An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

Cooking is both simpler and more necessary than we imagine.

Try poaching eggs directly in chicken broth. This is delicious if philosophically perplexing.

This is not a trick, but an expression of the fact that things taste good with cream added.

This is partly because it takes a while to do, and there is bread and prosciutto, and chilled white wine, and chillier March air;

Unless you are an aspiring laser beam, your microwave won’t teach you anything.

Turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its humbled surfaces prickle with feeling. — Robert Capon, The Supper of the Lamb

which is that if you have it, all you need to turn it into a meal is whatever else you have.

basing an opinion of their merit on prior experience is very much like deciding you don’t like Bach after having heard the Goldberg Variations played on kazoo.

If you didn’t put two cups of beans in a pot of cold water last night, get on the bandwagon today by putting them in a pot, covering them with five inches of water, bringing it to a boil, turning off the heat, and leaving them sitting in hot water, covered, for an hour. Then drain them and cover them with new water. This has the same effect as overnight soaking and is a good alternative.

Tuscan cooks are extravagant with good olive oil, pressed from dark trees, and with vegetable scraps and Parmesan rinds, which, along with salt and more of that fine oil, make transcendent pots of beans.

I make notes to myself after meals, and there are enough torn pieces of paper attesting that “The best bean broth has fennel in it!” for it to have become axiomatic.

They also need an immoderate, Tuscan amount of olive oil.

Tuscan food is based as much on the broth made by the beans on which Tuscans lavish their affection as on the beans themselves. Harold

If you have the ingredients to make either one of those soups, two of which are beans and their broth, it means you’re cooking steadily, buying good ingredients and saving the parts of them you don’t cook immediately to cook later.

It was a simple meal, and it was calming.

Although Southerners have never been our most pacific citizens, it’s true that we all fight less when we eat well, which an abundance of grits guarantees.

but I will remember how the day felt on my face, and my creative soft self will have been awakened. So I listen hard. I listen with the purpose of remembering. And

Or I read passages from children’s books, which often contain the most limpid descriptions of food.

If tomato sauce still tastes acidic, give everyone a bowl of olives and a stern look and cook the sauce until it mellows out.

Only remember what is plainly and always true: the act of serving fulfills itself. It doesn’t matter what you serve.