We are getting so excited and inspired (and hungry) watching your submissions roll in for our upcoming Food issue! In the spirit of the food theme, we put together this collection of Roomies’ favourite cookbooks for writers.
We are getting so excited and inspired (and hungry) watching your submissions roll in for our upcoming Food issue! In the spirit of the food theme, we put together this collection of Roomies’ favourite cookbooks for writers. These books all feature recipes, but also include fiction, memoir, and other literary elements.
For those of us who are always too busy, or would just rather be reading or writing than preparing meals, Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal offers a persuasive argument (disguised in the form of a mesmerizing narrative) that will hypnotize the busiest of us into miraculously spending more time in the kitchen.
Adler’s fad-adverse approach to feeding ourselves is about fully utilizing sensible kitchen tools, accessible ingredients, and the abandoned ones many of us consider to be compost and trash. Although her food memoir is peppered with timeless recipes, the writer and chef insists that cookbooks and recipes, including hers, should not be treated like religious edicts. Instead, what she accomplishes with her writing is instilling in her readers an intuition in the kitchen that they might not have been in tune with before, leaving them more imaginative and composed the next time they find themselves in a supermarket aisle or in front of their kitchen counter.
Adler debunks myths about boiling meat, demonstrates the delightful possibilities of the most mundane ingredients, and most importantly, the writer demystifies the act of cooking, which has somehow become elusive in the face of Michelin Starred restaurants and millions of Yelp reviews.
There’s a chapter dedicated to eggs (like a love song), a chapter about finding one’s way back into the kitchen if one was ever there before, and another on readily turning kitchen setbacks into triumphs. In this food-obsessed generation of foodies and superfood worshippers, An Everlasting Meal reminds those of us who eat that when it comes to cooking and eating, we should go back to basics—not because it’s authentic—but because it just makes sense.
