An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler (Scribner, 272 pp., $25)

Cooking With Economy and Grace says it all. Dedicated to “all amateur cooks,” this is a book of beautifully written essays, simultaneously meditative and practical, about how to appreciate and use what you have and how to prepare it appropriately with a minimum of fuss, space, equipment, or waste. Inspired by MFK Fisher’s How To Cook a Wolf, written in wartime 1942, Adler’s volume revisits Fisher’s premise that imagination, not money, is key to producing flavorful and satisfying meals.

Adler, once an editor at Harper’s magazine, loves reading and writing and cooking. After working in the kitchens of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune and Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, she developed her own approach to preparing food with instinct and thrift, deriving pleasure from both process and results. For example, her system for turning an ovenfull of fresh vegetables into a week’s worth of dishes is a brilliant answer to the perennial community-supported agriculture box question. “By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once. … You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse ….”

Although full of delicious and useful ideas, the book is less about recipes than thinking about food and what to do with it. “A meal is cooked by the mind, heart, and hands of the cook, not by her pots and pans,” she says. “Consider … not filling your kitchen with tools, but becoming, rather, the kind of cook who doesn’t need them.” An Everlasting Meal helps us become that kind of cook.

This article appears in December 9 • 2011.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.