"An Everlasting Meal", by Tamar Adler, is an impressive, informed, invaluable inside look at the pleasure and practicality of food usage and cooking in a sustainable manner (see my review)

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

Reviving the inspiring message of M. F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf— written in 1942 during wartime shortages—An Everlasting Meal shows that cooking is the path to better eating.

Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs know: that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them.

She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.

MY REVIEW:  "An Everlasting Meal", by Tamar Adler, is an impressive, informed, invaluable inside look at the pleasure and practicality of food usage and cooking in a sustainable manner. Making the most of the flavors found in almost every part and particle of foods both common and exotic is not a new theory, nor is it one lacking in culinary satisfaction. On the contrary, learning to incorporate natural flavors and cooking essences into savory seasonings and sauces is a true treat for the taste buds. This is a carry-it-forward food plan that takes some skill in the kitchen, an organized mind, and a commitment to not letting valuable resources go to waste. Why throw it out and then have to go buy it again? Why not accept it, embrace it, and enjoy it? My favorite chapter in the book is "How to Live Well", and it glorifies one of the most humble, and most essential of all foods: the dried bean. Being from the South, I have an innate love for a bowl of brown beans with some boiled potatoes and a hunk of cornbread on the side. Add some sliced onions and slices of juicy home-grown tomatoes, and you have a peasant's meal fit for royalty! There are wonderful recipes and cooking tips throughout "An Everlasting Meal", but there is also a gentle reminder of how simple and soothing it can be to just cook and enjoy food with your family and friends.

Book Copy Gratis Simon & Schuster

Reviews

 

“An Everlasting Meal is beautifully intimate, approaching cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking…. Tamar is one of the great writers I know—her prose is exquisitely crafted, beautiful and clear-eyed and open, in the thoughtful spirit of M.F.K. Fisher. This is a book to sink into and read deeply.” —Alice Waters, from the Foreword

"It can be tricky, in this age of ethically charged supermarket choices, to remember that eating is an act of celebration. Tamar Adler's terrific book wisely presents itself as a series of how to’s—How To Boil Water, How to Have Balance, How to Live Well—with the suggestion that it's not only possible to do all these things, but in fact a pleasure. An Everlasting Meal provides the very best kind of lesson (reminding us we enjoy being taught), that there is real joy to be had in eating, and eating well." --Dan Barber, Chef/Co-Owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

“Tamar Adler understands a simple truth that seems to evade a lot of cookbook writers and self-proclaimed ‘foodies’: cooking well isn't about special equipment or exotic condiments or over-tested recipes (and it sure isn't about ‘quickfire challenges’ or kicking it up a notch). It's about learning some basics, respecting the ingredients, and developing a little culinary intuition, or maybe just plain common sense. A book can’t necessarily teach you how to do that, but An Everlasting Meal will almost certainly inspire you to teach yourself.” --Colman Andrews, author of The Country Cooking of Italy and Editorial Director of TheDailyMeal.com

“In this beautiful book, Tamar Adler explores the difference between frugal and resourceful cooking. Few people can turn the act of boiling water into poetry. Adler does. By the time you savor the last page, your kitchen will have transformed into a playground, a boudoir and a wide open field. An Everlasting Meal deserves to be an instant and everlasting culinary classic.” –Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved

"An Everlasting Meal is a great thrill to read. Anyone who cooks is engaged in a re-creation of the Enlightenment Age--beginning with alchemy and mystery, always grasping towards chemistry and a tasty supper. With this book, Tamar Adler has chronicled our epic. Her tone manages to make the reader almost feel like he is thinking out loud. A marvelous accomplishment." –Jack Hitt, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine

“Lessons so right and so eloquent that I think of them as homilies." --Corby Kummer, The New York Times Book Review

“Reads less like a cookbook than like a recipe for a delicious life.” --New York Magazine

"Reading [An Everlasting Meal] is like having a cooking teacher whispering suggestions in your ear.... Mindfulness, I’m discovering through this terrific book, can be delicious."
--Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

“Tamar Adler has written the best book on ‘cooking with economy and grace’ that I have read since MFK Fisher.”
--Michael Pollan

"What it really is is a book about how to live a good life: take the long view, give to others, learn from everything you do, and always, always, always mindfully enjoy what you are doing and what you’ve done. The fact you’ll learn to be a great cook is just a bonus." --Forbes.com
 

Tamar Adler

 

 

Tamar Adler is the author of Something Old, Something New: Classic Recipes Revived and An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.

 

Tamar worked as an editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2001 through 2004. Having cooked at Prune restaurant one summer, after leaving Harper’s, Tamar worked as a personal chef, wrote, and did research for Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

In 2005 Tamar moved to Athens, Georgia, to help friends open Farm 255, where she was the head-chef until leaving for California in 2007. She was hired at Chez Panisse a few weeks after arriving and spent a year and a half cooking there, also co-founding and directing the second meat CSA in the country, and leading Slow Food Berkeley.

In 2009, Tamar left Chez Panisse to write An Everlasting Meal. Tamar had a column in the New York Times Magazine for a year and a half. She is now a contributing editor at Vogue Magazine.

Tamar’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Leader, Mother Jones, Salon.com, Fine Cooking, Gilt Taste, the New Yorker.com, the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, the Art of Eating, and other publications.

http://www.tamareadler.com/