Keep calm and carry on cooking

Even if she was unaware of it until years later, Adler’s love of food must have taken root during her childhood. “Growing up, I didn’t really care about food — I didn’t cook. We just ate really good food — the food my mum made — we didn’t eat out.”

It was not until after college when she was working as a magazine editor in New York City, she found herself becoming more interested in cooking. “It was calling to me — I actually started moonlighting secretly at Prune restaurant on the Lower East side.” With no professional experience, Adler blagged her way into a grill cook role making Saturday brunch.
The dual life lasted only three months. “I was torn between two worlds and felt I wasn’t doing as good a job as I needed to.” This fork in the road was ultimately to send her down a culinary route. She secured a place at law school, but never went, instead working as a private caterer. Her mother was doing some catering and offered Adler one of her jobs.

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Tamar Adler is frustrated we only give our leftovers love in times of crisis Photo: Grace Brannigan

Despite her inexperience, she took the work in upstate New York. “It was before Google, but I’d look up on the internet how to roast a chicken, print it out and furtively check it as I cooked in the house of a client who was paying me $75 an hour.” Simultaneously, she was working as research assistant for the chef Dan Barber, owner of Blue Hill restaurant, where Adler’s brother was head chef.

“A lot of things aligned that gave me flexibility and allowed me to enter the food world.” She spent 18 months leading a kitchen at a friends’ restaurant in Georgia, following which the pressure of being a head chef saw a burnt-out Adler buy a one-way ticket to California. There she secured unpaid work experience in the kitchen of the world-famous Chez Panisse. After a few weeks she was a full-time member of the team. “One of the cooks had to leave suddenly … they needed someone quickly so within a couple of weeks I got hired by Chez Panisse and had found a room in Berkeley.”

It was after this she started to put down her thoughts on what she terms preservative cooking. She’d always been a fan of US kitchen classic How to Cook a Wolf, by MFK Fisher. The advice manual was published post-World War Two, intended to help readers stretch limited resources. “That food book has always been the book that I’d found the most moving and meaningful.”

With the encouragement of a friend, she started writing her modern-day version, and after some years, An Everlasting Meal was born. The 250-ish pages are filled with advice on a variety of subjects, from making your own mayonnaise to using your oven most economically; and from seasoning salads and making a meal from the barest of store-cupboard staples (it’s amazing how many recipes you can make from a can of tomatoes) to how to come back from a whole range of kitchen catastrophes.

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There's as much flavour in the pod as the pea Photo: Getty Images

She has a purpose for every by-product of the cooking process: “The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It’s no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it’s no more or less pea for being pea or pod.” She tells us to hold onto those pea pods to make a flavour-filled, verdant stock.

There’s an entire chapter on beans, a food stuff to which she is so devoted, she found herself in constant demand during early lockdown for expert advice and tips as Americans under siege rediscovered the nutritious legumes. Something which pleased and irritated her equally.

“It felt poignant and urgent — Americans buying all these beans — but what is happening on a global level is so extreme and so fast that we should have been buying all of those beans long before we were experiencing a global respiratory pandemic.”

She’s also frustrated that we only give our leftovers love in times of crisis. “I’m excited every time people get enthusiastic about using what they have and making wonderful meals from previous meals. I also find it exasperating that in America anyway, once a particular crisis recedes, so do these lessons. It would be so much easier if it could become just how we eat.”

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace (Swift Press) is out now