An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

There is great value in being able to say "yes" when people ask if there is anything they can do. By letting people pick herbs or slice bread instead of bringing a salad, you make your kitchen a universe in which you can give completely and ask for help. The more environments with that atmospheric makeup we can find or create, the better.

All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.

Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made - imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell... Meals' ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness. This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking.

If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith. We aren't often taught to cook like that, so when we watch people cook naturally, in what looks like an agreement between cook and cooked, we think that they were born with an ability to simply know that an egg is done, that the fish needs flipping, and that the soup needs salt. Instinct, whether on the ground or in the kitchen, is not a destination but a path.

But cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page. There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what's left; there should be looking at meals' remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become.

So you must simply pay attention, trust yourself, and decide.

Though plucking artichoke leaves doesn't mend all cracked spirits as firmly as pea shelling, it has its own curative power. There is a Dutch saying: “Bitter in the mouth cures the heart.” If you happen to have a friend shaken by heartache, hand over a bag of raw artichokes. Once she has relieved them of their leaves, encourage one brave bite. Between the meditative peeling and the bitter taste, she should be completely healed. If there are no artichokes around, raw dandelion greens are a good substitute.

The word instinct comes from a combination of in meaning “toward,” and stinguere meaning “to prick.” It doesn’t mean knowing anything, but pricking your way toward the answer.

The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod. Grappa is made from the spent skins and stems and seeds of wine grapes; marmalade from the peels of oranges. The wine behind grappa is great, but there are moments when only grappa will do; the fruit of the orange is delicious, but it cannot be satisfactorily spread. “The skins of onions, green tops from leeks, stems from herbs must all be swept directly into a pot instead of the garbage. Along with the bones from a chicken, raw or cooked, they are what it takes to make chicken stock, which you need never buy, once you decide to keep its ingredients instead of throwing them away. If you have bones from fish, it's fish stock. If there are bones from pork or lamb, you will have pork or lamb stock.

Food is what I love, and how I communicate love, and how I calm myself.

t smells in. Let the smell of hot tarmac in the summer remind you of a meal you ate the first time you landed in a hot place, when the ground smelled like it was melting. Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemon as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one. Then something about the wind off the sea will have settled in your mind, and carried the fried clams and squeeze of a lemon with it.

Good meat only seems so expensive because we eat meat like children taking bites out of the middles of sandwiches and throwing the rest away.

Or dispense with any heating and combining and buy a few dark chocolate bars. Break them into big squares and serve them in a tumble on a plate, with a glass of Scotch per person, which will make each appetite feel listened to, and provide a tiny anesthetic to the pain of letting go.

Substitute any vegetable that grows with its leafy head aboveground for another: a flower for a flower, a root for a root, shoot for shoot, stem for stem, tuber for tuber. (No rules apply to beets.

The managed grazing of pastured animals is as good for land as factory farming is bad for it.

There are certain stormy days when a sensible meal of chickpea soup won't do. That is when I turn to a secret cache of cans I keep, even though they are frivolous, for the strange weather that needs them. [...] It is as wise to be prepared for an impractical meal as for a practical one. If something so good or so bad has happened that only buttered toast and cuttlefish, or delicately whipped liver or goose neck, or pâté are appropriate, as long as you keep your pantry stocked with a few lovely, uncommon things, you can open it and be as well set up to celebrate as to survive.

Luckily we don’t have far to go. Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made—imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell.

You, of course, are not I, and it must be from someplace in you, not me, that you serve. If you like symmetry, you must line things up. If you feel most satisfied composing plates away from your table, do it happily, for it will be genuine and full of what is yours to offer. Only remember what is plainly and always true: the act of serving fulfills itself.

When not fully cooked, any vegetable seems starchy and indifferent: it hasn’t retained the virtues of being recently picked nor benefited from the development of sugars that comes with time and heat. There’s not much I dislike more than biting into a perfectly lovely vegetable and hearing it squeak.

Omelets, which provide the gracious foil of soft, simple egg, are especially good at making less dramatic meals from restaurant leftovers, which are usually so strongly seasoned that eating them untransformed the next day can feel like meeting someone at the breakfast table in full makeup.

Unless you are an aspiring laser beam, your microwave won’t teach you anything. Use yours as a bookshelf, or to store gadgets you don’t use.

1 shallot, finely chopped 1/2 teaspoon salt red or white wine vinegar 1 bunch parsley, leaves picked from stems and roughly chopped 1/2 clove garlic, chopped and pounded to a paste with a tiny bit of salt in a mortar with a pestle or on a cutting board 1 anchovy fillet, finely chopped 1 teaspoon capers, finely chopped 1/2 cup olive oil Put the shallot in a small mixing bowl. Add the salt and then enough vinegar to cover. Let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Drain the shallot of its vinegar, reserving it for a future vinaigrette. Mix the shallot and the rest of the ingredients together.

First, an egg is not an egg is not an egg. I don't know what to call the things that are produced by hens crowded into dirty cages, their beaks snipped, tricked into laying constantly. Whatever they are, they are only edible in the sense that we can cram anything down if we need to; their secrets merit airing, but not eating.