background on mining camps, in the gold rush period. And then interesting period, one that we're not particularly proud of it. In 1901 the Australian government implemented the White Australia Policy where it meant only white people could come and live here and then all the Chinese people that have been living here were completely ignored and weren't allowed on property or have jobs. So one of the only jobs that could do was cook and they set up restaurants in, you could almost say literally every Australian town in Australia, from the cities to the Outback towns and here they put aside their own personal tastes like a lot of the Italians and Greeks in the beginning when starting businesses here, they put us on their own personal tastes, that is what they cooked at home and they cooked what they, what made money and what sold to the locals. So we have a lot of land dishes, which is very unusual and unique because most of the Chinese food cooked in Australia was Cantonese and lamb wasn't really big on the menus in that region of China. So we have a dish called Mongolian lamb. I know there's a Mongolian beef in other countries, but Mongolian Lamb has very little to do with Mongolia and a lot more to do with what Australians like to eat. And we have prawn toasts, beautiful prawn cutlets, salt and pepper squid. So the Aussie Chinese ingredient recipes start to use Chinese methods and techniques with the local produce and then in the 50s and 60s, we have a lot of these stable of Chinese are the ingredients like a take on a pork spare rib and we use a different cut of spare rib in Australia, which is very different to America and other places. And then moving into the 80's, when Australians become a little bit more adventurous with their food, we have a salt and pepper squid that is almost on every pub menu in Australia. Now with fish and chips and the hamburger moving further into the eighties, we have even more exciting to like pipis in XO sauce, there's a recipe for that in the book as well. And I felt like I couldn't write a cookbook without indulging that more because there are recipes like ham and chicken roll. Like I've never seen that anywhere else. It's absolutely delicious. It's chicken breasts, fill it with a slice of ham. You roll it up. Then you roll that in spring, roll wrapper and flash fry it and slice it. It's really delicious. So we have this fascinating unique take on Chinese food in Australia. It's really good.Suzy Chase: What are pippis?Ross Dobson: Okay. Pippis, clams. Um, yes, uh, surf clams, tiny little surf clams that, uh, still mostly caught by a traditional method called raking. They're mostly in south Australia on the wild coastline there. I don't know if you're familiar with the technique where you walk in the sand, there's little bubbles and they literally would get a rake and then break with the bubbles, come up and use their fate. And they're not particularly cheap, but the clam in the XO sauce is so delicious and XO is a Chinese sauce and it's called XO because it comes after the Brandy XO brand, which meant something extra special and it came from Hong Kong and the heady days of the eighties, where everything was looked at with opulence and it had lots of seafood in it. And you just need a teaspoon of this in your stir fry.Suzy Chase: You wrote in the book that the industrial revolution was one factor in preventing Australia from developing its own regional cuisines. I found that so interesting.Ross Dobson: So did I, because when I started researching on the book and even prior to that we'd have these discussions, why doesn't Australia have its own regional food? Of course, First People had regional cuisines based on the produce available to them, but certainly for 150 years. And even up until now, most people really started to, uh, come from overseas that weren't convicts. The convict stopped in about 1850. So we had free settlers coming here from that 1850 onwards. And they were educated that were literate they could read and write. And Australian publishing also really took off at this time because Australia is such a big country, people isolated, and they were getting the newspapers. And these were national state newspapers that shared the same news. And lo and behold, they shared the same recipes, which are found fascinating when I started researching serviceably for a cake published in the early 1900s. If it was good enough, it might've been published in a newspaper in say Hobart. And because the print was syndicated, if it was a good recipe, it would be today's equivalent of going viral. So the recipe would go over to Perth or Darwin or Brisbane, and these recipes would be shared. So I think there are two factors in, um, the thing about the industrial revolution. It was communication. And I think we have to think also where we have these countries that have a strong history in regional cuisine. I'm thinking Europe, you might have a village in Italy where someone might put ricotta in their pasta and down the road, it would be heresy to do so because these villages were very isolated often. And I often had their own dialects as well, but in Australia, because we were really populated after the industrial revolution, there was this national communication, if you will. And also production food production comes into play as well as refrigerated food canning of food is very important so ingredients could be shared across the country. So it didn't just limit it to one region. And I hope that explains it a bit further for you, Suzy.Suzy Chase: How did you determine if a recipe was worthy of inclusion in this cookbook?Speaker 2: Well, you know, I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to work on the project. And the first thing I thought was I just have to put my ego aside. I mean, I've had several food businesses where I've certainly cooked a whole bunch of different, I think things that are really interested in tasty, but that didn't belong in the book because they didn't have a place in our history or our culture or our social structure. So I think that there were really important aspects that a recipe had to belong to all of us. It wasn't just something that a friend told me that they cooked, or I thought that was tasty. And I think this was really important to see it as a collective project. And one of the ways of doing this was, um, doing a lot of research, fascinating Australian government initiative, it's called Trove, it's a national library where they are systematically scanning and putting up documents of literally every printed newspaper that in Australia. So I could Google, for example, banana bread and all banana cake and I might find this recipe first published in 1928, for example and then as I looked further, I thought, well, this really is part of us. This is what we eat. And so really it was about the research and its worthiness was based on, do we have a connection with it? And I really wanted people when they look at the book and I felt like I've got this reaction so far where people go, oh my God, I forgot that existed. I'm so glad it's in the book. So that makes me very happy.Suzy Chase: Like their grandmother used to make it and they forgot about it. What do they mean when they said they forgot it existed?Ross Dobson: Well it's like you know, when I first started looking at the book and you know, I was researching and talking to a whole bunch of people that obvious Australian recipes where pavlova Lamington make pie, but then as I delved a bit further, people might ring me a few days later, France and go, my auntie Joan made a cake, it was called ginger fluff. And I said, I've never heard of that. So I then go to the research and look at the history. And lo and behold, there is a whole bunch of recipes for something called ginger fluff. Another really good example is a cake called peach blossom cake. This was really popular from about 1900 to 1950 or 60. And it wasn't until maybe eight years ago. And I'm sure, you know, you're familiar with the cooking competitions and celebrity chef, et cetera, that now are on television. It wasn't until they had a guest chef from an amazing institution called the CWA, which is a Country Women's Association. And they've been making scones and cakes for a hundred years or so. And a woman went on to the show and made a peach blossom cake and it went viral. People were like, where's this been? And they loved it. It's a very easy cake. It's beautiful to look at. There are other recipes like cream buns and finger buns and match sticks. And a finger bun is like a really soft yeasted bun. It's oval shape, not very big. And it's got some currants and some sultanas in there, and it's generally has a really soft pink icing with a sprinkling of desiccated coconut. And when I put that in the book and people were saying, oh my God, we ate that in the seventies and eighties, but then it's had a huge resurgence. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the term hipsters. We do have them here to Suzy, which fascinates me. They've got bakeries popping up all over the city and the hipsters have now discovered the finger bun and they're making it their own. And I actually just the other week was in one of the local newspapers talking about my classic recipe and they had a few young dudes cooking finger buns and re-inventing them, which is fabulous. So we're really holding on to our food history and it's incredible that people have just taken so warmly to these recipes that have reignited an interest in baking as well. It's really lovely.Suzy Chase: Speaking of history, the essay on indigenous food written by Jody Orcher at the beginning of the book sheds light on the fascinating and ancient culinary techniques that went largely ignored for years and years. Can you talk a little bit about Jody and her tips for demonstrating respect for the cultural integrity of Australian Aboriginal people?Ross Dobson: I first started working on the book. We thought it was imperative to engage an Aboriginal Australian, to write and contribute to the book Jody Orcher is fascinating and genuine and generous, and she sheds light and a knowledge on, on the ingredients is so worthy. Uh, and I must say my scope of knowledge of the First Peoples food. I would say like many of my generation was really went on ignored or, you know, I think it went to go a bit deeper into the whole psyche of when Australia was colonized the British assume that, you know, it had never been colonized before and it was theirs. So I was very much part of that generation and my grandparents, my parents and grandparents weren't enlightened. And I think it's time to open our eyes. And certainly Jody helps us do that with a beautiful essay and a glossary of some of the fascinating ingredients, uh, that showcase the wonderful cuisine of indigenous indigenous people.Suzy Chase: Bushfoods were often considered to be inferior by colonists. Is that changing? Are they making a comeback and restaurants are the hipsters onto it?Ross Dobson: I would say on the most part of getting much more adventurous about Aboriginal indigenous ingredients and many of these now can be bought online because a lot of, a lot of the ingredients like the lemon myrtle and the peppers can be bought because they dry very well. And a few people from overseas have asked me if they can get the ingredients. And I certainly know there's a lot of websites where you can get them and have them shipped to you. But the other thing too, um, with the book was, you know, I think when we think of Australian Aboriginal food, um, in terms of protein, we automatically go straight to the kangaroo, which is very high in protein and you can buy that in the supermarket, but the other meats still very much a niche. It's very difficult to get them. But in looking at this, I realized that we often overlook the native seafood that we eat. Muscles, I mentioned Balmain bugs before Moreton Bay bugs and pippis of course, clams and puppis. And we have our lobsters here, which aren't really lobsters or they're called a spiny lobster. They don't have the claw on the front. They just got a spine spiny thing. And we have yabbies, I think he's a really delicious, they're a freshwater crayfish. All these ingredients are available at the fish market and even the supermarket. And, um, there's a bit of a stereotype that Aussies eat emu koala and kangaroo. And you know, that simply isn't the case. And I hope this book something to throw off the shackles of those stereotypes.Suzy Chase: I hope so too, because I was on an interview on the BBC last week and he said, what's your next cookbook coming up? And I said, I'm interviewing Ross Dobson, who has Australia the cookbook. And he's like, are you going to talk about kangaroo? And I said, oh my God, Maybe, maybe not.Ross Dobson: Well you can talk about it because it makes sense. Like there's a recipe in the book for a Thai kangaroo salad which makes sense because you know, the whole thing about usually use a lean cut of beef in the salad and kangaroo makes perfect sense. So I think it's fun to talk about these things, but as you've looked at the book Suzy and other people, I've really heard, they've gone, oh my God, there's such a wide range of interesting ingredients from all over the place that have come together to make our food truly unique.Suzy Chase: I'm curious to hear about the section at the end of the cookbook on guest chefs.Ross Dobson: At the end of the book, we have these wonderful, um, additions from some incredibly talented, enthusiastic chefs that have contributed recipes that you would say people at the other end of the cooking spectrum with a high degree of knowledge and skill would attempt at home. But what it, what they're there to do is to showcase, I think the talent of chefs in Australia and also their talent in using local and indigenous ingredients and really showcasing Australian food on the world stage, you know, Mark Olive has got this great recipe for it's simple, it's a real fusion. Mark is indigenous Australian and he's using chicken thigh with Spanish Sherry and a native pepper. So that's a really good example of kind of, if you will, high-end Aussie cuisine.Suzy Chase: The other day I made Damper, which is apparently super trendy these days, it's on page 242. Can you describe this?Ross Dobson: That probably came from the influence of the Irish convicts, where soda bread had always been, you know, I loved simple throw together bread. And then in Australia we have a lot of itinerant workers, jackaroos going from farm to farm finding work and they'd have a backpack or a swag bag and carried few things as they could, and they'd have to make food and they would have Billy tea which was a can over a fire. They'd sweeten it with golden syrup, which is also called cockies joy causes swagmen also known as cockies. So it was their sweetener, and this was also used on damper, which was pretty much just two or three ingredients self rising flour, baking powder and some water, or maybe some milk, so it was very, very simple and it too would be cooked in a Dutch oven and just put on the fire with a lid on it. It's lovely, fresh. It's a bread that's meant to be eaten fresh. You know, it's not a yeasted, so it doesn't toast that well the next day, but it's delicious, fresh, and I make it in the cafe and serve it with soups. It's really yummy.Suzy Chase: I read in the book that Aboriginal Australians make a similar style from seeds. Have you ever tried that?Ross Dobson: No, I haven't. And this all came about about three years ago, Bruce Pascoe wrote a book called Dark Emu starting to explore the notion that, and the evidence is there to support it that aboriginals were making a flatbread. I haven't tried it. I would love to. So, um, maybe that could be my project. Try and find a shop that supplies the seeds or the flour and make a flatbread with it. And I'll let you know how it goes if I do, but I'm very keen to do that.Suzy Chase: Tomorrow I'm making a classic Lamington, which I had never heard of. Um, it's on page 310. Can you describe this and talk a little bit about how it got its name?Speaker 2: There is a story that there was a Lord Lamington from England, like a lot of early colonists and he was in Brisbane and the story goes, he had some chefs that had made a cake they dropped the cake by accident into a bowl of chocolate icing and they didn't want to waste it. So they then took the bits of cake out and rolled them in coconut. Not sure if this is true, but it's such a unique cake it could probably only be invented by accident. So there's so many different recipes for a Lamington. I found that, and it's a good tip for you Suzy, If you make the sponge a day before this can just cover it and let it sit overnight, it's much better to have a Lamington that is not fresh. And you dip it into chocolate icing and rolling in coconut. Uh, so good. And I've been making them here at my cafe mini versions. So they're only about an inch square and I'll tell you what, they're delicious as well, but they're a bit fiddly to make. So if you starting it for the first time, I'd probably do the bigger ones.Suzy Chase: So Australians have a way with words like brekkie breakfast, you celebrate chrissy, you shorten more words than any other English speakers. What are your go-to words?Ross Dobson: Well, um, I liked occasionally I'd have a beer and we drink it out of a glass here called a schooner. So I call it a schooey. It sounds absolutely ridiculous doesn't it?Suzy Chase: But they know what you're talking about?Ross Dobson: People would, I would say I have two schooeys of New is brand of beer to be exact, it sounds like another language, but we're funny even you know, the unique Australian coffee flat white people would call it a flatty. It's a very old language. Australians are known for shortening more words, but then if it's too short, that will make, make it longer. It doesn't make any sense. Please. Don't ask me to explain it.Suzy Chase: We're going to move on to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what had last night for dinner.Ross Dobson: I very discovered the American version of this book America: The Cookbook and I've been making some great chilies, like as in you call them chili, you know, chili con carne and things like that. But last night I made beef stroganoff and that's what I had for dinner. It's not Australian. I'm sorry to disappoint.Suzy Chase: No I love that though but it's cold where you are, right?Ross Dobson: Yes, it is. And I would never eat that stuff. It's just too hot here. And it's getting down to like three or four degrees at night, which isn't cold by your standards. But I mean, making in America: The Cookbook there's two versions of stroganoff there's the American stroganoff, which uses ground beef. Personally. I thought this sounded a bit odd, the flavors and textures, but I then went for the other one in the book, which uses a Chuck steak or blade steak. And you slow cook that. And so that we thought had noodles, oh my God, it it's very good. And let's face it. Anything with sour cream. I mean,Suzy Chase: You'll have to make that a fad in Australia and you can call it strogey it's my recipe for strogey.Ross Dobson: It'll confuse it even more if we call it stroggy. Isn't that terrible it turns into something very unappetizing.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Ross Dobson: Instagram- @RossDobsonFood and I also have a great little cafe Cafe Royce, R O Y C E. And you see so many lovely food pics and mood picks of the cafe. And if you go to my Ross Dobson food Insta when I was working on the book three years ago and testing, I took so many food pictures. I'm very pleased that I did because it was a good memory thing and the food does look really good, so I'm very pleased with that. So do check it out.Suzy Chase: It is Aboriginal lore to only take what you need and leave some for others words. We should all be living by. Thank you, Ross for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Ross Dobson: It's been a pleasure, thank you.Outro: Follow @CookerybytheBook on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Cookery by the Book Unplugged Live with Megan Day

