38. An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler

It's a first for Olman's Fifty, a cookbook!  Good friends gave this to me for my birthday years ago.  I am not a natural cook and have never had much interest in cooking but have been forced into it by circumstance.  Personally, I have very simple tastes and can eat the same thing every day (I literally lived on rice from a rice cooker, a can of goya beans with cheese shredded on top as my dinner for most nights or years as a bachelor).  Unfortunately, others around me have more varied needs without the means or will to provide it for themselves, so it falls on me.  Many of my friends are hardcore foodies and I know a couple of incredible cooks, so I have also benefited from their delicious skills and good taste and have over the time developed a pretty sophisticated pallet in some areas (I have become kind of a BBQ snob for instance).  My mother is also an excellent cook and while I only really started paying conscious attention to her techniques in recent years, I realize that I did absorb some fundamental principles at an early stage.  

I started An Everlasting Meal when I first got it, but it is so dense with practical advice, that I had to put it down.  The plan was to read a little bit at a time and try her techniques as they came along, but instead it just gathered dust. I decided instead to read it almost straight through and then go back to it and try the various recipes and techniques and perhaps (horror!) mark it up with notes and stickies.  

First off, the philosophy and techniques in this book are excellent.  So many people in this fear and gadget-addicted age are obsessed with sterility and wellness but think that healthy and organic means individually wrapped in plastic and throw away anything that doesn't make their perfect instagram image.  This book will teach you how to use all the food and where to find real flavour in your food.  This is pretty much how I grew up with jars of weird liquids filling the fridge, the crisper being full of random weird single vegetables, my mom cutting off the moldy bits on cheese.  It is validating to see these techniques not only in print but applauded by all the hipster food media outlets.

My one caveat is the tone.  I went to a liberal arts college and there was a certain type of woman that I met there, the crafty earth mother.  They were amazingly competent and weirdly grown-up.  They weren't smug or righteous because they were too inherently caring to go that far, but there was a certain firmness and lack of humour in their demeanour that did not make for a lot of fun.  The kind of person who didn't watch cartoons as a kid and would say things like "why is there so much yelling in sports?" You can't tell if they are putting on a role or if they are genuinely that pure in their vision.    It feels like Tamar Adler was this type.  She's always saying things like "stale bread must be ground up into crumbs" like it's some universal goddess rule she is handing down. One gets used to it, but it is mildly annoying.

Still a great book if you want to expand your cooking game and more, change your entire perspective on food.  I will be going back to it over time.