Tables of Contents Makes Literature Edible

Summary

All Of It Podcast Summary: "Tables of Contents Makes Literature Edible"

Host: Alison Stewart
Guest: Evan Hanzor, Chef and Founder of Tables of Contents
Release Date: March 3, 2025
Podcast: All Of It by WNYC
Duration: Approximately 15 minutes

---

Introduction to Tables of Contents

In the episode titled "Tables of Contents Makes Literature Edible," Alison Stewart delves into the innovative world of culinary arts inspired by literature. She introduces listeners to Tables of Contents, a Brooklyn-based initiative founded by chef Evan Hanzor, which bridges the gap between the literary and culinary worlds by creating meals inspired by books.

Alison Stewart begins by highlighting the concept:

"Have you ever read a description of a meal in a book and thought, wow, that sounds so good? Thanks to the Brooklyn based company Tables of Contents, you can enjoy said meal." (00:39)

Evan Hanzor’s Journey: From Chef to Literary Culinarian

Evan Hanzor shares his passion for both cooking and literature, detailing his path to founding Tables of Contents. He recounts his culinary beginnings in New Orleans while attending Tulane University, where he first gained hands-on experience in restaurants like Ye Olde College Inn.

"I started working a restaurant in Westport called the Dressing Room, which was kind of appropriately situated next to a playhouse, the Westport Playhouse. So there was, you know, art and food sort of proximate to each other, that place." (01:36)

Evan emphasizes how his love for storytelling and food systems converged, leading him to explore the intersection of these passions through cooking inspired by literary works.

Founding Tables of Contents: Bringing Books to the Plate

Alison Stewart introduces the genesis of Tables of Contents, highlighting how Evan transformed literary scenes into culinary creations. The first event centered around Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," where Evan crafted dishes that mirrored key moments in the novel.

"We chose that book and we did everything ranging from a scene of trout wrapped in ferns that sort of echoes this moment where two characters are fish... to a bullfight scene with a plate dusted with mushroom powder and some tartare and beets and a sort of bloody splatter." (03:14)

This inaugural dinner solidified Edward's commitment to continuing literary-inspired culinary events, blending direct interpretations with more abstract, emotional representations of literary moments.

Creative Process: From Page to Plate

When discussing his creative process, Evan explains how he extracts inspiration from various elements within a book, not limited to explicit food scenes. He delves into the nuanced aspects of literature, such as colors, textures, and emotions, to craft unique dishes.

"We can make gnocchi inspired by the description of a baby's fontanelle. Like the soft texture of a head. So it can range into the kind of the weird, the interpretive, when there are sort of less direct or obvious options to look for." (05:53)

Evan illustrates this with examples like choux pastries inspired by the description of a bruise and concentrated tagine flavors reflecting the compactness of a poem's emotion.

Expanding Culinary Horizons Through Literature

Evan discusses how collaborating with contemporary authors and exploring diverse cuisines through literature has broadened his culinary repertoire. This continual infusion of fresh ideas keeps the project vibrant and ever-evolving.

"There's something about cooking from the text that gives the dish a whole different identity and heft." (07:17)

He highlights the integration of cocktails into the experience, enhancing the literary and culinary fusion.

Table of Contents Digest: Capturing the Experience

To extend the reach of his culinary-literary endeavors, Evan introduces the Table of Contents Digest, a zine that compiles recipes and insights from their monthly events. This publication serves as an annual recap, allowing those who couldn't attend in person to experience the essence of Tables of Contents.

"This has, I think, 13 events from sort of the 2023, 2024 season, roughly three dozen authors, a bunch of different dishes and cocktail recipes." (11:01)

Working with Poetry: A Unique Challenge

Evan shares his unique approach to translating poetry into culinary art, emphasizing the concentrated emotional resonance of poems.

"There is a description in one of the poems of the flavors of a tagine and carrot is mentioned and uni... We wanted to take that and channel it into a small poetic bite." (12:11)

This approach allows him to distill the essence of a poem into a single, impactful bite, mirroring the brevity and depth of poetic expressions.

Impact on Little Egg and Future Endeavors

Balancing his role at Little Egg, Evan explains how Tables of Contents complements his restaurant work, fostering community through different culinary expressions.

"Little Egg is a restaurant for the community... Tables of Contents shares a different space and different goals in a lot of ways." (13:34)

Looking ahead, Evan expresses interest in developing a comprehensive cookbook that encapsulates the spirit and creativity of Tables of Contents, expanding its reach and impact.

Connecting with Tables of Contents

Evan provides listeners with avenues to engage with Tables of Contents through their website, newsletter, and social media platforms. Upcoming events and publications offer opportunities for literary and culinary enthusiasts to participate and experience the fusion firsthand.