Legendary Dinners: From Grace Kelly to Jackson PollockBy Anne Petersen Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authorsAnne Petersen: I'm Anne Petersen and I'm the author of the book, Legendary Dinners from Grace Kelly to Jackson Pollock.Suzy Chase: You are the woman behind Salon a spectacular German lifestyle and design magazine that I definitely want to talk with you about a little later, but for now it's about Legendary Dinners. For me, a great dinner party is a break from the ordinary and a chance to connect with what really matters connection and inspiration. Do you think dinners are going to be different post pandemic? Like will they be more grand or maybe smaller and more intimate?Anne Petersen: I think post-pandemic parties will definitely be more intensive and I'm sure that we will all remember how easy it is to have people over, to meet, to share a table and have a good evening. And as you said, connection and inspiration, I think we are all interested in other humans. We are social beings and I think there's no substitute to real social context.Suzy Chase: What makes a great dinner party?Anne Petersen: What makes a great dinner party? I think everything is important. Like food location, decorations, fashion, the music and I think the party is always a big exaggeration, it's an exception, it's a special moment and it is something that follows very specific rules. Like it is allowed to be overdressed. It is allowed to be drunken. It is allowed to address the stranger. It is allowed to make a speech. It is allowed to take your shoes off and dance on the table because it's a party. And we celebrate who we are. HumansSuzy Chase: I'd love to hear about the research process for these 20 menus and how they made the cut.Anne Petersen: The book brings together a number of stories that we have all printed already in Salon. And we tried to choose iconic events, parties that became historic like the wedding of Grace Kelly or Prince Rainier of Monaco, which is still an inspiration for brides all over the world today, or Truman Capote's spectacular black and white ball also copied thousands of times or the most luxurious state dinner ever, the feast that Richard Nixon gave to the astronauts after the moon landing, Apollo 11. So I think what we did in the book is we really collected from Coco Chanel to Claude Monet or Karen Blixen to Thomas Mann, even Goethe's 66th birthday or Napoleon's wedding. So a big, a wide variety of different dinners and events. We tell the stories and we cooked all the recipes again. And of course it's easier if you have the old menu card or the invitation, but some of the recipes we did adjust interpretations because for example, of Coco Chanel at the Côte d'Azur, we had no recipe, but you get hints in different books about her. And we did not cook everything historically correct, but we found a modern version for today. Most of the time.Suzy Chase: I like that you combined both archival images with contemporary photography of the food, because so often with books like this you have to look at old grainy photos of the dishes that they served.Anne Petersen: Yes. I think that's the fun of the book. And, and, and this is why it's, it stands also for the whole magazine Salon and all its contributors for the whole team, because it is chefs on the, on the one hand side, put it the recipes, stylist, the very excellent authors, the photographers. I think the book has so many different levels, the recipes, the stories, the food, the table tops, the porcelain and the flowers and I think you read about an event and you dive really into it with all the details and also all the gossip of the time, which is also very nice. I think like with Truman Capote's black and white ball and all the hysteria in New York who was invited and who was not. Yeah, I think it's a coffee table book and eye candy, but also an historical book and definitely a very good cookbook with reliable, good recipes.Suzy Chase: With modern dinner parties we could just text people or ask them to join us, but there's something special about receiving a dinner party invitation. In the book you give examples of wildly creative invitations. Do you have a favorite invitation?Anne Petersen: Yes. I really liked the Bauhaus invitations because they were a university for graphic design and art in the twenties. And in general I love paper invitations and I think that the dinner party is really an occasion where you can still send paper invitations. I think it's more uncommon to write long letters or even postcards from holidays, but I think dinner invitation is something different. And if it's a really beautiful one, I think it's nice because people can hang them up and pin them on their board. And then they know maybe in two weeks time, three weeks time, they will attend this party. I think that's, that's very nice.Suzy Chase: You just brought up the Bauhaus parties. They were so creative and wild and it looked like a ton of fun. And do you have a photo of their sandwiches and it very much fits with the geometric art style. Every recipe in the book is something on whole wheat bread. Can you talk a little bit about that?Anne Petersen: Yeah. I think this whole wheat bread, that is a typical German thing, maybe also from Denmark, but that you just put a lot of different things like carrots and walnuts, pesto, marinades with beans on bread in this case. Yeah, well, they, they cut it in very geometric forms and this is also just the fun they make. They also bake this gingerbread figures. There was an artist she was called Gunta Stölzl and she founded that those gingerbread figures, the Bauhaus was famous for it. You can still find these real figures in the Bauhaus archive in Berlin and I think it's a nice inspiration to create all kinds of crazy elephants and whatever you can imagine, not only for Christmas and decorate them also wildly.Speaker 3: Marie-Hélène de Rothschild believed those who are in small spirit who are mean narrow-minded or timid should leave entertaining with others. And I agree. I'd love for you to chat a bit about her invitations and her elaborate parties.Anne Petersen: Yeah. I think she was really legendary and especially her surrealist ball in 1972. So every detail was planned exactly. For example, also for this costume party at her castle was decorated in Alice, in Wonderland. So 150 guests were invited, press was not allowed and everybody had to come in costumes. The special thing about it that you wore evening dresses, but your head had to be costume. So it was just the heads. So Audrey Hepburn put a birdcage on her head. And the only one who came without a mask was Salvador Dali because he said his face was disgusting enough.Suzy Chase: I mean, when I think about her, I think they had more money than they knew what to do with.Anne Petersen: I think so too. Yeah. If I think about this costume ball, I sometimes think about the FIT costume ball in New York but also, uh, let's say about these I think very ridiculous costumes that for example, Heidi Klum is wearing for Halloween. You know what I mean? Now you can buy everything at Plastic Fantastic. You know, and that was another time, like she had a real head of a gilded deer head with diamond tears. They really had to make an effort like Audrey Hepburn with the bird cage on her head. It's different. And of course I think she was able to throw a lot of money out of the window. Definitely the big windows of her big castle but I think, yeah, I think it was a lot of fun. Like the guests arrived at the party. There were, on both sides of the stairs and on their way to the ballroom the whole service people and the stuff that were dressed as cats and they were lying there and sleeping and just moving around. It had a lot of humor. What's interesting about Madame de Rothschild is also, she had stage fright before each of her parties. And also, at this time at the surrealist ball, she just started to relax a little bit when most of the guests were gone or as she put it, the guests were reduced like a good sauce.Suzy Chase: So Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh who just passed away at the age of 99 was a Greek, Danish, German, Prince who married Princess Elizabeth. Now Queen November 20th, 1947. I was interested to see that the menu was in French and on the menu was Filet de Sole Mountbatten. I thought it was curious that they added Phillip's last name onto the name of the dish. Do you know why they did that?Anne Petersen: That was to welcome him in, into the family because that was a sign of recognition and acceptance for Phillip. I mean, he was a very handsome guy, a lot of aristocratic titles, but no money, five years older than her. And I don't think that everybody was so thrilled about this marriage in the beginning, especially in the Royal family. This wedding is also interesting because it was two years after the war. They were not sure if it was appropriate to have this big wedding. And that's also why the menu was quite simple, just three dishes, fish, poultry, and then ice cream. And it was in French. But why? Well, because French is the preferred language of gourmets and that even at Buckingham Palace.Suzy Chase: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner live the Bohemian life in my neighborhood in Greenwich village, it was the hub of the city's artist colony. And that's one of the reasons why we live in this neighborhood today. It's retained much of its already residents and artistic feel. So they left Manhattan for a big place in the Hamptons where they could host dinner parties for the movers and shakers of the New York City art scene. His art was so complicated and abstract, but I found it interesting that they entertained with simple dishes like borscht and roast chicken stuffed with herbs. Can you talk a little bit about that?Anne Petersen: Yeah. I think both loved good, simple food, but there were no good cooks and they apartment in Manhattan even had no kitchen. And when they moved to the countryside in 1945, they bought the house and build the kitchen and started to host dinner also to not lose the contact to the Manhattan bohemian society. And Krasner learned to cook took charge of the baking. And I think together they were great hosts and yeah, borscht, it seems to be something that they have cooked very often because Krasner she's a child of Russian Jewish immigrants.Suzy Chase: Coco Chanel, whom I would assume would host elaborate high style dinner parties was very toned down, dress was informal as were the meals. Lunch was served buffet style with food service and antique silver dishes from England on a long table at the end of the dining room, like salad nicoise with tuna steaks and fried chicken with asparagus artichokes and fava beans and crispy fans of grapefruit with pine nuts, the juxtaposition of fancy fashion and informal meals intrigues me.Anne Petersen: I think the interesting thing about Coco Chanel is actually at which state of her life she was when we did this menu because she just turned 40 years and she met the Duke of Westminster. And the Duke of Westminster was at that time, the richest man of Great Britain and she met him on his big sailing ship. And so in this period of her life, she bought the piece of land at the Côte d'Azur and had the La Pausa built on it. And this became a swanky relaxed retreat for herself and all her friends. And for her love the Duke of Westminster, there was not a strict menu guests themselves from a large poofy eating as much as they wanted or as little, I think, I guess Coco Chanel probably did not eat a lot. And that was also something the buffet style for her was also a possibility to be not forced to eat so much because you cannot see how much she would eat.Suzy Chase: That's interesting. Huh?Anne Petersen: That's for example, one of the menus that we had no exact menu card for that. And we wanted to do a dinner with Coco Chanel and contacted the Chanel archive in Paris. And we also thought about maybe do something was the Ritz in Paris. What we didn't do, because that is the period where she was really collaborating with the Nazis. And it was also the time when in Paris, a lot of people, they were really starving. And I think in the Ritz, they were still partying with champagne and had everything. So that is all, it's not the nice part of Coco Chanel. So this is a little earlier.Suzy Chase: You're the editor in chief of Salon, a beautiful lifestyle magazine. And I collect vintage interior design coffee table books, and must have over 50 in my small collection here in my small New York city apartment. I was talking to India Hicks on this podcast about her brother, Ashley, who you mentioned on your Instagram, I think yesterday or the day before. Yeah, they're related to Prince Philip. So he got me through the pandemic, locked down with his wonderful Instagram Lives of him flipping through interior design books, discussing the background and history of interiors. What are some interior design styles or interior designers that influence you?Anne Petersen: I also love Beata Heuman. I don't know if you know her. She just released the book Every Room Should Sing. And in the last issue we did a big story with François Halard who is a very famous European, interior photographer. And I think another favorite book that I recently bought is The Life of Others by Simon Watson. It's also an interior photographer that I really like.Suzy Chase: What is your favorite style of interior design?Anne Petersen: Very eclectic. So it's a mix of old and new and very colorful, um, yeah. To use a lot of color to use even wallpaper. And I think it's important to have some old furniture because it gives the room a soul and makes it warmer. It gives more atmosphere. Yeah. I think that that's my style.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Anne Petersen: Yeah. I had asparagus with butter sauce and caramelized breadcrumbs and chopped eggs. And that altogether was potatoes and ham, which is typical German.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media on Instagram?Anne Petersen: You will find Salon @Salon_Magazin. And you'll find myself at @Anne_Petersen.Suzy Chase: I'm thrilled to celebrate the return of the dinner party with this book. Thank you so much. And for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast!Anne Petersen: Thank you Suzy. For having me. It was great fun.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Cookery by the Book Unplugged Live with Trent Pheifer

