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Tamar Adler Cures Your Takeout Addiction

The writer and chef dishes on her new book, cooking in California vs. NYC, and the only five ingredients you really need in your pantry.

| Fri Jan. 13, 2012 7:00 AM EST

Quick: You're staring down assorted vegetable tops, three half-empty jars of condiments, and a quarter cup of last night's takeout. What's your first thought? If you didn't answer "dinner," you may want to pick up An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace. Its author, Tamar Adler, has mastered the art of what she calls "catching your own tail": transforming whatever odds and ends your pantry has to offer into deeply satisfying meals—a practice which also happens to reduce grocery bills and eliminate food waste. I chatted with Tamar about her transition from magazine editor (she worked at Harper's) to high-end chef (she cooked at New York City's Prune and Berkeley's Chez Panisse) to book author, and picked her brain about kicking my embarrassing restaurant-food habit.

Mother Jones: Let's hear about the path that you took from magazine editor to chef.

Tamar Adler: I loved my job at Harper's, but the whole time I was there, I observed that I was thinking and creating mostly in the realm of food. I spent my lunches at the farmers market. I literally had baskets of mushrooms and artichokes in my office. I was constantly bringing in things that I had made. It took me like two years to hear a smaller voice that was like, if almost all of my energy is going into this other thing, maybe I should think about vocation and avocation and switch those around. And so I went to my favorite restaurant, which was around the corner from our office, and petitioned the chef to let me work there in secret. And pretty much she let me come in just 'cause she liked my letter (though she's incredibly tempermental). So I cooked there for three months on Saturdays. But I felt like I wasn't doing a good enough job as an editor and, working just one day a week as a cook, I wasn't getting good enough for my job to be really rewarding. So I went back to Harper's and a year later I just quit.

MJ: Since then, you've cooked in a bunch of places, including both New York and California. Have you noticed differences in people's attitudes toward food and food culture in New York City versus the Bay Area?

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TA: There are incredible differences. The metabolism for everything in New York is so high. So food falls into that pace. So that even though [food] is one of our basic needs, and one of the things that gives us pleasure on a much more primal and much harder to define level than something like fashion—it really is a trend [in New York City], even though it's much more like sleep or sex or shelter. And that's not as true in the Bay. I try not to say things like this because I think they get written off—but there is an absolute connection in the Bay Area between the way people live and where their food is grown and how it gets to them. That's just completely absent from most people's relationship to food in New York.

MJ: Now you're working with kids in New York City's edible schoolyard. That must be different from your previous gigs.

TA: Well, I was a line cook, and line cooking also is a great analogue for almost any problem solving you could ever have to do. In a battle situation, I would probably choose a line cook over a fireman.

MJ: So if you could only write or only cook, which one would you choose?

TA: If I couldn't cook I would write about hunger, and the hunger I had for cooking, or for food, and so in a way I'd be doing both. Because so much of cooking is about our needs and hungers, and the edges of our hunger are what makes eating as gratifying as it is. I couldn't cook about not writing, though.

MJ: Lately it seems like we're in an era of the chef-celebrity. What do you think that's about?

TA: On some level, I feel like by making chefs into celebrities, we're kind of crying for help. Look, what characterizes celebrity is its unavailability to any of us, and how little it has to do with the normal person's life. I mean, I am grossed out by an obsessive relationship with food. Like, you want bacon in everything. Or when people feel better if they've been to every new restaurant or read food blogs. But, I think, again, all of that is a symptom of the fact that we know we haven't been thinking about this in the right way, but we do care. 

MJ: What's your favorite cookbook?

TA: It's called Simple French Food by Richard Olney. It's so beautiful. The table of contents reads like a gastronomical poem. There are four recipes for bread and onion soups, one of which essentially is just steeping stale bread in red wine. He's incredibly iconoclastic.

MJ: Let's pretend I had space in my kitchen for only five ingredients, which five would those be?

TA: Olive oil. Salt. Red wine vinegar. Eggs. Then…this is a tough one. It's either bread or something green. It's probably a loaf of good bread. And if you could perch a head of garlic on top of the olive oil bottle, I would recommend it.

MJ: And if I just happened to make a pantry expansion and I could fit one vegetable in it, which vegetable should it be?

TA: A green, like a Tuscan kale.

MJ: Let's pretend that I got an even bigger pantry and I was confronted in the market one day with two seemingly identical tomatoes—one of them organic from Mexico and the other local but not organic. Which one would I choose?

TA: Well, I would choose the local one, for sure. I just don't think that food is meant to go very far. Organic is one of those words that's obviously been emptied out. Originally it referred to a much more integrated system of dealing with food. And that doesn't include putting stuff in trucks from another country and driving it across the national border.

MJ: Which ingredients do you think are worth buying the really good versions of?

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