Tamar Adler, James Beard and IACP Award winning author, on haer new book, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day is a 365-day account of the small delights of cooking, eating, and living well.
Lately, guzzling directly from the food influencer firehose has become a recipe for my own kitchen malaise. You may know the kind of social media videos I’m talking about. Well-manicured hands whip up a burnished Basque cheesecake or drizzle a car payment’s worth of single origin olive oil in a surreally sun-streaked kitchen. On-camera messiness—accidental spills, rumpled linen napkins, spent citrus peels on the cutting board—is a visual signpost: “You can do this, too.” The truth is that their exacting imperfection is as choreographed as anything Martha Stewart ever let hit TV.
For anyone else who has grown weary of watching people on the internet produce a beautiful simulacrum of kitchen life, Tamar Adler’s latest book, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, may help bring you back to your culinary center, as it did me. Sometimes, we forget about these essential joys: of eating well and sharing food with each other, without judgement for falling short in the million small ways we do every day. Her latest book is a timely reminder, rendered in her distinctive lyrical prose.
Adler, a James Beard and IACP Award–winning author of An Everlasting Meal, Something Old, Something New, and the bestselling The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, is known for poetically pinpointing the needful beauty of utility and resourcefulness in the kitchen. A former chef who cooked at Chez Panisse, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Prune, her writing carries a deep reverence for seasonality and the very animal desire we humans have to be in sync with our environment.
After facing what she describes in Feast on Your Life’s introduction as “a bout of crippling depression,” Adler’s husband suggested that she start documenting what delighted her. “That same night,” she writes, “I wrote a list and, for the first time in weeks, found respite from my despair.”
The resulting mindfulness-exercise-turned-manuscript contains 365 days worth of entries that span a multitude of pleasures, from picking cherries to a historically minded rumination on the simplicity and ingeniousness of Roman pasta sauces.
“It was so helpful to have to put into words again and again all the ways the imperfect could be,” she says. “There are so many times in the book where the place I find delight is in a place that you would not call objectively beautiful, and maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been on a quest for a frisson of joy.”
Reading the book helped reignite my own kindred feelings for the friction-filled routines of feeding myself, my husband, and our two small children—a task often tainted by obligation and fatigue.
Particularly aching in their ephemerality are the passages where Adler describes cooking for and sharing food with her seven-year-old son. She dutifully cuts the “offending yolk” from his fried eggs and puts it to good use in a lunchtime dressing and eats the melted chocolate from a croissant he warmed himself in the oven, whose “buttery shards always remain, probably eternally.” In one early entry that sent my heart into the top of my throat, she writes, “I can taste my son’s food simply by sitting near him.”
Kids, with their sensitive palates, have a way of shaking an enthusiastic cook and their well-provisioned pantry to their core. Cooking for them is often spiceless, thankless, and littered with an unthinkable amount of food waste. But, as Adler tenderly observes, they are developing their own relationship with food in a way that can coexist with our own.
“My son, given that I am a cook and a writer, was of course going to be a food-resistent kid,” she says. “I had to decide early on how that was going to fall with me, and I decided to be totally okay, super mellow about it. But that didn’t mean I enjoyed it. The process of writing about it made me actually enjoy it. I wasn’t suffering at the removal of the yolk, but getting to contemplate a yolk while doing it made the story mine.”
Adler, who has struggled with clinical depression since childhood, says one of the things she most wanted to discuss in the promotion of Feast on Your Life was the experience of dealing with her mental health issues. “It’s a tough condition to have when your life’s work ebbs and flows, because you’re guaranteed to feel like absolute shit about yourself in between,” she says. “For lots of reasons, depressed people tend to be more creative and it’s really depressing to be a creative person.”
Throughout the book, she intentionally presses a finger into the bruise where pleasure and pain intermingle. While cooking polenta, she registers its “funny, dangerous” splutters. She attends a funeral where the family’s beloved matriarch planned the menu for her own memorial, from cocktails through dessert. Walking the streets of Chinatown, she notes that the fragrant scents of star anise and five-spice power in the air meld with the fetid smell of rotting greens.
The less-pleasant realities of cooking, eating, and sharing meals with other people are central to their experience. By glossing over them or shooing them out of our memories, we distort the truth and move the goalpost of daily joy further out of reach.
In one entry, Adler describes cooking dinner for her in-laws after a long day in the garden before they drove back to Vermont. “It was a meal where everything was just a little bit not as good as it could have been,” she recalls. The vinaigrette was a little too acidic, the potato-boiling water was undersalted. “I knew it wasn’t great. It was unbalanced. But I was like, you know what? The generous thing for me to do right now is to dress the salad. They don’t want to eat perfectly seasoned potatoes. They want to eat dinner with us and drive home before it gets dark.”
“My delight on that day was this pretty mediocre meal I served to my in-laws,” she adds. “And my ego can just take a rest.”
For those who live in the Region, there is the delight of stumbling upon familiar names on many pages. Adler, who has called Hudson home for over a decade, rhapsodically catalogues the smells at Mel the Baker, enjoys an intimate Persian Nowruz dinner at Cafe Mutton, and buys avocados at Rolling Grocer. (For the A+ locavore, there are also a handful of descriptions of places and foods without names to guess, too.)
For Adler, who moved with her family to Spain for a year at the end of this summer, the book is also a love letter to the place where she has built her life and raised her son. As part of her New-York-only promotion for the book, she is returning to the Hudson Valley next week for two appearances. On Tuesday, December 2 she will be in conversation with Cafe Mutton chef/owner Shaina Loew-Banayan at Spotty Dog Books in Hudson at 7pm, and with Lacy Schwartz Delgado on Friday, December 7 at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck at 7pm.
Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day will be released on December 2.