To Asia, With Love: Everyday Recipes and Stories from the HeartBy Hetty McKinnon Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Hetty McKinnon: Hi everyone. I'm Hetty McKinnon and my latest cookbook is called To Asia, With Love.Suzy Chase : There's something that sets your cookbooks apart from the rest. You have this lovely way of connecting beautiful, doable recipes with the photography and a feeling of comfort. And homeyness to me, your, one of the cool Brooklyn moms along with Jessie Sheehan, for those of us who adore your cookbooks, I think we feel like we know you, your family and your beautiful kitchen through the photography in your cookbooks and with, To Asia, With Love you imagined a book that not only conveyed nostalgia, but also captured a strong sense of home. So you took all the photos in the cookbook?Hetty McKinnon: I did, I did, and all the photos were taken on film, which has probably a departure from every cookbook on the cookbook shelf right now. But as soon as I had the idea for the book, the photography, it was a no brainer. You know, I knew I wanted to shoot it on film. I knew I wanted to give it that really irrefutable sense of home and warmth. And to be quite honest, rawness, I'm not a professional photographer, I'm not selling myself as a professional photographer, but I think I have particularly with all my books, but particularly with this book, I have such a connection with the recipes and the photos and the book is part of the storytelling. And I think over the years, I've become more. I've wanted, I've had more at stake in terms of how the photos look. I felt that as the books have progressed, so with this one, I just thought to myself, I want to shoot it myself. And I want to shoot it on a film, because you know, a lot of professional photographers say to me, when they shoot a book like this, they're trying to make their digital photos look like film. So a part of me was like, I'm just going to shoot in on film and they're largely unedited. And I think it just lends just a beautiful raw, honest portrayal of every dish. And it's just something so special, you know, film really invites you into the frame. It's not perfect. And that's probably why it's not used very much in food photography is that you don't get the details that you get in a digital photography. Um, you can't sharpen up edges in that same way. So there's a lot of layers in, in one photo, the secondary reason. I don't know if it is the secondary reason, but it's one of the main reasons why I wanted to use film was because, um, it was like this kind of indirect nod to my Father who doesn't really figure a lot in this story because it's really a book about my Mum and my relationship with my mum, but my Dad was an amateur photographer and he always had cameras lying around the house and he developed all his photos in a makeshift dark room in our laundry. And I remember admiring his photos so much as a kid. Like, I didn't know anything about photography, you know, as a young child, you know, when I was under 10, but I would look at his photos and just think he was a master. And I always took that away with me. You know the way he captured images. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the other part of why I felt like I needed to do this, that part of the book for myself in this particular book.Suzy Chase : I love that so much. And I love when the photo kind of matches up with the recipe, you know what I mean? Like you have super homey and comforting recipes and then you look at the photo and it depicts kind of what the feeling is surrounding this recipe.Hetty McKinnon: Yeah. I mean, I think that it's also because it's not styled, you know, there was no stylist on this book and it was just me. I would cook the meal and take a photo. And I think as I explained, I think it's the very first page of the book that, you know, everything in the photos is, is my dining table is my flatware, my plates, my children in there, my children aren't in this book very much actually. But if they are, or their hands are in it, it's them in the actual act of eating, not in a posed, active eating, if you know what I mean. And, and that's, that's the difference, you know? So everything you see is real, you know, you, I don't know if that happens that much in, in cook books anymore, where there is no styling, no prop, no people sitting around acting as hand models. They're just, it's just my family really. So yeah,Suzy Chase : It's very inviting for home cooks. I think. I'm very intimidated by like the perfection of the cookbook. And then I wonder if they put more into how it looked then the recipe.Hetty McKinnon: Absolutely. Yes. It's a different process. You know, I think when there's a styling involved, your making the dish, according to how you think it's gonna look the best on camera on film or on digital photography. But I think the difference with my dishes is that they were made according to the recipe. And that is how they actually will look if you cook it at home because, you know, I don't see myself as any different to anyone else that is picking up my book to cook dinner for their families every night. You know, I am a home cook, I don't have any professional training. So the things that I'm cooking, other things that I am able to achieve at home in my own home kitchen for my family. So I think that that's, you know, you talked about kind of, you don't find it intimidating and that was a really important part of not only this book, but every book and every recipe I write is that, that element that anyone can do it. It's not, it's not about technique. It's not about hours slaving over a dish. Um, it's just about good, wholesome food that you can put on the table to nourish your family every night.Suzy Chase : So To Asia. With Love is your homecoming a return to the flavors of your childhood. Throughout the house there was always evidence of your next meal or food for the future. Can you talk a little bit about that?Hetty McKinnon: Yea, so I grew up in a very traditional Chinese household in Sydney, Australia. My parents had immigrated in the late my Dad in the late fifties, my Mum in the early sixties and they married in Australia and they were essentially a very Chinese family and so I'm the third child and I grew up kind of caught between these two cultures. My Mum having just arrived in Australia, straight from China and you know she'd got married straight away and had children straight away. Her life was very much centered within the home. And almost every memory of my Mum when, from when I was younger is of her cooking is of her in the kitchen. She started every day with a big Asian breakfast, the savory meal, whether that was fried rice or noodles or, jook, conjee or macaroni soup. There was always something brewing from the very start of every day. And it didn't really stop. You know, everything that she did was somehow focused upon the meal. She was cooking or the next meal, you know, like she would have and greens sitting in the colander, she would have meat defrosting in the sink. She would have some sort of broth going on on his stove top. There was just always food and endless parade of food in our house. As a kid, as a Chinese kid who grew up, grew up in a Western world, I'm like thinking, why doesn't she work wise? And she out, like, why isn't she at school helping, helping out at school? Like all the other Moms, there was definitely judgments I had about things that I thought were her choices, but a lot of these things weren't her choices, you know, like she didn't have the opportunities and so being this young mother and wife, living in the suburbs of Sydney in a country where she had not grown up, she didn't speak the language cooking was really probably her survival in many ways. And the way she kept her traditions alive, the way she stayed connected to her homeland almost desperately, you know, sometimes I think of it now and I think it was almost desperate the way she cooked, um, because she was really trying to hang on to something. And that's something that, that's a story that you'll hear a lot from immigrants. You know, when you're in a foreign place, food is the way you stay connected to the life that you left behind. You know, the story of immigrants is, is a complex one and being somewhat of an immigrant myself. Now, my story is very different in every way to my parents immigrant story. But, you know, immigrants are very, um, indebted to the host country, the country that they moved to. And I think my mum, my parents definitely had that indebtedness, but there's always that sadness to the life they left behind. And I think food was really my mom's way of really staying connected.Suzy Chase : What does she think about this cookbook?Hetty McKinnon: It's kind of hard to say to be completely honest, because she doesn't say that much about my professional work. My Mom's been with me kind of my whole journey and food. She used to cook for me with me actually, when I had my salad business in Sydney, she influenced actually a lot of my recipes in both flavor and ingredients, but she was in my home at the time as my youngest son's babysitter, you know, she would come over and kind of pretend she was looking after him, but really just always find herself in the kitchen in terms of like what she really thinks of this book. She hasn't really said, you know, she makes comments about pictures and recipes and the things I included, but she really hasn't said that much about this book. And that might seem odd to a lot of people, but it's not odd to me. I mean, it's a very Asian Mom trait not to issue direct praise to their children. The, a lot of the pride is internalized. And I'm hoping that's that it's there, but honestly, she's really, she's said very little about this book, even though she knows that it's a pretty much a hundred percent inspired by her. It's actually what I expected.Suzy Chase : You have a dumpling for every season in To Asia, With Love summer is coming up. What's your favorite dumpling ?Hetty McKinnon: For summer I'm excited about tomatoes. And in the book, as you mentioned, there is, I was very, I'm very, very excited about this as it dumplings by the seasons. And it's basically several dumplings for every season working with, you know, things that you might pick up from the farmer's market or what you'd get from your local grocery grocery place. There's a tomato and egg dumpling in the book, which is basically a riff on these very classic Chinese dish called tomato and eggs. There are several versions of it in the book, but tomato and eggs is basically a home-style tomato stew that is mixed with scrambled eggs and it's kind of on this kind of sweet side, sweet and salty side, and I kind of made it into a dumpling filling. And so it's one of the really exciting things for me in this book. And I think from early reactions, it's one of the things that readers have really loved is the fact that it's showing that dumplings can be made with lots of things and not just say a straight pork filling with some vegetables or just, or not even with Asian ingredients. I was really excited to show that because that's how I eat dumplings at home. Like I don't just make Asian style feelings. I don't just use Shiitake mushrooms and tofu and water chestnuts and Napa cabbage. I use lots of things that I just eat normally, and I can fashion those into a dumpling filling. So it's one of the sections of the book I'm really excited about because it just shows people the possibilities.Suzy Chase : So here's another thing that I've never heard of noodles on a sheet pan. I mean, that just opens up a whole new world for me.Hetty McKinnon: You know, one of the characteristics that I love most about my Mom's Chow Mein is the textures. There is crispy bits cause she pan fries at the bottom and then she kind of leaves the middle bits off. And then she has a sauce that goes over the top. But I love a sheet pan dinner, you know, which working Mum doesn't love a sheet pan. You let someone else do the work for you in this case, the oven. So I think I just kind of threw everything onto a pan and gave it a go and I was really impressed by what came out. I was like, wow, like on a high temperature. And I, I love a high temperature bake. You're getting these crispy bits that feel like you've had to work for it, but you haven't done anything. It's been such a popular recipe because who doesn't want that complexity in, in texture and flavor without really doing much at all. And the other wonderful thing about that particular dish is that you can use virtually any vegetable. Like I think in my recipe I use like broccoli, peppers and carrots, asparagus, baby corn from a can I, I love baby corn from a can, but you could really just use any vegetable. You have languishing in your vegetable drawer. It's a great fridge clean out dish.Suzy Chase : You know what you taught me, how to do? You taught me how to cook with lettuce.Hetty McKinnon: It's so good. I mean, I think that recipe was in Family, right? The rice lettuce in Chinese culture, we don't eat a lot of raw food, which is ironic since I make salads, but growing up, you know, like there's this belief that raw foods make your body cold. And so, you know, it's not seen as like that healthy for your body, cause it makes it harder to digest and so we didn't really eat any raw foods going up. So lettuce was always cooked. So when I saw people eating it raw, I was like, what you eat lettuce raw?. And you put in a sandwich? Like that's pretty interesting. Lettuce just like any other leaf leafy vegetable. Right. And particularly, and I'm talking particularly of iceberg lettuce, which is much maligned for some reason, but you know, when it's cooked, it's so good. Right?Suzy Chase : I love iceberg lettuce. To me, it's still the best lettuce The other night, I made your Perfect Jammy Soy Eggs. So I guess the key to soy eggs is the five spice powder, which I have never used in my soy eggs.Hetty McKinnon: I mean, it might seem odd to have the Perfect Jammy Egg recipe in this book, but I grew up with a lot of eggs. You know, my eggs are like a big part of a Chinese diet or my, my particular Chinese diet my mom had a really strong belief in eggs as brain food, you know, before every exam, she made me an egg sandwich, but I've always cooked eggs, really haphazardly. Like I don't pay attention. I don't look at what I'm doing. Like when I boil an egg, I just throw it in the water. Like I tend to do that sometimes. So,I basically worked it out what I needed to do. And it was so exciting. It was life changing, you know, to know how to boil an egg to the way you want it. And I was so excited. I put it in the book and I think it's been so popular. So many people have reached out and said, Oh my God, I can't believe I finally know how to make a jammy egg. And this is like such a joy because I was like, wow see, I'm not alone in my little kitchen disasters and journey. It does pay to share even what you think is such a basic skill. And none of us don't have those basic skills. So I'm really excited that everyone is making perfect jammy eggs now. And in the book also got, you know, three ways to marinate them to add a bit of flavor and color. And there's also some beet eggs in there. I mean, so beautiful, like the beautiful, huge pink and that beet egg, the longer you leave it, the further in the pink moves towards the yolk. So I've left it so long that the yolk has almost turned pink. It's really cool actually, to try. And then the third egg is amazing a tea marbled egg. So you're basically making a tea broth and your kind of cracking the eggs so it's going to create a marbled effect on the egg whites, and you're kind of cooking it in there and soaking it in there. And it just gives off this beautiful kind of smoky earthy flavor.Suzy Chase : The US Senate passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act on Thursday, aimed at addressing the recent spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans across the US amid the ongoing pandemic. There has been a dramatic surge of violence and hate crimes targeting Asians. And I wanted to check in with you and ask how you're doing and what I can do to be an ally.Hetty McKinnon: Thank you for asking Suzy. It's been a really, it's, it's been a really complex thing to unpack. You know, it's one thing to be called names, which most of us have experienced our entire entire lives. It's one thing to think about the, the bigotry and hatred and biases that you're against you, just because of the way you look, but to actually, um, to think that people are dying because of the way we look, it's been a lot. And so, and, and, you know, I might add black people have experienced this their entire lives and continue to, and I've had to ask myself, you know, a lot of questions I've had to really confront the injustices that I'm not, I'm no longer willing to accept. I, and a lot of people who look like me and a lot of POC's, we we've turned a blind eye to a lot of the latent racism and the casual racism over the years, growing up, ever since I was a kid, you know, like being called names, being called derogatory names, made spun off people who have asked me about what my name means like Hatty like it's not because it's unusual telling me that's not really my name it's gotta be short for something, all of these things, all like they're all released in the fact that I look the way I look and it's been confronting to have to think about, you know, 40 plus years of being treated this way. And now I've had to confront what I'm no longer willing to accept, and that's not okay for myself, but it's predominantly for my children. My children are biracial. So it's been an interesting conversation with them because, you know, they have a different experience to me and they are very close to their Asian heritage, probably closer to Asian heritage, but then, you know, they live in a Western world and they're white adjacent. And that's another thing that I have to kind of, you know, unpack and try to understand, but in terms of, you know, how people can help, how people can be allies, I think people have to really stop and ask questions, you know? So I really think that there's so much going on and so many layers to this story, but not only from this tragic horrendous incident, um, in Atlanta, but just the every day stuff that we have to deal with. And you know, in food, when you just look at one industry, the one that we're in food, you know, you, you see this respect towards cultural recipes and I don't believe that that people can't cook food from other cultures. I think that you are welcome. We are all welcome to food from other cultures, as long as there is respect, as long as there is, um, you are doing everything you can to respect where the food has come from and the people that's come from and the stories behind the food. And I just don't see that happening. And I'm going to be really honest here. I just see a real pillaging of our cultures, food in the food media, not just in press, but in the books that are being published by publishers is heartbreaking. If there are sliding scales of dishes, you know, but there are some dishes that, you know, that only kids who grew up in a really specific type of Chinese household because they are so specific, they're specific to a region. And when you see people taking that recipe and just, just taking of stripping it of its value and its history, and its heritage, it's really heartbreaking. And like, these are not violent crimes against Asian people, but it's stealing from our culture. You know? And I just, I think that people can be allies by asking more questions by questioning themselves. I ask myself questions all the time about it, authentic to who I am. Am I honoring where this comes from? All of these questions that I ask myself, when I'm writing a recipe or writing a book or writing an article, everybody needs to ask those questions. I've been privileged enough to have grown up with a mother who gave me this rich culture and that I'm trying to pass that onto my own children. And I don't even feel like it's, it's mine. I'm just interpreting it. And I just feel like there's just not enough of that in the food media right now. So I don't really think I answered your question, Suzy.Suzy Chase : I just wanted you to know that I honor you and I honor your work. And the reason I reached out to you to have this cookbook on was because I wanted to elevate your story.Hetty McKinnon: Yeah. And I think that generally the conversations I've been having, there's been really thoughtful conversations about these topics. And, you know, like some topics are harder to talk about than others. Obviously I try to force myself to share something and it's not always the most coherent answer you're going to get because it's laced in so much emotion and it's laced in so much of, you know, a lifetime of feeling like you don't really belong. And so, you know, I don't think you could ask me this question on two different days and you'd probably get two very different answers, but, um, it's really hard to unpack these, these issues that you carry around with you, but people have been really interested in it. And there's a researcher responsibility in releasing a book called to Asia with love during this time of stop Asian hate during this time of hate crimes. This book is written as a love letter to not any specific place, but to a culture which has raised me and sustained me. And that I owe so much to, you know, it's, it is hard to talk about sometimes, but there's a, there's a comma in, you know, To Asia, With Love and it's because it was written as a love letter to, to this culture, to not to one place where people have said to me, Oh, you know, Asia is not a monolith. And it's like, to me, it's not, it's not even a place. It's it's culture, it's in my blood. It's um, you know, it's my DNA.Suzy Chase : So now I'll ask a happier question.Hetty McKinnon: That wasn't not a happy question.Suzy Chase : Yeah it was heavy. Now to my segment called Last Night's dinner,It's not that heavy, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Hetty McKinnon: It was a very late night. My boys were playing baseball so we came home and I made pizzas at nine o'clock.Suzy Chase : Oh my gosh. That's so late. What kind of pizzas?Hetty McKinnon: So I have this favorite pizza. I use dough from my local Italian deli so I didn't make the dough. But my favorite pizza is potato pizza. Like a pizza with thinly sliced potatoes is something I had when I was six or seven years old. But my sister is about seven years older than me so she went and she was like, she was about, she was a teenager. She must've been about 13. And she went to a party to, at her friend's house who was Italian and she took me along with her. It was very weird. And the Grandmother of course, was the only person that spoke to me. And so I sat in the kitchen with my sister's friend's Grandmother and she fed me potato pizza with Rosemary on top. And I have to tell you, Suzy is really one of my most vivid food memories from childhood. And every time I eat a potato pizza, I am sitting in that kitchen with my sister friend's Grandmother eating that potato pizza.Suzy Chase : So where can we find you on the web and social media?Hetty McKinnon: I am ArthurStreetKitchen.com still my original website for when I had the business and on social media I'm @HettyMcKinnon. That's it.Suzy Chase: Well, thank you Hetty so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. I am so thankful. I know you.Hetty McKinnon: Thank you, Suzy. I feel the same way. It's been a great conversation.