Simple Food for the Good Life: Random Acts of Cooking and Pithy Quotations

by Helen Nearing, Barbara Damrosch (Foreword by)

Fifty years before the phrase "simple living" became fashionable, Helen and Scott Nearing were living their celebrated "Good Life" on homesteads first in Vermont, then in Maine. All the way to their ninth decades, the Nearings grew their own food, built their own buildings, and fought an eloquent combat against the silliness of America's infatuation with consumer goods and refined foods. They also wrote or co-wrote more than thirty books, many of which are now being brought back into print by the Good Life Center and Chelsea Green. Simple Food for the Good Life is a jovial collection of "quips, quotes, and one-of-a-kind recipes meant to amuse and intrigue all of those who find themselves in the kitchen, willingly or otherwise." Recipes such as Horse Chow, Scott's Emulsion, Crusty Carrot Croakers, Raw Beet Borscht, Creamy Blueberry Soup, and Super Salad for a Crowd should improve the mood as well as whet the appetite of any guest. Here is an antidote for the whole foods enthusiast who is "fed up" with the anxieties and drudgeries of preparing fancy meals with stylish, expensive, hard-to-find ingredients. This celebration of salads, leftovers, raw foods, and homegrown fruits and vegetables takes the straightest imaginable route from their stem or vine to your table. "The funniest, crankiest, most ambivalent cookbook you'll ever read," said Food & Wine magazine. "This is more than a mere cookbook," said Health Science "It belongs to the category of classics, destined to be remembered through the ages." Among Helen Nearing's numerous books is Chelsea Green's Loving and Leaving the Good Life , a memoir of her fifty-year marriage to Scott Nearing and the story of Scott's deliberate death at the age of one hundred. Helen and Scott Nearing's final homestead in Harborside, Maine, has been established in perpetuity as an educational progam under the name of The Good Life Center.

Genres: Food, Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Cooking, Vegetarian

309 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1985

About the author

Helen Knothe Nearing was an American author and advocate of simple living. She and Scott Nearing started a relationship in 1928 and married nearly 20 years later, on December 12, 1947.[3][3] The couple lived in rural Vermont where they grew much of their food and erected nine stone buildings over the course of two decades. They earned money by producing maple syrup and sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures. (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brigid · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the blogs I follow (can’t remember which one – sorry!) recently mentioned this book by famous homesteader Helen Nearing, so I decided to check it out. It arrived quickly on interlibrary loan from a mystery library abbreviated AMO (Amarillo is my guess), and I perused it even faster.

Nearing claims not to cook, so what follows, she reasons, is not really a cookbook. In a sense, it’s true. The chapters do not contain recipes so much as methods or ideas for using certain ingredients. Each dish is incredibly simple, as the title claims, containing a short list of items and nearly effortless instructions. As a result, I would recommend this book for brand-new cooks, people with little time, or new vegetarians. For me, it was almost useless. I already know how to sauté veggies or soak grains.

However, what saved it, for me, was Nearing’s amusing tone and outlook. She is very matter-of-fact and learned, which gives the book a better flow than most traditional cookbooks. She espouses a diet of “hearty, harmless food” (p. 8) and hopes to reach “those frugal, abstemious folk who eat to nourish their bodies and leave self-indulgent delicacies to the gourmets.” What you see is what you get here.

Though this isn’t entirely my style of eating, I respect her efforts and her honesty. However, one thing bothered me: she claims to “drink no milk” and then qualifies that claim with all the dairy she does consume (yogurt, cottage cheese, occasional yogurt), all of which are milk-based. She also includes many recipes containing butter. The inconsistency, following on a very finger-wagging tirade against eating flesh, was a bit hypocritical.

Nonetheless, the book is a quick, easy read, and though it won’t win any awards for innovation, I appreciated her views on eating.

[Libby]

A weird book. Is it a food book, written by a woman who claims to not like food very much and not to want to spend much time or thought on it? Is it a cookbook written by a woman who says she hates to cook, and indeed backs that up by serving mostly raw food or things that take less than 20 minutes to make? She's also a vegetarian. I really didn't find her funny, I just found her negative. And I do love food, and I'm not much on negativity. DNF

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and her strong and interesting opinions.

While I'm not sure I'm going to follow it, I loved to hear her state that we overeat because food is too tasty and varied, so she does not aim to do that. It's a cookbook where the cook doesn't care if the food is tasty or interesting. I love it! This is backed up by research BTW. People will eat much more of a snack mix than a single thing like pretzels.

Another opinion is that we should hardly need to drink any beverages, because food contains all the water we need. She said as hardworking farmers they barely drank a glass a week, though in hot weather it might be a glass a day. It got me thinking about how I feel a need to have a water bottle on hand all the time, when even in college I never did. It started in the '90s. I can't account for it, but her opinion made me wonder if it's because of changes in what we eat? Are we eating more saltier drier food?

