Description

‘The most beautifully written description of what cooking is all about, and what it actually is, with recipes’ Nigella Lawson

Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs know: that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them.

She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.

The Times/Sunday Times Food Book of the Year 2022

Publisher Review

'Tamar Adler has written the best book on 'cooking with economy and grace' that I have read since MFK Fisher' Michael Pollan 'Tamar Adler is more than a wonderful food writer-she is a wonderful writer ... A profound book' Sheila Heti 'Reads less like a cookbook than like a recipe for a delicious life' New York Magazine 'An Everlasting Meal is beautifully intimate, approaching cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking ... Tamar is one of the great writers I know - her prose is exquisitely crafted, beautiful and clear-eyed and open, in the thoughtful spirit of M.F.K. Fisher. This is a book to sink into and read deeply' Alice Waters, chef and owner of Chez Panisse 'Lessons so right and so eloquent that I think of them as homilies' New York Times Book Review