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes and StoriesBy Nigella Lawson Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.Nigella Lawson: Hi, I'm Nigella Lawson and my latest cookbook is Cook, Eat, Repeat just published by Ecco.Suzy Chase: What I found so interesting was Cook, Eat, Repeat is the pre-pandemic title, but you wrote the cookbook during the lockdown with the recipes pretty much fully developed. I'd love to hear about that process.Nigella Lawson: Well yes fully developed, but I did change some because left to my own devices, which I very much was I carry on testing and retesting and so in a sense, you could carry on developing a recipe for as long as you have it in front of you. I had the book sort of mapped out, I'd written a teeny bit of it, and I had all the recipes ready, but I found the different time in which I was writing it inevitably had an impact on the recipes and my writing and so I pitched one chapter altogether, which would have had, you know, larger, quantities, you know, sort of bigger recipes and that seemed obviously unlikely to happen. It didn't seem right to be doing that now. And so instead I replaced the chapter about entertaining, which was going to be called How To Invite Friends For Dinner Without Hating Them or Yourself. She visit me in appropriate for a number of reasons. And I instead use the quote from a Lord Byron poem, "much depends on dinner." Also the title of a Margaret Visser book about what we eat and where it comes from. So I wanted to write more about the family meals. So that changed quite a bit. I mean the tenor of the recipes, probably not so much because my cooking, whether I have people round or, you know, just the usual crowd, although I wasn't cooking for anyone during lockdown just myself, it is very much the same sort of food, family food, but I added more recipes for one and I think probably more mindful of substitution and how to vary each recipe. So although conceived pre-pandemic, it has that overlay of really sensing that so many people were intensely bound up with what they were going to cook, what they were going to eat and I'm like that anyway. I mean, from the moment I wake up in the morning I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat that day under the circumstances we were all living, you know, other people came around to my way of thinkingSuzy Chase: So in the cookbook you talk about repetition, which we were cooking, eating and repeating all year long, but you talk about repetition, not in kind of a drudgery sort of way, but in a freeing way that repeated actions will teach us ease in the kitchen.Nigella Lawson: Yes. I think what I feel very much is that for people who don't cook an awful lot, you know, obviously not your listeners, but, for people who don't cook a lot, there's a sort of fear of making something new as if it's some totally novel situation they're going to find themselves in. But the reality is even when you cook something new, you are relying on steps that you use all the time when you cook, whether it's chopping or stirring. And the more often you do those little tasks, I mean, nearly all savory recipes, start with chopping an onion and frying it and the more you do that, the more your body and your whole self sort of gets into the swing of it. And because this step is sort of so often returned to, I think in frees you, thinking, even if it goes beyond the recipe, it frees you to start thinking, Oh, I could add this. That would make it a bit different. Or this would act in much the same way because the framework is there. You can be either more playful or more adventurous, or just frankly, using what you've got in your kitchen at any time. And I think that whether you're cooking or whether you're living generally having a framework is soothing and gives you a sense of security, but obviously none of us want to get bored either in the kitchen or in life. And therefore you still have the ability and I encourage it to be a bit spontaneous between these fixed points. And I think cooking relies on that. Repetition is not diametrically opposed to innovation. I think there's a dynamic relationship between the two.Suzy Chase: How is the cookbook organized in terms of chapters and recipesNigella Lawson: Organized is a very kind word given that each book I've done in a way I like the chapters to reflect the personality of the book. And I knew I very much wanted to write about ingredients that I adore and that I cook in many different ways. And for example, you know, A is for Anchovy and the Rhubarb chapter, it's fairly idiosyncratic, but I think that in a way a book has to be expression of one's enthusiasm. And this one very much is I also wanted to talk about certain types of foods. So there's a chapter called A Loving Defense of Brown Food, which are stews and braises in between that other ideas I wanted to investigate. I didn't think they had to match one another for extent or variety so I knew I wanted to write about pleasure in eating and there's a chapter that's called Pleasures, which was going to be called Death To The Guilty Pleasure, but I decided to accentuate the positive rather than dwell on the negative and when I start writing, I always write at great length. Initially there were getting to be more ingredients chapters, but I felt I'd rather just write at length about what I love. And so, in a sense, each chapter is its own microcosm even though of course there are links and I refer in between them, but I didn't feel the need for a big organizational principle. I felt that in a sense that my enthusiasm for food stuff or the ferocity with which I hold an opinion, that was enough to link the chapters.Suzy Chase: In the Pleasures chapter you wrote, "yes, a bar of chocolate is a true joy, but so is a plate of garlicky, spinach or lemony salad." I'd never really thought much about the term guilty pleasures, but now I kind of despise it.Nigella Lawson: Yes, I do. My jaw tenses at the very notion, I mean, often people use it without thinking, without meaning to imply all the baggage that goes with it, because I think it warps your sense of what you're seeking in food and in different moods, you want to eat a different thing and I don't like it if someone says to me, if I'm making a bowl of vegetables, "oh, you're being very healthy," because I don't think that's a very helpful way of thinking about food. And, you know, whatever's deemed healthy in one stage is then suddenly sort of wicked at some other and the reality is you would have a variety of different foodstuffs ideally and I think then your body and your appetite finds the balance.Suzy Chase: In your A is for Anchovies chapter. You will have a recipe for Spaghetti with Chard, Chilies and Anchovies that I made over the weekend. Can you describe this recipe?Nigella Lawson: I certainly can. Over the holidays in 2019, I believe. I was the staying with friends in the country side and Cornwall, which is a beautiful rugged coastline Southwest of England and went to a restaurant where I ate pretty much this dish and I thought I've got to make this, and I didn't ask for the recipe because it was really evident what was going on on it. And in terms of repetition, as we were just talking about it falls back on something, I do an awful lot, and there are about three or four, I think examples in the book, which is when I cook pasta, I put vegetables with it, as well as the other, perhaps more intense flavorings. And this really is the garlic, well anchovies first in olive oil over very low heat and you have to stir the anchovy filet for quite a while, until they seem to dissolve into the oil and it's salty but it's more than that. It's like providing as I say, depth and richness, umami, we've learned to call it and with that garlic, teeny bit of chili flakes, and that provides such a rich, not necessarily very large in quantity, but a really rich dressing the pasta, with the rainbow chard. You could use any green vegetables really, but of course, when you cook chard, you have to cook the leaves and the stems or the ribs separately. So there's a lot of contrast going on and I think that when you eat taste is one part the equation, but of course, to deliver that you need a very important second part, which is texture and that also makes it very filling. And, you know, the blandness sweet semolina blandness in a way but bland perhaps is not a good word for it, but I can't think of another one right now of the pasta and that sort of mineral quality of the green leafy vegetables, really both of them in their different ways and their opposing ways really can take the hard hit of the garlic and anchovies.Suzy Chase: An exciting part of following along with one of your recipes is I can hear your voice in my head. So for example, in the spaghetti recipe you wrote "when the pasta water has come to a boil salted, it will rise up excitedly." And I can vividly hear you saying that.Nigella Lawson: In a way I feel that once you abandon this aim of getting a recipe to fit on one page and one page alone, you have the freedom and the space to put your voice in it. So it isn't just the barest instructions. And I think that some degree a recipe is also a commentary rather than a description of steps needed.Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, in writing recipes, you had to learn another language and I'm interested in hearing about that.Nigella Lawson: Well, I was a journalist for a long time actually, before I started writing recipes and not a food journalist and was interested me and I studied languages at college as well, but I felt food obviously has enormous reach and it's an emotional language, you know, it's overlay with meaning, but flavor, taste, texture, the feel of food. This is the realm of the senses and language is abstract in a way. And I wanted to find a way of using language to convey the fullness of the experience of making food for, it's not enough to give a description of what steps are required. I feel that I want to convey what it feels like to be cooking that particular recipe and to be able to describe the dish in a way that makes it live vividly before the reader has taken this step to cook it. And for that, you often have to use metaphor or language that is evocative rather than merely boldly descriptive. And that interests me, but it gives me pleasure. I savor the words as much as I savor the food.Suzy Chase: And I think that's why your cookbooks can either live on our counter or on our bedside table.Nigella Lawson: And I think that I've always felt that the cookbooks I love are ones that have a dual purpose. I think the recipes absolutely have to be impossibly reliable, but I also think it has to be a good read. It has to provide nourishment at both those levels.Suzy Chase: In the, What is a Recipe chapter there's a beautiful photo of your Grandmother's recipes. So you put them in, I think I heard this, you put them in a special place and forgot about them?Nigella Lawson: Well, yeah, I mean, I had them ages ago and then my Aunts had them and then I got them back. And I guess when I last moved houses, I just put them somewhere and then that was it. But it was sometime in the early stages of lockdown over here I dare to say, I might decided I'd have a decluttering project, which is sort of, I live in with so much clutter, mostly in the kitchen, and I found her books again. And I started going through them and that was the end of my de-cluttering and cleaning up project. Very pleasurably so.Suzy Chase: During the lockdown here in New York City, I felt compelled to rearrange my kitchen. Did you rearrange anything in your kitchen?Nigella Lawson: I started trying to find... You go through things that said things like use before 2004, to see if you know what cleaning up to be done. But actually I was very busy with writing and occasionally I would attempt to something like that. Just love writing. I also do anything to put it off. You know, it was really writing and retesting recipes again, and again, wanting to add new ones, because I always think that what makes it a book alive.Suzy Chase: So in Cook, Eat, Repeat you wrote, "I relish eating alone and cooking for myself." Some recipes in the cookbook are for one like your glorious Fried Chicken Sandwich on page 67 in the recipe, it says, serves one ecstatically,Nigella Lawson: But it really does, for me, it does at any rate. And then I came up with this cookie recipe because I think I also wanted some cookies and I didn't want to make... you know normally you have to make so many, even with one egg. It makes often, you know, at least a dozen, sometimes two dozen. So I work pretty hard on how to make a cookie that tastes like a proper cookie, but without egg, because it seems wasteful to reach an egg and then take two teaspoons out. So I was very happy with that. And there's a recipe that been very popular in the book, which I called Chicken in a Pot with Lemon and Orzo and it's one of those family, one dish warming meals that I wanted to eat again. So I wanted to work out a way of saying, how would you adapt that just for one person? And there were quite a few recipes I've done that for, because you know, sometimes it is as simple as just dividing things, but often you have to look into adapting more freely. So I want to do that. And I did love cooking for myself. I mean, I always had cooked for myself, but I've never cooked for myself exclusively for such a long period of timeSuzy Chase: Last weekend, I made the Chicken in a Pot. It is so darn good. The leaks turn out so creamy in the orzo and there's something so homey about that dish.Nigella Lawson: Yeah, there really is and yet it's much bolder and seasoning than a lot of those old fashioned dishes are, and sometimes it's mistakenly assumed that in a way to be comforting must be sort of quietly spiced and this isn't, I mean, it doesn't really hit you over the head, but the oroza pasta and the leaks taste even sweeter. So it's a real family favorite over here I miss making it and I enjoyed coming up with the version for one, just using chicken thighs.Nigella Lawson: I also made your Fear-Free Fish Stew on page one 84. So good. And the cumin and the turmeric and the cinnamon and the sweet potatoes, tomatoes, I can go on and on. But I'm curious about the name of the recipe. Fear-Free.Nigella Lawson: I don't know what it's like stateside, but I think it is similar from conversations. I've had, people are in inordinately frightened of cooking fish. It tends to be expensive. It's very easy to overcook. And if you're not cooking it a lot, I think it can be tricky. So I wanted a recipe that wasn't tricky, didn't involve split-level timing. And because when you put the fish into the skew at the very end, you cook it just for a short time in the pan, when it's on the stove and then you turn it off and you leave it to cook much more gently with the heat turned off and it's pretty impossible to over cook that way. And it makes the fish so tender. I suppose I also wanted, I mean, in truth there are many ways you could have taken the fear factor out, but I felt very much, apart from my slight weakness for alliteration, I wanted to make a signal up ahead, look, you can do this and it's not frightening and it's not stressful. And so I felt I had to announce that in the title, because I know that a lot of people, they see a fish recipe and they turn the page over rather hurriedly, if it's not just the plain bit of salmon or something so I suppose that those were the reasons and I enjoy playing with titles, you know, like the cookies I was talking to you about moments ago, you know, they're called Mine-all-Mine Sweet and Salty Chocolate Cookies. I enjoy coming up with titles that have a bit of character. I have to contain myself. And sometimes a very plain title is also what's needed.Suzy Chase: The pièce de résistance was my very first Pavlova on page 243.Nigella Lawson: Oh yes the petite Pavlova, the little one with two egg whites.Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. So for some reason I've been so intimidated by that recipe all these years, and it's so easy.Nigella Lawson: It really is. And also, you know, if it cracks a bit on the outside, that's rather beautiful, but a Pavlova is a wonderful dessert and it's not eaten as much in the States as it is over here. And it's just a wonderful dessert too because you do the base in advance. I mean, I don't know, seeing we'll all be having people over, I guess, but essentially it makes life much easier. If your planning a meal, you don't want to have to cook all of it all in one go, especially for people coming. And so it's easy on a number of levels, but I mean, I, you know, as I said before, I'm a pavoholic, you know, I can't stop making Pavlovas.Suzy Chase: Same here. I've made two this week. So now to my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Nigella Lawson: Okay. I can tell you what I had last night for dinner. And I had Squid Salad, like calamari salad from the squid briefly cooked and then steeped in lime juice, fish sauce, soy sauce, and ginger and garlic and fresh red chili peppers. And this is a strange thing to do, but I also had, and they're very much flavorings some of the Ruby Noodles, which are in the book, which is cooked spaghetti for half time in water and then you finish the cooking in beetroot juice from a carton. I don't have a juicer or anything. And with added flavors, which were very similar to those in the Squid Salad, I like the mixture of sweetness, heat. And I had a bit of both leftover and I mixed them and I added a teeny bit of avocado and a lot of freshly chopped mint.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Nigella Lawson: Well, I have a website called Nigella.com and a huge percentage of my recipes can be found there. Although they present in metric if you press a little button on each recipe it will convert instances to US measures and on Twitter, I'm Nigella_Lawson, and on Instagram, I'm NigellaLawson one word.Suzy Chase: This has been such a pleasure. Thank you, Nigella for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Nigella Lawson: Well, it's been such a pleasure for me and do you know how wonderful it is for me to hear about the recipes you've cooked? It warms the cockles of my heart.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

