An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

By Tamar Adler

An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler should be read immediately by everyone with an interest in cooking and food. Amateur chefs the world over will appreciate these beautiful little essays that possess the power to change the way we approach food. With fine language and a sly sense of humor, Adler provides a thousand tiny revelations about our relationship to cooking, from properly salted water (“like the sea”), or how long to simmer beans (until they are “swelled like the fat boy in his prime,” an aphorism Adler borrowed from food writer Clementine Paddleford), to a use for the discarded stems of broccoli and kale (“core pesto”, which I can attest is brilliant on toast). In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, and with a nod to Robert Farrar Capon's wonderful and under appreciated Supper of the Lamb, An Everlasting Meal is a lovely (and useful) meditation on the limitless pleasures discovered in the quotidian kitchen.