Gathering with family, friends, and even strangers for a meal provides a space to listen and learn. Often, those exchanges can be more nourishing than an appetizing spread, displacing feelings of isolation and discord. In this roundup of recent cookbooks, authors share how their personal creative processes in the kitchen – whether that’s keeping things simple, contemplating the history of a recipe, or being inspired by the beauty of one’s surroundings – can have a harmonizing, restorative effect.
Samin Nosrat made her first splash in the cookbook world with the bestselling “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking” in 2017 and a 2018 Netflix docuseries of the same name. She returns with Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love. Similar to her first cookbook, the author supplies a bounty of foundational tips, such as how to choose and store the best ingredients and how to work efficiently with kitchen tools. But more importantly, “Good Things” offers recipes to support the communal experience of dinnertime.
Nosrat emphasizes that the effort spent on a dish shouldn’t take precedence over spending time with those who have gathered to eat. The fuss and mess aren’t worth it. It’s a lesson she learned when cooking a birthday party meal for her friend’s young son. After biting into a delicious taco, he said the only thing missing from his party was Nosrat, who was busy in the kitchen frying up perfect fish. “I’ve been trying to put what I learned from Orion that day into practice,” Nosrat writes. “I spend less energy trying to do everything for everyone. Instead, I rely on a handful of recipes I think of as small, welcoming gestures and focus on spending quality time outside the kitchen with the people I love.”
Why We Wrote This
In this roundup of cookbooks, authors like Jacques Pépin and Samin Nosrat share how their personal creative processes in the kitchen can have a harmonizing, restorative effect.
“Good Things” is a meditation on those gestures that feed the soul as much as it is a cookbook for readers wanting to create a solid dinner ritual with friends and family.