Cookery by the Book Unplugged Live with Jessie Sheehan

Eat Cool: Good Food for Hot DaysBy Vanessa Seder Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Vanessa Seder: This is Vanessa Seder, and I'm here to chat about my new cookbook, Eat Cool: Good Food for Hot Days.Suzy Chase: You are a chef, food stylist, recipe developer, teacher, author, and founding member of Relish & Co. a Portland based culinary design collaborative and I'm excited to chat about Eat Cool. Your second cookbook, 100 plus recipes, tips, ideas, and support to help you eat and cook your way through hot weather. So Eat Cool is another one of these cookbooks that will pull us out of the pandemic rut. It's a fun versatile guidebook. What's the objective behind Eat Cool.Vanessa Seder: It just came from this organic place where I just started cooking in a new kind of a way and I found that I was getting good results. My body wasn't feeling tired or overly heated from the way we were eating. We were eating really delicious food. We didn't feel depleted. So it kind of encompasses a number of things, it's to cook in ways that reduce oven, stove top use, or making food items that require no cooking whatsoever. It's also cutting things in ways that kind of cut down on the cooking time. Eating foods that are naturally cooling, fruits, vegetables, grains, plant-based proteins and proteins that are lower in fat and less meat focused. And I'm not saying omitting all these things, but the food items that are heavier, alcohol-based, fattier to eat those more sparingly when it's really, really hot.Suzy Chase: What are some of the different cuisines that you include in this cookbook?Vanessa Seder: I'm really inspired by cuisines from around the world. In my first cookbook Secret Sauces, it also kind of has an international angle. So in this book, there are recipes that are inspired by, I would say Japanese Thai, Korean, Mediterranean, Indian, Mexican, middle Eastern, and maybe farm local source centric recipes. I grew up in Los Angeles. That's where I’m originally from, my grandmother was actually born there so I'm a true Los Angeleno and if you look at the history there, there's a lot of Mexican, South American, Central American and a lot of Asian culture. So I grew up eating a lot of that kind of food. Plus going up North, I have an aunt lives up North a bit. And so, you know, going into olive oil tastings and eating artichokes and all that kind of stuff, that was part of, of my childhood. So that kind of inspires a lot of my cooking style.Suzy Chase: So this is something that you don't often get in cookbooks. You have a list of five criteria for this cookbook. What are they?Vanessa Seder: Is it delicious and enjoyable to eat? Well, obviously that's very important. You know, I don't want anybody to go to the supermarket or the farmer's market and spend all this time and effort cooking food and having it not taste and look delicious. Number two, will it keep you relatively cool? So that's really important here when you're eating cool. I had all these recipes tested by friends and neighbors, and I asked them how they felt after cooking the different things or not cooking the different things. Cause there's a lot of recipes in this book for you don't even cook. And then I was in the kitchen on stop during the summer and I was developing into the fall winter, but it really did start. I did a majority when it was very, very hot, just seeing how I felt after eating these dishes that I was developing. So that was really important. The third one is, does it avoid the need for lots of labor and cooking? You know, you want to kind of cut down as much as possible, the cooking and chopping and cleaning when you're just so worn out at the end of the day. I tried to keep things simple so that it's not too time consuming. The fourth is can the home chef make it successfully? So yes, of course I also work as a teacher every month. I teach cooking at the Stonewall Kitchen headquarters here in Maine and I absolutely love teaching because I think that cooking is a life skill that everyone should have. And so the teacher, part of me comes out when writing a book too, and I want to make sure that everything is really clear and really well explained in the recipes so that people cooking the food, know exactly what to do when making the recipes. And then number five are its ingredients easy to find or can viable substitutions be provided. And for that definitely in a lot of the recipes I include in the head notes suggestions for where to put purchase hard to find items. There's always the internet these days as we've probably all use a lot of within the last year because of the pandemic. And if there's anything that's a little bit exotic, I offer suggestions for where to find those itemsSuzy Chase: Does eating something hot, actually cool, a person down.Vanessa Seder: I did a bunch of research on this. I am not a scientist, but I really explored this concept of why do people eat this way in hot climate. And what it is, is there a special protein structures called receptors in our mouth. And the one that kind of detects hot spicy food and drinks is called the TRPV1 receptor. And so when we eat or drink something that's hot or spicy, it triggers the TRPV1 receptor. And that cues, the nervous system to transmit a signal to the hypothalamus, which is kind of like our brains thermostat. So when you eat the spicy food or drink something hot, it triggers it. And what happens next is our body starts sweating and that's what cools down our body. So that's eating hot to cool, in a sense. So on the flip side of that, when you eat really cold rich foods, such as ice cream, or like an alcoholic slushie, which I actually have some of those in the book, but I say in the headnote to eat them sparingly, if it's really, really hot, it cools the body down a lot quicker, but it's more temporary because it has to work harder to digest it, which heats up your body.Suzy Chase: Now moving from hot to cold, let's talk about your soup chapter. What is the key to good gazpacho? Because I feel like you either get out-of-this-world gazpacho or you get like, so- so good gazpacho.Vanessa Seder: I, 100% agree with you there. Well, I was kind of on the fence actually, if I should include a good gazpacho recipe, just because there are so many out there in the world, but I think what it comes down to is that because everything is raw and in a gazpacho the end result really depends on the quality and ripeness of the individual ingredients of the soup. So if you're using tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, chilies, herbs that are peak ripeness during the summer and are from a farmer's market or a garden, obviously it's going to taste so much better than off season tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, right? And then you have the olive oil. So I think that really matters here. I'm lucky enough. I mentioned it before, but I have an aunt who lives in Atascadero California. That's near lots of vineyards and olive groves and she sends us bottles of really good olive oil, Pasolivo and Kitehawk farm, are some of my favorite that come out of that area. And so when I am making a gazpacho, I saved my really good olive oil for my gazpacho because it comes through. And then I would say the last part would be to bread or not to add bread. And I like adding bread in my gazpacho because I find that it absorbs some of the acid from the tomatoes and the vinegar, and also adding bread to gazpacho is a great to use an extra bread or bread becoming stale.Suzy Chase: How did it feel getting written up by Florence Fabricant in the New York Times, she is notoriously hard to impress, take it from me. She has never wanted to write anything about this podcast. Oh wow. She has written, I pitched her and she, she wrote try again. And then I pitched her more. Try again. She wrote that like four times to me, I just kept saying, I'm the only cookbook podcast Florence.Vanessa Seder: Wow, honestly it was a thrill and a highlight I have to say and I got an email out of the blue and when I saw who it was from, I got a little teary because I've been doing this for so long and to get Eat Cool, noticed by someone I respect and admire meant so much to me. And she said that she liked the book and thought it was a very timely subject and had some questions about some of the recipes in the book and it made me a little nervous, but I held my breath and I just did my best to answer them straightforwardly and accurately as best I could. It was just a really great honor that the book caught her notice, the notice of the great Flo Fab. What a great name, huh?Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh. I mean, you have to frame that.Vanessa Seder: Oh, I don't know if I'll frame it, but I'll definitely keep it.Suzy Chase: Definitely. Yeah.Vanessa Seder: It's definitely kept in a safe placeSuzy Chase: In the cookbook. You said the cold seafood spread is akin to the charcuterie, meze or cheese platter. Can you tell us about that?Vanessa Seder: I find that when it's really, really hot out, I love a good tinned seafood. There's a whole variety, you know, you can buy really inexpensive tins of seafood and they're fine for the most part. Or you can move up the ladder and purchase really expensive tins that come from Spain, all sorts of things like razor clams, kippers, herring, oysters, sardines. They're really all pretty good, I think. And so it's kind of a play on the charcuterie cheese board where you assemble a beautiful board, but with your tin seafood, but then you balance it with peppery greens, different sauces, crackers, chips, crudité all sorts of things like that. It just makes for a really easy meal when it's hot, as blazes outside.Suzy Chase: So normally when I start doing research for a cookbook, I look at every single one of the cookbook authors, Instagram posts, it kind of gives me a feel of their personality. And immediately when I looked at Instagram, I thought we need to be friends. She's my new friend. Yay. You have such a knack with photography. Your little family is darling. And I got so sad when I saw your beloved cat Birdie passed away, but then you rescued two kittens. So one particular Instagram post that caught my eye was the beautiful cookbook collection at the Lincolnville Motel in Lincolnville Maine.Vanessa Seder: He stayed there in 2019 feels like a world ago and we were up that way cause I was teaching a class at The Saltwater Farm Cooking School run by Annemarie Ahearn and it's this cute modern yet classic Maine inn and shout out to Alice who runs it. She's great. It's a little bit North of Camden, Maine. There's a lot of great restaurants up there, like Long Grain. So yeah, if you're ever in the area, you should make a trip, go up there, kind of a fun place to stay.Suzy Chase: For desserts on a hot day I have such a hard time thinking outside the fruit box. What sorts of ideas do you have for cooling desserts?Vanessa Seder: For the non fruit variety, I would suggest either the Chocolate Panna Cotta with salty Praline Peanut Crumble, Summer Corn Ice Cream, White Almond Sorbet, Ginger Cardamom Saffron Ice Cream, The Tropical Crispy Bars or the Malted Chocolate Icebox Cake. When I was creating this book, I purposely stayed away from shortcakes, tarts, pies, layer cakes, things like that because they take longer in the oven to bake and also when you're making something like a pate brisee which is a butter class of laminated dough, biscuit dough, the butter needs to remain very cold and that's really difficult to achieve when it's hot as blazes.Suzy Chase: Tell me about the Summer Corn Ice Cream. I've never heard of corn ice cream.Vanessa Seder: I think it's good, but you have to like corn, of course.Suzy Chase: I'm from Kansas. I love corn.Vanessa Seder: Well I didn't grow up with the best corn. When I started dating my husband, we met in college, he's from Massachusets. We went to go to his dad's house for kind of a grill outside and he served corn I just kind of blown away by the sweetness and quality of the corn we had, as simple as it was, and so that was my real introduction to New England corn and I have a huge respect for it and I wait all year to eat corn. I don't want to just have any corn and want that corn. So what I do every summer is I absolutely love making ice cream and so I used that corn and I soaked the cobs in the cream and the milk to get as much flavor out of the corn cob. And then I add the fresh corn to it and then I create a custard base and then run it through the machine. And it has a really intense corn flavor and it's just really delicious. I love it.Suzy Chase: That sweet corn is like heaven on earth.Vanessa Seder: I think so too. I mean, that's the thing. I don't think everyone loves corn. I don't know why, but we all love corn here that sweet summer corn. And if you like things like, like a corn custard or a cream corn, then you'll love the ice cream.Suzy Chase: Okay. Here's a super random question. I would love to hear about your dining room table.Vanessa Seder: Well we love antiques when we were first in Maine we went in search of a table and we ended up finding the table that it was in Buxton, Maine, and it was in a barn and it was just sitting there. It barely cost us anything and it had been in the same family for over 50 years and the why they were getting rid of it, but we just absolutely love it. And it's where we gather. And it served our family really well and we just love it and we try to take as best care of it as we can. I love old things. I like new things too, but I think it's also better for the environment. You know, you're just repurposing and you're loving something again and you're bringing new life into it. So I'm all for that. I.Suzy Chase: I know you're endlessly curious about food. So what is some sort of culinary thing you learned this past?Vanessa Seder: Okay, well this is gonna probably sound boring and a bit cliche at this point.Suzy Chase: Sourdough?Vanessa Seder: Wow. How did you guess? I mean, there's not much to get, I mean, we just really upped our sourdough starter making game and it got to this point where we were making bagels and bread and it became part of our weekly cooking rotation. But between working and remote school this year, our daughter's been in remote school all year. It just was hard to keep it going. And also it was just getting to this point where we were just eating way too much bread. So I would say that ultimately this year was about figuring out ways to avoid shopping as much as possible and getting really creative with leftovers in our fridge.Suzy Chase: You have a section called Fun with Rotisserie chicken. There's six options to make rotisserie chicken more interesting. When it's a hot hot day to pick up a rotisserie chicken is such a lifesaver. So I made your Quicker Shawarma recipe over the weekend. Can you tell us about this recipe?Vanessa Seder: Well, what did you think? First of all.Suzy Chase: I loved it And it was so easy and fun for my family and easy for me to make because it's a rotisserie chicken. It's great for moms everywhere, but that sauce was so darned good.Vanessa Seder: Which sauce did you use?Suzy Chase: It was the chili sauce. The toasted garlic and chili sauce. And I didn't have chili's so I used jalapenos.Vanessa Seder: Perfect. I love that. You're improvising. So my point with this page, which is kind of a sidebar was that if you're so hot and so tired and so burned out, go get a rotisserie chicken. There's nothing bad about it. And you don't have to just think of it as chicken leg. You can transform it into so many dishes shawarma is cooked on a vertical spit for hours. And so this is a huge shortcut. And why heat up your kitchen? When you can just go to the store and get her history chicken, season it up, put it in a slightly warmed pita, add a sauce of your choice. I offer a couple suggestions, top it with some lettuce and tomato, yogurt, but you can improvise too, you could add some avocado. It's a loose interpretation, obviously, you could add hummus anything you'd like, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.Suzy Chase: It's a full dinner. You don't have to make a side or anything. You just shove everything into the warm pita. And by the way, what's better than a warm pita?Vanessa Seder: I don't think anything. Nothing, right? Yeah. It's great. A warm pita is just delicious.Suzy Chase: Over the weekend. I sort of combined pages 111 and 113 to make grilled shrimp with herb butter, tomatoes and micro greens on sourdough toast. I really, really love the toast idea.Vanessa Seder: Why have two pieces of bread when you can just have one and still feel like you're getting a full meal. And I'm glad you combine the recipes actually. I mean, I tell students this, when I'm teaching that you can look at a lot of recipes as just kind of a loose blueprint or a jumping off point to improvise, but I'm really glad that you're having fun with the book and you're improvising from it. If you don't have all the ingredients that I hope people are doing that.