I’m not sure there’s another cook currently writing who has the power to transform her readers’ relationships to their own kitchens quite like Tamar Adler. The Vogue contributing editor’s last book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, envisioned a world in which no leftover or spare ingredient goes to waste, and her latest effort, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, is no less ambitious. In a collection of food-related journal entries, Adler seeks to assure those of us who occasionally (or more than occasionally) feel wholly uninspired by cooking that—psst—she’s no different.
Somewhat ironically, for a book born out of its author’s depression, Feast on Your Life is one of the most invigorating and, yes, life-affirming tributes to an existence bookended by meals since Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. Vogue spoke to Adler about the healing power of cooking, the simple perfection of eggs on toast, her MVP recipes (including one reprinted here), and the one meal she’d choose if she had to eat the same thing from her book for a month.
Vogue: How did the spark for this book get lit for you?
Tamar Adler: I was really depressed, and it’s funny to be talking about it now, because I think I’m probably about to get really depressed again. When I look at the timing of it, it was not long after my last book was published. There’s a really sort of sad time after a book comes out, where you’ve been working on something and you have this whole team working on it, and people are talking about it, and then it’s just over. It was a combination of all of that happening, and then a sort of larger midlife reckoning of, Wow, I really thought that I was going to be more successful or happier, or something. Maybe not happier, but I thought I’d have more money and more success, and it just kind of came at me like a tidal wave, and I got really depressed.
I went the conventional route of upping my Prozac and talking to my therapist and stopping drinking, but then my husband Pete got me to start a gratitude journal. I was like, “I don’t want to do that. That’s cheesy.” And then, literally, as soon as I started, I was like, “Oh God, this really is pretty transformative.” Right after I wrote the first entry, it felt like when you’re using a chisel to open a wheel of Parmesan, and you’re like, Oh, wow, that’s cracking open along an interesting line. That’s kind of how it felt in my mind. I did that for a while, and then I was talking to my agent about it. We were talking about Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and the utility of recording those observations, and she suggested that I do it in the kitchen for a week and sort of see how it felt. I did, and I felt like it was the same practice, but with enough specificity and firm enough constraints to be creatively interesting and maybe helpful. I started it in the solipsistic vacuum that a depressed person exists in, but then I sort of realized, especially when it was done, that, like, Oh, my God, almost everybody is a semi-depressed person.
Are there meals, recipes, or go-tos from the book that you feel lend themselves particularly well to being cooked when you don’t feel like cooking?
Looking through the book, I definitely notice a lot of eggs. I think there are a few reasons for that, ranging from practicality to poetry. It’s sort of the easiest thing that you can make, and it can become any meal, right? An egg on toast is half my meals in my life, or an egg on rice. There’s a reason people get so metaphysical about eggs, even beyond the role that we know they play in anything’s creation; their symmetry and lack of symmetry, once you crack them open, is amazing, and the color of a yolk is amazing. They’re almost like a container for the magic that exists in closely observing any phenomenon in cooking, you know? You crack it open, and you immediately see these two different colors, these two different consistencies, and you start noticing that there’s so much there. I would say that an egg is tailor-made for simple cooking and observation.
Also, now that we’ve reached the holidays, the sort of foundation of all Thanksgiving cooking is cooking down onion and fennel and celery and maybe some garlic, and then sage and those warming smells; we cook all that in butter for your stuffing or for your turkey or whatever, and you’re like, Wow, that smells like home, within a a Western European or North American cooking tradition. I found, lots of times, that the process of cooking garlic and fat was an incredibly reassuring one; the smell of cooking garlic or cooking onion would make me feel like, Right, okay, cooking is happening, I can do this, even if you just mixed that with pasta and maybe some melted anchovies and breadcrumbs.
What was your writing process for Feast on Your Life like, compared to your previous books?
Mostly, I tried to do other things that I might or might not finish doing. I tried to write other things and then carried this idea around for the day that I had to find something beautiful. Sometimes that happened really early in the day, and sometimes it happened late in the day, but it mostly, you know, didn’t. I wasn’t trying to make something in particular with this book; I was just trying to be a little bit less sad and make sure to write it down. It kind of looked like a regular depressed person trying to get my Vogue pieces done, and then trying to write a plot for a novel that still hasn’t happened, or think about writing a memoir about my Israeli father, and then not get past the first page to empty out a cabinet instead. But I was pretty diligent about recording something every day. They weren’t all good. Some of them were bad, so I had to take them out and replace them. But it was a practice, and that was good for me and different than any of my other writing.
I really like how Feast on Your Life includes some recipes, but doesn’t overwhelm the reader with them. How did you find that balance?
I thought that people would want more of them, and then my editor was like, “No, I don’t think so,” and a friend of mine read a little bit and was like, “No, I don’t think so.” I just put in the granola one at first, and then my editor asked for the guacamole one. Then there’s a recipe that I really love—I think it’s one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made, and one of the most delicious recipes I ever developed—and it’s in a book of mine that kind of nobody read, so I put it in in the hopes of people reading it.
Okay, I have to know which recipe it is!
It’s the petits pois à la Française.
If you had to eat the same meal you mention in the book every day for a month, which would you choose?
There was a meal that I cooked for friends who were in from California, and it was chicken Milanese and wild mushrooms with tarragon and spring onions, and then nettles and kale and Bandol rosé, and it was so good.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
This recipe is in The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. I use it so often that my own copy of the book opens naturally to its page and lies there, patiently, like a willing spell in a book of sorcery.
Ingredients
- 10 cups whole rolled oats
- 2 1/2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut
- 2 cups sesame seeds
- 1 cup olive oil
- 1 1⁄2 cups maple syrup
- 1 scant cup brown sugar (light or dark)
- 2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 300°F.
- In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients. Spread onto two sheet pans and bake for 20 minutes.
- Remove and stir and rotate and return to the oven, stirring and rotating every 15 minutes until the granola is dry and toasted, another 30 to 40 minutes.
- Let cool, then store in airtight jars.
Heat the oven to 300°F. In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients. Spread onto two sheet pans and bake for 20 minutes. Remove and stir and rotate and return to the oven, stirring and rotating every 15 minutes until the granola is dry and toasted, another 30 to 40 minutes. Let cool, then store in airtight jars.