"Our next reading is next week, March 11th. I think there's still a few tickets so people can check it out in person if they want." (15:27)

---

Conclusion

In this episode of All Of It, Evan Hanzor exemplifies the harmonious blend of literature and culinary art through Tables of Contents. His innovative approach not only celebrates the richness of literary works but also fosters a unique community where food becomes a medium for storytelling and emotional expression. Whether through intricate dishes inspired by classic novels or the intimate creation of poetry-infused bites, Evan transforms the act of eating into a profound cultural experience.

For more information and to engage with future Tables of Contents events, visit tablesofcontents.org and follow their Instagram @TablesOfContents.

---

This summary captures the essence of the "Tables of Contents Makes Literature Edible" episode, highlighting Evan Hanzor’s journey, creative process, and the innovative fusion of food and literature. Notable quotes are included with accurate timestamps to provide depth and authenticity to the summary.

Transcript

[Progressive Insurance Ad]

All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Listener Supported WNYC Studios.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Have you ever read a description of a meal in a book and thought, wow, that sounds so good? Thanks to the Brooklyn based company Tables of Contents, you can enjoy said meal. IRL founder and sounder. I'm gonna try again. Foundered Founded by chef and little egg owner Co Evansor. I'll sit it right there. The company hosts literary events that draw direct inspiration from the featured books. For example, for C. Pam Jiang's culinary novel Land of Milk and Honey, there's a scene where truffle oil is being thrown in the trash. Evan turned that moment into a truffle ravioli dish. And if you want to take some of these recipes home, you can by checking out their zine called Table of Contents Digest right here. I've got a copy right here. It features great dis and cocktails you can make at home to impress your literary friends. Joining me now to tell us how he takes things from the page to the plate is chef and Table of Contents founder Evan Hanzor. It is so nice to see you in person.

[Evan Hanzor]

So good to see you, Allison. Thanks for having me back.

[Alison Stewart]

When did you decide to first become a chef?

[Evan Hanzor]

So I always loved being in the kitchen, loved food. But when I was in college at Tulane in New Orleans, an amazing food and culture city, of course, I was cooking for friends in the tiny a house I lived in on Plum street, and I was curious about trying to work in a in a real restaurant and see what it was like in there. So I worked at a spot down there called Ye Olde College Inn for a few months my last semester, and I thought that would be the end of cooking. I was like, that was fun. I got that out of my system. But I ended up moving back here. I'm from Connecticut and I started working a restaurant in Westport called the Dressing Room, which was kind of appropriately situated next to a playhouse, the Westport Playhouse. So there was, you know, art and food sort of proximate to each other, that place. And that's where I really began to sort of become excited about cooking, both as a tangible I love making food for people sort of practice. But learning More about food systems and how it intersected with the things that I wanted to write about, having been a writer before I started cooking. So that was kind of a pivotal moment for me.

[Alison Stewart]

Have you always just loved books?

[Guest]

Just loved reading books as much as you love food?

[Evan Hanzor]

Oh, yes. Yes. I feel like one of the indelible images of me as a kid is being asleep in different places in the house with a book on my face, having just fallen asleep reading it and not even had the energy to put it down. And so tables of contents kind of became the way to bring together books and food as my two main loves into one space.

[Alison Stewart]

You were inspired by a dinner you.

[Guest]

Created based on the Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.

[Evan Hanzor]

Yes, that's right.

[Guest]

Good.

[Evan Hanzor]

You got it.

[Guest]

What do you remember about that menu?

[Evan Hanzor]

So this was a book that I read also in New Orleans. I took a class called Last Call, which was the last class. This professor Dale Edmonds, who had cooked, who had taught at Tulane for 30 years, was teaching all of his favorite books. I just remember reading this book in my friend's backyard mostly, and I'd, like open a bottle of wine and pretend I was in France or Spain with the characters. And there were so many scenes where I really wanted to bring them to life. And finally, when we did our first Tables of Contents dinner, we chose that book and we did everything ranging from a scene of trout wrapped in ferns that sort of echoes this moment where two characters are fish. The France Spain border, to a bullfight scene with a, you know, plate dusted with mushroom powder and some tartare and beets and a sort of a bloody splatter. So there's just so much to bring out of that onto the plate. And once we did that meal, I knew we wanted to keep doing these kinds of dinners.

[Guest]

I was going to ask Bulls running in Spain.

[Evan Hanzor]

Yeah, we had to find a way to interpret it. And that meal was cool because it reflected the different ways you could bring food from a book to the plate. One sort of more direct and then one a little bit more interpretive. You know, trying to take a feeling and put it on in front of people to eat.

[Guest]

This sounds like a nice idea.

[Evan Hanzor]

Thanks.

[Guest]

How do you take it from a nice idea to an actual entity? Table of Contents.