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.Vanessa Seder: So I started off with some really good olive oil, and then I toasted leftover pasta. I think we had rigatoni so I toasted that up in the pan until it got kind of like crisp chewy tender and it had some more texture to it. And then I added some nice asparagus and fresh garlic to that and just kind of tossed it through and just heated it so that the asparagus was kind of crisp, tender, a little bit of salt and pepper. And then I added eggs to it and I kind of scrambled it all together and then a little bit of spicy chili and a shaving of parm. And then we had it with Cortaterre. It's an Oregon Pinot Noir. It's just fabulous. We really are into good Oregon Pinot Noir.Suzy Chase: I want to give a shout out to your editor, Jono Jarrett.Vanessa Seder: I think you should. He's incredible. I can't say enough good things about him. I love Jono.Suzy Chase: You know, we are from the same hometown.Vanessa Seder: Stop. It really?Suzy Chase: Yes. We're from Prairie, Kansas. We're Instagram friends. And I'm like, wait, how did I, how did I not know you? My mom has to know your mom!Vanessa Seder: What a small world. It is a small world. He was just so great and involved in so much of this book and he would ship props over, you know, cause I did all the propping styling with Stacy and Jennifer, the three of us did the book together and everybody contributed so much to this book. It's really a huge process to write a cookbook. Yeah. He was just such a wonderful editor to have.Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?Vanessa Seder: VanessaSeder.com or RelishandCo.com and then I'm @VSeder on Instagram.Suzy Chase: Eat Cool is going to be my go-to at the beach house this summer. Thanks Vanessa for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.Vanessa Seder: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

The Arabesque Table: Contemporary Recipes from the Arab WorldBy Reem Kassis Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Reem Kassis: My name is Reem Kassis and I'm the author of The Palestinian Table and more recently The Arabesque Table.Suzy Chase: I'm so happy you're back. So the last time you were on the cookbook podcast was 2017 with The Palestinian Table where you use the power of food and storytelling to share the Palestinian narrative with the world. Today, I'm thrilled to chat with you about your second cookbook, The Arabesque Table, all about the evolving cross-cultural food of the Arab world. Let's start off with you talking a little bit about doing three years of recipe research for this cookbook.Reem Kassis: You're right. It was very long, you know, the process of from getting the idea to researching it, to ultimately the end product but it was also fascinating because what I started out with was very different from the book that I ended up with. Um, you know, initially I think my desire was to capture this modern Arab table that was inspired by how we ate at home and all the cross-cultural interaction that I was seeing. But then it became clear to me as I started working on this, that you cannot understand this modern table with any kind of integrity, if you don't know the past on which it's based. And that kind of got me into the rabbit hole of the research you're talking about, which involves a lot of digging through archival materials through medieval Arabic cookbooks. It also involved a lot of academic texts and research articles, but at the end, I had this picture in my mind that is so much richer and more fascinating than I ever imagined our history to be. I don't know where to start and where to end telling you about it because it is so vast, but it's extremely interesting and only a portion of it made it into the book, Suzy, because as you know, it's a 250 page cookbook, so if I were to run with it and make it the thousand page tomes that I was aiming for, nobody would buy it. It would be too heavy and probably too boring so you ended up with the very interesting bits in the book that you have.Suzy Chase: I want to start with the cover. So when I think of the word arabesque, my mind immediately goes to the ballet move the other definition of arabesque is, and I looked it up in ornamental design. So you had a long journey coming up with the title for this cookbook and the cover. Can you take us back to your childhood garden when you were drinking lemonade, talking about the title with your mom?Reem Kassis: It's actually funny that you mentioned the arabesque ballet move because it was also in the back of my mind when I was picking the title, even though I picked it more for the ornamental design and you're referring to something I talked about in the introduction, which is I had submitted my first and then that draft went through edits and I submitted the second and final one. And we were doing the photo shoot at my parents' home in Jerusalem. And still we did not have a title for the book. So naturally I'm stressed out. I'm talking to my mother, to my father, to my brother, you know, what is the title of this book going to be? And it really only hit me towards the very end after we spoke so much about what the book is, what the main topic of the book is, what I'm trying to convey. And one of the tables in our backyard, it has this ornamental design on it and Arabic pattern. And just seeing how those designs fit together, they're woven, they're infinitely woven in a way, you know, you can't tell where one starts and one ends, you can see each one individually, but taken together as a whole. They formed this beautiful image in front of you. And I thought that's what our cuisine is at the end of the day. It's intertwined. It's, cross-cultural, it's stretches infinitely through time from the start of civilization to the present day. And national cuisines are like those individual patterns that you can point to, but you also cannot see where they begin and where they end because cuisine is regional. And it has been evolving since the start of civilization. So Arabic to me was the word that conveyed that the most. Um, but also the Arabic ballet moved to me was about having one foot firmly rooted in the past with your hand reaching for the future. So in order to reach for that future in front of you and understand the evolution and the excitement that can come from your dishes, evolving and changing, you also need to still be firmly rooted in the ground. That is the base of everything that you're doing.Suzy Chase: And it also kind of goes back to what you just said. You started out with an idea for this book, but it ended up something completely different.Reem Kassis: Which is probably the case with many cookbooks and books in general. I mean, when I started out, I was looking at how we were eating at home. I have two young kids and our dinner table on a regular basis was just as likely to have a Palestinian dish on it as it was to have an Indian or Japanese or Korean one. And my pantry similarly had all different kinds of ingredients from across the globe. And it reminded me of my grandmother's and my mother's pantry, which were very uniform. It was just the Arab ingredients that we were used to cooking with. And I thought, Oh, this is great. This is fun. I want to capture this. I want to show how food evolves and how it can be exciting and how it can interact with other cultures. But as I started working on it, inevitably have to change because any dish that I wanted to talk about or explain, I realized there was so much more backstory to it than just, this is a mishmash of A and B you know, yes, it's mixing those two things together, but where did those two things come from to begin with? And what ended up happening was most of that exploration often took me back to ingredients and crops, and that's why the book ended up being also split by ingredient or ingredient group, because those are the things that tell that story of evolution in the neatest way.Suzy Chase: So you celebrate the contemporary Arabic kitchen, but what are a couple differences between your grandmother's pantry and Galilee and your modern pantry?Reem Kassis: Well, for starters, hers was probably mostly made by hand. You know, every ingredient she had was probably one that she had grown in her garden and herself preserved or dried or fermented or what not. Mine unfortunately is mostly store-bought at this point, there are still a few things like za'atar, that, which my parents send me from back home and pomegranate molasses, which are handmade by family members, but mine is a lot more convenient, but also it's a lot more global. So I have all different kinds of soy sauce and vinegar and, you know, different kinds of tins fishes from Europe. And it's just, it's a mishmash of things. And I have Indian pulses, you know, different lentils that are used for making Indian dishes and different kinds of pastas from Italy. And it's just, so it's almost like looking at this microcosm of the whole world in a very small space.Suzy Chase: I'm curious to hear about the pomegranate molasses.Reem Kassis: So pomegranate molasses really it's just pomegranate juice that has been reduced to a syrupy consistency and the balance of sweet versus sour depends actually on the variety of pomegranates you use, unfortunately, what ends up happening with what you buy in stores is that, you know, it's thickened with starch, it's sweetened with sugar and you're really don't have that much pomegranate in there. My father does our own pomegranate molasses at home because we have a few trees in our backyard and he, every August we'll pick them and he will spend weeks and weeks peeling them and then juicing them. And, you know, the kitchen becomes a factory. And my mother basically does not even want to go in there. It's a nightmare for her. But at the end of the season, once you have all these bottles and they're labeled and you're giving everyone the bounty of the season, you suddenly remember why you do this every year and why it's, it's fun. And it's useful. I mean, it's a wonderful sour flavor that adds a little kick to different things. You know, we use it in certain traditional applications, but you could use it in place of lemon and place a vinegar in any dish that you do, whether it's a salad dressing or a sauce for fish, it's I find the balance of sweet and sour to be a lot more, they have a lot more dimensions than just vinegar or just lemon juice.Suzy Chase: So with the recent spring cookbook releases, I've been hearing so many stories of authors making do during the pandemic and creating a cookbook in the middle of the lockdown. I'd love to hear your story of how this cookbook came to life during the pandemic.Reem Kassis: You know, Suzy books are a very long process from start to finish. So when it first started out, everything was great and fine. And you know, you're meeting with your publisher in person and you're speaking to people in person. And I wrote majority of the book before the pandemic hit, but the photo shoot was supposed to start in March and we were supposed to fly out on Friday. And I think it was on a Wednesday or a Thursday that they enforced lockdown. So literally 24 hours before flying back to Jerusalem, we have to cancel our flights and stay in Philadelphia. And we had no idea like, would the photo shoot ever happen in time for a spring release? Would I ever be able to go back this year? Luckily enough, we were able to go back in may and we did do the photo shoot there. But the flip side of that coin is we got stuck there for three months and couldn't come back. So, you know, it was an exciting journey, but it'll definitely be a memorable one down the line. When I think about all the craziness that happened to bring this book to life.Suzy Chase: Did you and your mom take the photos or did you just make the food that was in the photos?Reem Kassis: No, no. We just cook the food. So there's a photographer and it's actually the same photographer who did the first book. And part of the reason I wanted to do the photo shoot back home is he's such a phenomenal photographer that I really wanted him to photograph this one. And you almost cannot tell it's the same one because of how different the two books are. And it just goes to show how, you know, when you set a certain brief for how you want it to look, you really can bring it to life. And my mother and I, we cooked all the dishes. We didn't have a prop stylist. We didn't have a food stylist. We didn't have really anything. It was a very skeleton crew photographer, me and my mother. I love it.Suzy Chase: How simple the photos are. You really focus just on the food?Reem Kassis: Yeah, there's no prompts. I mean, there's no rusty spoons and thank goodness as you remember the first time around, I was like, is this normal? There's nothing on this picture other than the food. And then I realized it's actually good. You see the food, you know,Suzy Chase: Really good. As you tell the story of a cuisine that emerges from what are now 22 countries between the Atlantic ocean and the Arabian sea. You put the focus on key ingredients. You mentioned a little bit of that, but can you talk a little bit more about why you focused on key ingredients in the country?Reem Kassis: So, one thing when I'm writing that I'm always conscious of is I want to make this as easy and as accessible as possible to the person reading it. And chances are, if you pick up a book, you're not looking to cook based on an ingredient, or you're looking to cook based on an occasion, right? Is it breakfast? Is it dinner? Is it lunch? Is it a large gathering? Do I want meat? Do I want chicken? So I hesitated to break it up by ingredient. But then I thought back to the greater mission of the book, which was to tell a story and a history traced throughout time and ingredients were the best way to do that. Because at the beginning of every chapter, there's an introduction which discusses the ingredient, but also tells you how it came to the position that it's in, in our cuisine, whether it's even native to our region or not, and how it's used in cooking. So by looking at these ingredients, you start to form a more complete picture in your mind of what that history looks like from the middle ages cause that's how far back really I go in the book from the middle ages up to the present day.Suzy Chase: You had a bit of an epiphany during the pandemic you wrote suddenly. "I understood why my father loved these two dishes so much. It wasn't the dishes themselves. It was the memories they kept alive for him." I spend an inordinate amount of time pondering the meaning of home. Can you talk about those two dishes and home and what home means to you?Reem Kassis: It's funny home is such an elusive concept that I think you really start to appreciate and understand when you're moved from it. So for me, I never thought of what home meant until I found myself living abroad and eventually realizing this is where my life was going to be. I am not going to be able to go back home. And I mentioned in the book by the time that it is published, I will have spent more years living abroad than I did in Jerusalem. And when I think of my father, you know, I wrote about the two dishes that you're referencing. They were dishes that when I tasted them, I said, okay, they're fine, but they're not something to be wowed by. And yet to him, they were the best thing in the world. And it was only when I couldn't go home and I couldn't visit my parents. I couldn't eat the food that I had been promised and had been craving for awhile that I realized it really is this entire sensory experience from the flavors, the smells, the sounds, the sights, just the physical touch of being close to the people that you care about. All of that together forms this thing that is home. And part of the reason we love certain dishes is not because they are objectively very good, but because those dishes are the ones that we enjoy during periods of our lives that were extremely meaningful. And for me, you know, my childhood up until the age of 17, when I left home, those are the years that I look back on. And I think that's home. Those were the years, my formative years, the years that I spent in a place that has become so crucial to my identity. And so when I look back now, there are, they're not the same two dishes, but there are definitely dishes that for me, speak of home dishes that I don't even make in my kitchen, because no matter how well I can execute them, the experience around them and the flavor as a result will not be the same as when I eat it.Suzy Chase: Wow. So you don't even attempt because it's not even going to get close to itReem Kassis: Because there are times when I really miss those, you know, to give you a concrete example, the primary dish I'm referencing is stuffed chicken. It's so simple. It's just a whole chicken that you stuffed with a mixture of rice and beef that has already been cooked with pine nuts and spices. And it it's an easy dish to make. But to me, it's the dish that reminds me of Fridays and my childhood. It's the Fridays you went to my grandmother. It's the dish that my mother makes whenever I would go home to visit from university. She still does every time that I go back and I've tried to make it here, I just don't enjoy it as much. I even joked in front of my husband. One time he goes, do you want me to make it for you? Will it tastes better if I