I was genuinely baffled, though, as to why she came out *strongly* against dairy, on ethical and health grounds, in the comment section which makes up the first part of the book, and then I'd say 90% of the recipes include dairy. She admitted in the comments that she is not "consistent in our avoidance of harm to animals, " not a "purist," and eats some occasionally. The text indicated it was something they ate in the side, or when traveling. But she was encouraging people not to, so I expected at most a few recipes with dairy. The only explanation I can think of is that she thinks of them as only a small number of types of dairy. So butter and / or sour cream or buttermilk is in almost everything, but it's only three things?

[Ryanofthenorth · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a philosophy of food than a true cookbook, lots of great ideas from a woman who lived the back to the land experience for all of her life. As with most idealists, some of the rants border on the sanctimonious(the tirade against meat eaters was especially vehement), but if you can get past that there is plenty of great info in this book.

[Iris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn't get myself to finish it... It seems interesting in some ways, but the writting and abuse of quotes was too much for me, unfortunately.

[Ellen Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve loved Scott and Helen Nearing’s books for years so I was very excited to find a copy of Simple Food for the Good Life by Helen Nearing. Scott and Helen Nearing moved from New York City to a dilapidated farmhouse in Vermont in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression.

According to the book cover… Helen and Scott Nearing are America’s legendary homesteaders. Their way of life is recounted in more than thirty books, including Helen’s Loving and Leaving the Good Life, The Maple Sugar Book, and Wise Words for the Good Life. Helen Nearing died in 1995. The Nearing farmstead in Harborside, Maine (where they moved in 1952) has been preserved for posterity, and is now open to the public as The Good Life Center.

Helen and Scott Nearing were vegetarians so it goes without saying that these recipes contain no meat. The recipes do contain both eggs and dairy products. What I didn’t know was that Helen Nearing was also very interested in raw foods so many of these recipes involve no cooking.

The first six chapters of the book contain no recipes at all and are more an explanation of Helen’s philosophy on life in general and on cooking specifically. The book is dotted with quotations (some short and some long) from a variety of older cookbooks (1800s and early 1900s).

The recipes contained in the book are very simple, healthy recipes. You won’t find recipes calling for boxed ingredients or exotic spices. Recipes sections include breakfasts, soups, salads, vegetables, herbs, casseroles, baked goods, desserts, beverages and even a section on storing and preserving foods.

Many of her recipes are written with the assumption that you have your own canned or fresh garden produce. Instead of stating a sixteen ounce can of corn in her ingredients’ list, she will state two cups corn, fresh cut from the cob. The herbs that she cooks with are fresh and not dried. Her sweeteners include maple syrup and honey instead of white sugar.

If you’re looking for a cookbook that focuses on healthy, easy to cook meals, I highly recommend Simple Food for the Good Life. These recipes are easy enough for a novice cook to make and would also appeal to anyone who is looking for a way to use up garden produce, get a start on using raw foods or just learn more about the Nearing’s way of life. This book should also appeal to anyone interested in the homesteading and preparedness way of life. It's filled with tiny tidbits of knowledge that we all need

[Another · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good ideas for simple cooking here. Loved the quotations that begin each section, and are scattered throughout the book.

I do find her just the tiniest bit self righteous and sanctimonious at some points.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evidently I gave it two stars when I read it long ago. Now I’m giving it 4 and cooking more like Helen. I love how cranky she is and damn if she doesn’t make a ton of sense. Power to the simple food! Healthy. Awesome. And good grief, she’s the bomb.

[jen8998 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nearing is pretty much anti-cooking, espousing raw foods whenever possible. It's the anti-seasoning take that really got me. It's intriguing to think about going back to basics with cooking but Nearing endorses a fairly bland diet with some rather unappetizing recipe names (horse chow, anyone?).

[Judith]

As Helen Nearing says she's NO COOK. This is a fabulous book with comments from really old cookbooks and housekeeping books. If you like easy ways to eat this is your book.

[Suzanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The formatting on the Kindle edition was tough reading, but this is good reading for those interested in the homesteading that Helen Nearing helped to inspire in the 1960s and 1970s.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting approach. It's an aesthetic balance to some of the scientifically based champions for better health through diet.

[Jennybeast · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see what she's getting at, but I don't think I want to adopt the philosophy that if it doesn't taste that good, well then you won't overeat, will you? Funny.

[Bree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes:
would love if it weren't for the bashing of meat-eaters
simple ideas really helped me when I first started cooking
not as useful to me anymore

[Elizabeth Lund · Rating 4 out of 5]

unusual; worth a read