do? And I was like, no, it just tastes better when my mom makes it. It's not that I don't know how make it, it's just different when I'm eating it with her, with old family, uh, it could be small touches here and there. You know, maybe her oven is different from mine or the rice she uses there is different from the one I use here. But yeah, I try to avoid making that dish. She also served, you know, coincidentally avoids making it when I'm not there either.Suzy Chase: So to understand this modern way of eating one had to understand the culinary history of the Arab world. You wrote in the book. Food is a regional and ethnic artifact. Often more closely tied to language and religion than it is to an arbitrary political boundary. Could you talk a little bit about national cuisine?Reem Kassis: Of course. So national cuisine is the implication behind it is a cuisine of a specific nation. So Palestinian, Italian, Indian, et cetera, but the idea of a nation state is a relatively recent construct that came about at the end of the 18th, early 19th century and national cuisine itself is often traced back to the end of the French revolution. When the cuisine of the Versailles palace was nationalized and everyone had access to it, peasants and rich people alike. So if you look at food prior to that, but also even to this day, you notice it's regional and let's just take what I know the most about Palestinian cuisine. And if you look at the Northern part of the country, it is very different. What they eat there from what they eat in the center and the South of the country, and what informs those differences is the geography and the landscape, the proximity to other countries, uh, religion, socioeconomic status that for example affects whether traditionally you ate whole wheat or white flour bread, whether you ate rice or whether you ate vulgar grains, religion, you know, that affects whether you ate pork or beef or lamb, whether you drank alcohol or not. And as a result, did you eat messy platters with your alcohol, or did you eat big dishes that did not sit well with, you know, sipping alcohol as you ate them? So national cuisine is very important in the sense that it helps people form a collective identity around their culinary history, but it's also important to recognize the trajectory that food has been on from the past to the present day and how it has adapted and also adopted ideas and ingredients from other places and other cultures. And the point that I try to get across often with this book, and when I'm speaking to people is that those two things are not mutually exclusive. You know, your food can be important to you as a nation, but you can also recognize that that food has evolved and in all likelihood will continue to evolve down the line and that you don't need to be one or the other. You can be both as long as you recognize the origins of the things that you're eating and also recognize the importance that they hold for you as a member of a specific nationality.Suzy Chase: So would you say a good example of this would be the bagel, the bagel,Reem Kassis: More complicated history than that but we can get into it if you want, but I would say a good example of that be a dish like Maqlubeh for Palestinians. You know, Maqlubeh means inverted. It's a dish of rice and eggplants often layered with tomatoes at the bottom as well, or served with tomato based stew. Tomatoes did not make their way to the Arab world until the 19th century. Rice was not a staple until the 20th century. It was reserved for the ultra wealthy and everyone else just ate the ensuing wheat products, you know, bulgur and freekeh and the like. And yet, if you ask Palestinians today, what is your national dish? A huge portion will reference Maqlubeh as the national dish of Palestine. So you see that the ingredients that make it up are not native or not. You know, they weren't staples in that country. They were not common in that country 200 years ago. And yet today they have become together as a dish, something very symbolic of Palestinian cuisine. So that kind of points to how things can come from the outside. They can evolve and then that ensuing product becomes very relevant to national identity, but the bagel, if you want to touch on it, it's very relevant to Jewish identity. You know, when people think of Jewish foods, one of the first things I'll say is, Oh, a bagel and lox bagels. As I found out while doing the research for this book, actually the very first mention of a boiled and baked ring of dough is in a 13th century Arabic cookbook. And I, you know, I wrote this article that traced the history and how, you know, the Arabs when they took over Bari in the eighth century and from there, a lady from Bari went into Poland, married into the Royal family. They started making this bagel like pastry called obwarzanek or I'm butchering the pronunciation. And then Jews and 16th century Poland started making it. You see how through time it has traveled from one place to the next, you might be able to see how it's changed. Uh, and yes, you can trace it back to Arab origins. Does that detract from its position as a very important or iconic food for Jewish people? No, it doesn't. So also points to that thing you were saying where it is important to you as your nationality, but it has evolved through time.Suzy Chase: I'm so fascinated by that 13th century Arabic cookbook that you found. So where did you find that to do the research? And can you say the name of it? I have it written down, but I will butcher it.Reem Kassis: No, don't worry. So actually, luckily that particular one that I'm referencing has an English translation. The English translation is Sense and Flavors. It was translated only a couple of years ago. The literal translation of the Arabic name is the book with which to reach your loved one's heart via their stomachSuzy Chase: Does K I T A B mean book?Reem Kassis: It means books. So Kitab al Wusla ila al Habib, which means the book for reaching your loved one. And then it continues. I didn't put the full name in the, in the Arabic table because it would be like a full sentence. If I was going to name the entire thing from start to finish every time I love it.Suzy Chase: So where did you find this cookbook?Reem Kassis: You know, one book leads you to another book and another book. And a lot of these books, I first came across while reading academic articles. You know, you spend half your time reading the article itself and the other half sifting through the bibliography and the footnotes. And there you see what sources those academics have used. And then from there, you know, a lot of them might've done the research primary research right there on the ground. They're looking through ancient texts and libraries like Yale, for example, had the Babylon tablets, which are the oldest recipe in the world, or the oldest recipes in the world. They're the carvings on clay tablets, that date back to the Mesopotamian era. But the book that I use even more than this one was attempt century one called Kitab, and that's considered the first Arabic cookbook on record. And that one also has an English translation. Actually, people are interested. It's called angels of the caliphs kitchen. That was very well known. So it wasn't a surprise to come across. It it's from any Arabs, they reference it on the regular. They know about it.Suzy Chase: Do you have any recipes out of that cookbook in The Arabesque Table?Reem Kassis: I do. There's a couple actually. So there's one called Narjissiyeh. I don't know, off the top of my head, what page number it's on, but it's in the eggs and dairy chapter. Narjissiyeh means of narcissists, which nurses? This is the scientific name for the daffodil flower and the daffodil as we can all see outside right now is a white and yellow flower with a green stem. So the thought is it was all the dishes that are made with sunny side up eggs in that book are referred to as such. And that thought is like the narcissist, like the daffodil flower, you know, eggs are yellow and white. So that's why all that class of dishes have that name.Suzy Chase: Culinary appropriation is front and center for a lot of Palestinians. I'd love to give you some space to elaborate on that and the word authentic. What does that word really mean in terms of a cuisine?Reem Kassis: So let's start with the easier one, the word authentic. I find that word slightly problematic. I mean, it's good in the sense that it might convey something. When I say authentic Palestinian, I'm referring to dishes that to Palestinians have been enjoyed and cooked for a couple of centuries, at least. But if by authentic, you mean dishes that are free are void of outside influence. Then those dishes do not exist. And just to give you examples, tomatoes, they did not come to Italy until the 18th century. So all those quote, unquote, authentic Italian dishes like Spaghetti bolognese and you know, Pizza al Pomodoro and all these dishes that are tomato based did not exist in Italy 200 years ago, chilies did not come to Thailand or India also until after the Columbian exchange. And yet, can you fathom any kind of Curry that doesn't have chilies in it? No. When we talk about chocolates and or Belgium, the cocoa bean also did not come to Europe until after the Colombian exchange. So if by authentic people mean something that has not been influenced by outside culture or has not evolved through time, then no such thing exists. It's a, it's a fiction. If by authentic, what you mean is a dish that is meaningful to your people, to your nationality, a dish that has been enjoyed for at least a couple of centuries or several generations fine, but it's important to be clear about what you mean by authentic, because if you want to go by the dictionary definition, then it's, you know, it's hard to find really, really authentic foods as her culinary appropriation for Palestinians. I've written quite a bit about this, which, you know, it's difficult to summarize it in one or two sentences, but I think the important takeaway from the entire topic is, especially as someone who's writing about how food evolves and food is adaptive and adoptive and how fusions the history of cuisine in general is there's a big difference between culinary diffusion, which is how food changes through time, how it learns from other cultures, adapts and adopts, and between appropriation, which is taking something from another culture and willfully denying or ignoring that culture is contribution to what you're cooking. And I think that's the issue for Palestinians. And obviously when you say it's relevant to Palestinians, you're referring to the issue of Israel, appropriating Palestinian dishes and marketing them abroad as Israeli. And the primary issue there is that it's a willful denial of the Palestinian contribution, which is seen by most Palestinians as an attempt to rewrite the past and make it a past in which we do not exist.Suzy Chase: The other evening, I made your Spiced Kebabs with Preserved Lemon Dill Yogurt, and Orzo Rice for dinner. Can you describe these recipes?Reem Kassis: So Orzo Rice is really simple? It's basically plain white rice, but it has orzo in it. And the thought process behind it was we normally make it with a very short vermicelli type of noodle, which I don't easily find here in Western supermarkets. You can find it in middle Eastern grocers. You can buy angel hair pasta and chop it up very thin, but that's too time consuming. So I started using orzo in its place and it's delicious. And it serves the same function, which is, you know, a bulks up the rice, but the, it gives it a nutty flavor because you're toasting it first. But the primary reason that supposedly people cooked rice that way was it prevented the brains from sticking together. And they would say, you know, Arabs would joke that the more vermicelli noodles you had in your rice, the worse of a cook you were because you couldn't get your rice not to clump together without using it. I mean, I'm not a terrible cook, but I definitely use a lot of the noodles and the orzo in my rice just because I like the nutty flavor, but it's simple. That's all it is. It's just, you know, rice with some slightly toasted orzo or vermicelli noodles.Suzy Chase: So describe the Spiced Kebabs with Preserved Lemon Dill Yogurt.Reem Kassis: So this is that's a very simple dish. It's ground meat. You can use lamb or beef for a combination, and the spices are pretty simple. I think, you know, primarily it's black pepper and cumin. And then I think there's onion in the mixture as well, just to add flavor, possibly garlic. You know, I don't have the book in front of me, but it's a minced meat mixture that's flavored with different aromatics and then shaped into kebabs and fried. You could also, it's the same one that we use for our kafta dishes. So it can be baked in the oven. It can be turned into me, balls, whatever you want. And then the yogurt you're talking about is mixed just with preserved lemon and dill, some salt, you know, yogurt is great and it's very common in the Arab world to eat rice with cold yogurt. So most of our rice dishes are served with cold yogurt on the side, but I felt that the addition of preserved lemon and dill just kind of amped up the flavor. And it's a dish that I often make on weeknights when I don't know what to make, because who doesn't like, you know, for all intents and purposes, I meatball because just in the shape of a kebab basically, and the rice is, you know, an easy starch to make and the yogurt just makes it very fresh. So even if you don't have a salad on the side, it still feels like a very fresh light meal.Suzy Chase: So the preserved lemon comes up in another 13th century Syrian cookbook. Did I read that?Reem Kassis: Yeah, it's the same book we were talking about before the one with the bagel recipes. And I think it was common back then to preserve any and everything because there was no refrigeration, there's no freezing. So if you and everything was seasonal. So if you had something in season, you had to find a way to preserve it. Herbs were often dried, yogurt was fermented and dried, lemons were preserved themselves. That was how fermentation started in general, in all cultures across the world. It was a way to make things last from one season to the next, uh, preserved lemons tend to be an ingredient that features heavily in North African cuisine, less so in Levantine cuisine. Obviously now it has made its way into our kitchens as well. And it's made its way into kitchens here because it really is a very, I dunno, I like to call it a flavor booster, right? It's like lemon, which adds freshness. It's kind of like salt, which enhances flavor, but it is, it has multiple layers of flavor to it, I think because you have the acidity from the lemon, but you also have a bit of bitterness from having preserved it for so long. And I think together those two things give you this like umami combination of flavors that works wonderfully with many dishes. I often put it in my pasta sauces as well. I'll put a spoon in soups if I want to bring out a citrusy note. It's great. You know, if you're doing tuna salads, it's a wonderful combinationSuzy Chase: In that 13th century cookbook. It said something like this recipe is so well-known, it need not be described.Reem Kassis: True. And it says that about quite a few things as well. Oh really? Yeah. Because the way these books were written back then most of them were written with a certain audience in mind. Namely, the Royal courts are very wealthy people, I guess, with two goals in mind, on the one hand, it was written for its humoral properties or like its medicinal benefits. So if you look at the 10th century cookbook and to a lesser extent, the 13th century one, it will tell you, you know, this ingredient is good for this medical issue or for this body organ or for this bodily function. So it wasn't written the way books are today for mass consumption. It was written more to tell you which foods are good for what, but it was also a way with which to pass on recipes to the cooks in these Royal courts or Royal palaces. So again, if it's a recipe that's super common. I assume the thought process was why bother mentioning it, any cook who comes here will know how to do it. Let's just get into the bits and pieces that might need explanation.Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Last Night's dinner, where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.Reem Kassis: It's funny, actually, you asked me about what we had last night for dinner. My memory is not great, but with that said, I do have a running list or what I plan to cook every night that goes back to 2014. So if you could pick out any day of the year and be like, what did you eat that day? I could tell you what, yeah, it's crazy. So the way it started was in London, I was ordering groceries online and I needed to figure out what to order for the weeks. I would plan out what I was going to cook every day. And this especially became relevant when I was recipe testing. I started writing, you know, Monday, this Tuesday, this Wednesday, that, and I just got into the habit of doing it. And now we're 2021. And so I guess I have seven years worth of what we ate every day.Suzy Chase: You could be on some game show or something. You could make a lot of money off this skill.Reem Kassis: Think so, actually we are what today, Tuesday. So Monday, Monday we had mahshy, which is stuffed zucchini and eggplants and grape leaves. And it's not exactly a weeknight dish, but we often have it on Mondays because I'm home Sunday. You know, everyone's home Sunday. It's an easy date to spend a couple hours prepping a dish that requires as much preparation. So oftentimes I will stuff and roll in all of that the night before. And then Monday I just have to cook it.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Reem Kassis: On the web? It's my website, just my first name, last name.com. So ReemKassis.com. On social media. I'm mostly active on Instagram and again, Reem.Kassis or Reem underscore Kassis, but you'll find it, you'll see the pictures of my books.Suzy Chase: No cuisine is a straight line stretching infinitely back in time. Rather it's just like an arabesque pattern flowing and intertwined. Thanks so much Reem, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Reem Kassis: Thank you, Suzy. It's been a pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com and thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.

À Table: Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French WayBy Rebekah Peppler Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Rebekah Peppler: I'm Rebekah Peppler and my book is called À Table: Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French Way.Suzy Chase: In 2015 you started splitting your time between Paris and Brooklyn, which became Paris and LA and then Paris full time. How did that evolve?Rebekah Peppler: So basically I was living correct in New York in 2015, and I had started to kind of get this just like gut feeling that I needed a change. Um, and that change wasn't going to happen in New York. And I, at the time was working quite regularly as a food stylist primarily, um, but had wanted to get back into writing as kind of my primary profession. And so I decided that I would split time between New York and another city and I really wasn't sure where it was going to be. It was actually between LA and Paris kind of just popped up out of the blue. I had spent a little time there just on a holiday. I swapped my apartment in Brooklyn with a teacher in Paris and just lived there for, for six weeks, trying to get an idea of if I wanted to even make that move and I would say like two weeks in, I was absolutely not, not for me. Um, I didn't have any French at the time and it, it didn't feel like the right city. And then about three weeks in my kind of mindset changed completely. And I was like, you know what, actually, this is, this is exactly what I want to be doing. And so I started splitting my time between Paris and New York. And then, um, and then it became Paris and LA, uh, for a brief moment in time. And then it became Paris kind of totally however you are reaching me while I'm in LA. And so I don't think I've really shed that Paris LA commute quite yet, but all of my stuff lives in Paris, which is, which is a very exciting thing for me to, uh, to feel a kind of concrete home in one place.Suzy Chase: The subtitle of this cookbook is Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French way. So the phrase recipes for cooking, I know how I interpreted it as, like achievable, delicious recipes for the home cook, but what were you thinking?Rebekah Peppler: Oh, I actually never even thought about that. Um, how it could be interpreted in a different way for me. Uh, the subtitle kind of was born out of the fact that when I first pitched this book, um, and I know that you've spoken to quite a few authors. So, you know, that kind of proposal starts prior to writing the book and is sold. Um, it was more centered around gathering in my head and kind of like gathering around the table, eating together, cooking together. And it also evolved into me wanting to be able to say, you know, just cooking and eating the French way because, you know, I lived alone in Paris at the time and I was sometimes just cooking for one and sometimes I was cooking for two and sometimes I was cooking for eight. And so I didn't want to kind of pigeonhole it into a cooking only for a big group of people and then, um, fortuitously, when the book came out, we were still in the middle of the pandemic. And so it actually, um, translated even better than I could have ever imagined when I was kind of shifting in the beginning stages book.Suzy Chase: What does eating the French way look?Rebekah Peppler: Like for me personally, kind of eating the French way is just kind of enjoying your food and enjoying the moment that you're in and opening a bottle of wine or pouring an Apéritif, whether that be alcoholic or non alcoholic to usher in your night and really like kind of living in the moment and enjoying the things that you have and if you're around people, the people that are around you and the conversation that is flowing. And that to me is eating the French way.Suzy Chase: These 25 new French recipes that are in the cookbook were developed along the way back when you used to host impromptu weekly gatherings. À Table is the mirror image of the weekly dinner parties that you described in the beginning of the cookbook. As I leaf through the book, I feel like I'm right there and your grand Paris apartment with a suze sour in my hand, I see myself in a floral suit with Gucci pumps, kicking my head back, laughing with some interesting arty people and sharing life stories over delicious food. Please tell me if that's how it really is, right?Rebekah Peppler: Yes, you've, you've described it so perfectly and beautifully. Um, and I, and I do hope that that will become reality once again, um, as you mentioned, yes, the recipes were developed along the way. And also the images in the book feature, all the people that gather around my table and France anyway. And so they're all friends who have been at my dinners, the recipes were developed and tested in my kitchen and in friends kitchens around the world, if we're talking about kind of the Sunday nights, which is how this book started, um, was just kind of, I had people over for Sunday suppers, I would start the start time a little early, like around 6:00 PM, which is not your classic French way of doing things, but it's, um, it's my way of doing things. Uh, and so everybody kind of comes in the door at different moments. Everybody has a different kind of idea of what a start time at 6:00 PM really means, but by 7:00 PM, everyone's there and they have a drink in their hand. I have a beautiful balcony area. And so we're usually out there in good weather drinking and snacking and chatting, and then kind of getting rid of the stress of the day, um, in order to be able to then go inside. If the weather is again still nice, the doors remain open, and sit down and share a meal together. And yeah, the light, as you can see in the pages of the book, Joann Pai, our photographer shot it so beautifully, the lightest stunning in France and it really does create this kind of magical feeling when you're sitting around a table together.Suzy Chase: You can find me on the balcony. That's all I have to say.Rebekah Peppler: Exactly.Suzy Chase: À Table is the cookbook that is getting me excited to have dinner parties again. What are some of your tips for gathering in the modern way, minus the pressed linens, floral arrangements and babysitters.Rebekah Peppler: When you think of kind of the way that entertainment guides were set out in earlier day is it was very much like to do lists, do this at this time, this, at this time, this two days before, press your linens, fresh flowers on the table, et cetera. For me, I think that the way that we gather and the way that we will gather again, very, very soon, hopefully is intimate. If there are parents in the group of which there are in my life, um, sometimes the kids come with sometimes they don't, but there's not this need to kind of exclude the flower arrangements. There might be some beautiful flowers I see at the farmer's market that day that I grab and kind of throw in a vase or that someone brings to me and I grab again and throw in a vase, but it's not going to be meticulously set out the linens 100% in my life are never pressed because I don't have the inclination to spend the time doing that. And that allows space to gather more often and with less pressure and more of a, like, you know, come over at 6:00 PM, I'll have a drink like oh yeah, will you grab a couple bottles of sparkling water to bring up that kind of thing. It feels, it just feels more familiar. And also the way that we, that we do this now with the people that we love,Suzy Chase: Can you describe your Nicoise Salad for a crowd on page one 55? It looks amazing.Rebekah Peppler: Thank you. I love this recipe and this image. We wanted it to have a little bit of a garden party feel for lack of better descriptor and my incredible food styling assistant. Lena had this brilliant idea. She was like, what if we just stand in the doors, leading out to the balcony with these branches that you randomly have in your house and pass this light through this beautiful kind of mid day sun that was coming into the apartment. So this was actually shot in my apartment in Paris. And the light kind of gives you an idea that you're outside kind of in dappled light. The recipe itself is I think I say in the head note, it's kind of a choose your own adventure. And it absolutely is that I give a recipe for the vinaigrette and then the salad is kind of a list of ingredients that can kind of come and go as you have and what season you're in. And, um, what you prefer. I would say for me, the non-negotiables are like the handful of salted capers. And of course the nicoise olives, I think that punch of, of salty briny earthiness anchors the salad really nicely. And then when I'm serving it, what I kind of also mean by choose your adventure is only the ingredients that are kind of laid out on this platter itself. But the way that people, uh, at the table are making it, it's kind of, uh, you choose, if you like potatoes more than the other person, there's more potatoes on your plate. If you don't want eggs, you don't have to have them. Um, and I kind of let it be a kind of grab and go, as you will affair instead of opening the can of tuna for the photo, I want it to kind of just like throw it on the plate like I would when I'm throwing a dinner party and like open it last minute and everybody just kind of reaches in with a fork and grabs what they want. And I think that's the hope that I have for many of these recipes that are more shareable is that there's not this intent placed on having everything look perfect or be quote unquote, beautiful. I find beautiful is often found in the imperfect, um, and in the messy and in the like green being that rolls off and is covered in vinegarette and gets the tablecloth all dirty because that's what you want to have a washer for. That's I hope what the embodiment of at least this Nicoise For A Crowd is it's make a big platter and let everybody grab stuff. And it's a fun, interactive experience for everyone. And of course, if you're serving nicoise and you also drink wine and I highly recommend a very cold, wonderful Rosé, because that's what you would be drinking in France. If you were in nice having any nicoise salad.Suzy Chase: In France, there's an added and basically mandatory apéritif hour. So can you talk a little bit about that?Rebekah Peppler: Absolutely. So that was the subject of my first book, Apéritif and I delve very deeply into it in that book, but it is also a huge part of À Table because it is a huge part of the French table and cooking and eating and drinking the French way. And so the hour of Apéritif or Aperol hour or just Aperol is this time of day, that is very special. It kind of demarcate the end of the workday and the start at the evening and allows you to kind of transition from you are having a stressful day from kind of the busy-ness and the craziness and the intensity of the day, turn that kind of part of your brain off and switch into the evening. So it's usually a drink it's often alcoholic, although the culture of Apéritif extends to everybody. So as many of my French friends have told me, they would go to Aperol hours as children and they would have a special drink and that was non-alcoholic, but still very special to them. And so whatever is special to you can be an Aperol drink and I always kind of make that very clear. So you have a drink and then you always have something to snack on next to it. It can be a big snack or a little snack. It can be, often is a basket of potato chips or a little like crunchy salty things, olives that kind of variety in order to kind of whet your appetite and open up your palate for the rest of the night.Suzy Chase: How do you make shrimp cocktail French"Rebekah Peppler: Shrimp Cocktail, but Make It French. That's one of my favorite recipe titles. I had fun with with a lot of them, but that one was a good one. So to make it French, I just added this instead of the kind of classic cocktail sauce is this French remoulade that you're dipping shrimp in.Suzy Chase: One time when Dorie Greenspan was on this podcast, I asked her what I would get when I arrived at her house in Paris. And she said she would serve me Gougères. And on page 80, you have a recipe for XL Gougères. Can you tell me about these beauts? They're gorgeous.Rebekah Peppler: It's so funny when you said Dorie and what she would serve you. I was like, Oh, well it's Gougères it's Dorie's signature and I've been very fortunate to partake in many Gougères in her house in Paris and hers are incredible. My particular XL Gougères recipe in À Table is actually inspired by the bakery down the street from me has the most insane, massive Gougères that you, they kind of, they come out of the oven. I've timed this now sometime between like 10 and 11:30 in the morning. And so I, before I had a washer in my apartment, which I would walk down many, many, many flights of stairs to do my laundry at this laundromat. And it was right across the street from my favorite bakery. And so I would drop my stuff in the laundry. I would time it. So I would get there around the time that the Gougères would come out of the oven and then I would walk over and get myself this massive Gougères. And that would be my breakfast. And I've been wanting to make them at home ever since. And so at the bakery, they have a couple options. You can get them with like chorizo in them. You can get them the kind of standard traditional way, or you can get them with blue cheese. And so I decided to add crumbled blue cheese into, into my rendition an ode to my favorite bakery in Paris.Suzy Chase: This line you wrote is very deep, somewhere on your Instagram, but it goes.There's also a feeling of it being hard to truly ever be fully known because it's intensely hard to be your full, true self through constant interpretation and translation on both sides. I want to hear more about that.Rebekah Peppler: That that's in reference to my first relationship in France with this wonderful French woman. I felt very open to be my full self when I moved to France, because I didn't know anyone. And I was meeting people for the first time. And I think that's such an opportunity to kind of show yourself as, as you are in that moment, without all these kinds of things that people have placed on from knowing you for, for years or, or for your entire life. And so when I moved to Paris, I really like showed my true self and made my friends there with the person that I was. But at the same time, that like deeper nugget of like who you very much are realized in communication. And if you can't effectively communicate, or if there's misunderstandings or if you're, you know, in French, if you mispronounce a word, it can kind of mean something completely different. So this one, c'est pas mal which means, uh, literally it's not bad but me ex would, I would cook for her. And I was like, Oh, do you like it? And c'est pas mal. And I'm like, oh, that's not bad. That's like, I think that's like, I think that might be a diss on my cookie. And I'm like, I think I'm pretty good at this. Like, this is kind of part of my job. And I kind of let it go a few times. It just kept happening. And finally, I can't remember if it was her or if it was another friend who's a French speaker who kind of translated the translation for me. So when you say, c'est pas mal it's actually like, oh, this is great. Like, this is good. Like I like this. And when you say, c'est bon which means it's good and this all depends on inflection as well, but it can often mean it's okay. Like, it's, it's good. It's, it's like solid enough, but c'est pas mal is like, oh, this is, this is actually great. Like it's really good. And it was actually for expressing excitement. And so that was just one of the kind of lighthearted miscommunication moments that I had early on in my first kind of French/American relationship there.Suzy Chase: You wrote keep your bacon, egg, and cheese, your bloody mary, your Pedialyte, when I'm hung over, I make a wedge salad. I'm dying to hear about your wedge salad.Rebekah Peppler: Yeah, it's true. That head note comes from a very, honest place. That's what I, that's what I make when I'm hung over. And it does not matter where I am in the world. I crave like that kind of blue cheese dressing situation and like fresh lettuce with like bacon, which you're still, you know, you're getting in your bacon, egg, and cheese. I see the allure. And so for the version in À Table, I do a sucrine wedge and sucrine are just these beautiful, like small lettuces that are quite sweet and kind of look a little bit like a very small romaine with a very hardy crunch. And so they were kind of the perfect wedge that is also French. And then I top it with lardons. You can use bacon, shallots, radishes, and then the dressing has blue cheese, of course in it. But I also use a little bit of creme fresh to kind of heighten the Frenchness of it all.Suzy Chase: Your Instagram is amazing and I adore your photos from Paris, your food shots, your apartment drinks, the poems you post. I really like appetite from Paulann Petersen and your journey with COVID. I have to say you were so open about it. How was it opening up on social media and how are you feeling today?Rebekah Peppler: Thank you for all the compliments, but, especially bringing up the COVID experience. So I got sick with COVID very early on in the pandemic, March, 2020, you know, at the time we were told the symptoms were coughing and fever and that it would take two weeks and you'd be done unless you had to go to the hospital. And so after two weeks I was still very sick and it just kind of kept going. And then, I decided dark sharing a little bit about it. My main reason was because I wasn't seeing anyone else like me sharing this experience. And I knew that other people must be going through what I was going through. I thought that it would be important to kind of share it as the process goes along. I definitely was, you know, very careful and kept things private and kept things pretty professional. If you can put it that way, I was very much like a list-maker of like what my symptoms are and what I'm going through. And then talked a little bit about kind of the emotional unrest that was happening alongside that. But yeah, it just felt very important to share. And then as my kind of COVID progressed into long COVID, I felt like there were a lot of people reaching out to me, both friends and people I had not met previously who either were going through similar things or had questions or were just recently sick or on the other hand, no one in their life had gotten sick with COVID and I was their one touch point that felt really special for me to kind of hear when people would say, like, I'm more careful because of the story that you've been telling. And I hope that that, that translated into something that kept them at least a couple other people safe and not having to go through the same experience that I did and so many others did. I'm not fully better. I still have lingering symptoms you know, there's still so much that I used to be able to do that. I can't, but I have progressed so much in my recovery when I looked back at how sick I was, um, it's astonishing to me how articulate I was able to be, but also, and the stub tails into the question that you asked and kind of ties it back into À Table a little bit I had sent my manuscript for the book two weeks prior to kind of getting sick. And then I still had to go through all the phases that a cookbook goes through, design edits, you know, cover proofs and all these things. And so months into kind of being sick, I kind of gathered all my energy up and rested for days in advance and we finished some of the shots that we needed to finish. When I look back on both the posting that I did on Instagram and this book itself, it's a real testament to sheer force of will to get it done and love for the project itself and now when I see those images that we shot, when I was still very sick, it fills me with quite a bit of joy and gratitude for being able to kind of have those tucked into the book.Suzy Chase: A lot of people were thankful because when I was reading that I saw a very, very thoughtful PSA that you were writing along with these evocative photos. I want to say they were gorgeous photos, but you were really sick at the time, but there was just something beautiful about the photos and very thoughtful about what you're writing. Like you were letting people know this is what I'm going through, and I'm going to help you out too.Rebekah Peppler: To touch on your comment on how beautiful the photos were first thank you so much. But also I think that that just speaks to the fact that there is beauty in life. And I think that's something that I came back to many times, and I won't say that it was always this clear cut or easy for me to kind of admit, but life is beautiful and I feel very grateful for getting to continue with itSuzy Chase: In À Table I was reading, reading, reading, and got to page 200 where you wrote, there's a lot of chicken in this book and I'm fine with it. And I was just thinking, this is amazing there's so much chicken in this book. So last night for dinner, I made your recipe for Chicken Confit. Why Chicken Confit and not Duck Confit. And can you describe this recipe and why all the chicken?Rebekah Peppler: Absolutely. Yes, there is a lot of chicken in this book and I am very much fine with it. As you know, Duck Confit is a classic French dish that however duck is harder to find and it's more expensive. And to be honest for me, as much as I love Duck Confit I don't want to eat it all the time. Let's not like that's a, that's a very rich meal. And so after writing the Chicken Confit, I realized that it's, it's still rich. I mean, it's got, you know, five to six cups of olive oil that the chicken is cooking in and you should be using that olive oil for drizzling on other things and all that fun stuff. After you've used it for the Chicken Confit, it's still kind of reads light. It reads spring-like, there's leeks in it, there's a pod of garlic, which is amazing, and you can like smash that on bread, and like eat it as a, like a little toast the next day without any chicken at all. So that's kind of why I wrote the recipe as chicken rather than duck. I tested this recipe many times, but one time here in Los Angeles, actually with two of my friends, Alexis and Jamie, and I remember all of us just kind of like descending on the oil dredging our bread and it also, I think we had a baguette at that time and it's just, it's so flavorful and delicious and the chicken is I don't want to speak poorly of the chicken because it's very good, but the oil is for me where it's at.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinnerRebekah Peppler: Last night, we actually, um, picked up takeout as we kind of talked about a little bit. I'm still kind of dealing with the long COVID and I had a Thai Spice Soup from Night + Market Song, this really lovely spicy soup for dinner and kind of helped like nourish my body and make sure that I wasn't getting too run down. It was great. We got it with coconut rice and then I kind of go in and out of bouts of, of drinking and when I'm not feeling as well and that's what kind of, one of the triggers, my particular COVID experience. And so I've been drinking a lot of Ghia, which is this like wonderful non-alcoholic aperitif with just a little sparkling water and Meyer lemon and my partner had a glass of wine and I only looked at it like slightly longingly. And then I returned to my, to my drink.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Rebekah Peppler: Very easy if you know how to spell my name but I'm @RebekahPeppler on Instagram. It's R E B E K A H P E P P L E R. And I am also www.RebekahPeppler.com.Suzy Chase: This cookbook gives me so much hope and joy for people gathering together again. And I'm so glad you're feeling better. And thanks so much, Rebekah for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Rebekah Peppler: Thank you so much for having me and for your, for your wonderful thoughtful questions. It's been a true pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.