[Evan Hanzor]

It's still hard to think of it as an actual entity, but we have been doing it for a long time now, so I should probably start. It really is just remains a passion project. We've been very lucky since we did that first meal. And eventually, when we started our monthly reading series, where we went from cooking more of the classics books like the Sun Also Rises, the Rise of Watching God, To Kill a Mockingbird, et cetera, to having contemporary authors come into a space, read from their new books, and we could start cooking little bites inspired by the readings they gave. And I think from the beginning, I've just been astonished and so grateful for all the authors who have also thought this was a nice idea and wanted to take part, and all the people who have come through and supported over the years. So at this point, it's still a very small group. You can see the folks who put the Digest together, me, Josh, Olivia, Sammy, Tanya and other friends and family members sometimes chipping in to help. But it's my favorite thing to do. I say at every reading. It's my favorite night of the month every month, and remains that. So it's easy to kind of find the energy to keep it going and to collaborate with new folks each month.

[Alison Stewart]

My guest is chef Evan Hanzor, co owner of Little Egg and founder of Tables of Contents. We're talking about his process for creating literary inspired meals. When you're working with a book, it doesn't actually have a whole lot of food in it. How do you find your culinary inspiration?

[Evan Hanzor]

Yeah, it's a great question. We often have authors who we reach out to write back and say, I'd love to do this, but there's not a lot of food in my book. And the first thing we'll say is, send us a copy, because we're sure there's some sort of food in there. There's always, you know, some moment of food in the story. Most of the time that's true sometimes. Sometimes we're searching a little bit more deeply for it. But what's cool is that we're not always necessarily looking for a food scene where a family's sitting out to dinner or someone's characters are at a restaurant. Sometimes there's this description of a color or a physical attribute or a place. I remember one time, Tanya, who's our pastry chef at Little Egg, made this choux pastry, choux puff that was inspired by the description of a bruise. Cause it had this sort of mottled purple green cracklin topping on it. That was from, I think, Larissa Pham's book. And we've made gnocchi inspired by the description of a baby's fontanelle. Like the soft texture of a head. So it can be like, range into the kind of the weird, the interpretive, when there are sort of less Direct or obvious options to look for. And what we're always trying to do is not just make a dish that was in a book, although that can be really fun. But find a moment where there's some emotional resonance in a scene, often including food, but again, sometimes maybe a bruise that can be then put in front of people on a plate and really bring that descriptor, that description, that scene to life in a physical, sort of intimate, digestible way.

[Guest]

You've made Ukrainian food after the aftertaste. You learned how to make Cambodian rice porridge after the Ministry of Time. How has this expanded your culinary tradition?

[Evan Hanzor]

It's amazing, as someone who's been a chef and worked in food for so long now, to have another kind of source of creative inspiration, a constantly refreshing source. I mean, I love going to the farmer's market. And every year, every season is different. When you think about what am I going to do with these tomatoes this year, or what am I going to do with these baby beets in the spring, but you see the same vegetables over and over again. And so to be able to dig through this, you know, there's so many books that come out and so many authors I want to work with. I could never sort of exhaust that supply of inspiration. And there's something about cooking from the text that gives the dish a whole different identity and heft. So even if it's something simple that might not be sort of a culinary reach, the experience of cooking it and serving it to people might be totally different than if I was just serving a regular grilled cheese sandwich.

[Guest]

What if you decide to make something doesn't taste that good?

[Evan Hanzor]

Honestly, this is one of my favorite things about Tables of contents. Someone who owns a restaurant, restaurant's called Little Egg. We were egg for a long time in Brooklyn. A lot of folks are familiar with it. Very welcoming, comfort food, delicious tasting restaurant. In a restaurant, your goal is always to get people to come back. And the way to do that is to make them feel comfortable, make them feel satiated, make things taste good. And so when people talk about food as art, this becomes one of my qualms with it, because you're only after one sort of emotional response. And what Tables of Contents allows is the space to explore other emotional responses that other art forms are able to touch on. So we can make something that might make you a little uncomfortable to eat or might make you a little concerned. And we try to push those limits sometimes where taste or good taste as we think of it is not always the primary sort of way to assess the success of a dish.

[Guest]

Do you have a workshop, a test kitchen? How do you do it?

[Evan Hanzor]

Oh, man, I wish. If anyone else out there wants to fund a workshop or a test kitchen, let me know. We do have the restaurant, which is a great resource to work in and to play around in.

[Guest]

But.

[Evan Hanzor]

But no, we're just, we're trying things out each month. I'm trying them out at home. Sometimes we're trying them out for the first time. I hate to admit, but they usually work out at the events. But yeah, it is really cool also to be exposed to a variety of different cuisines and to, you know, new dishes. I'll be reading through a book right now. I'm reading through Pemi Aguda's book Ghost Roots because she's reading with us next week at TSC and looking up all these Nigerian dishes that I'm not familiar with. So there are a lot of sort of new areas for me to explore through these books as well.

[Guest]

How about cocktails?

[Evan Hanzor]

Cocktails have become an amazing part of Tables of Contents. Also, our friends Sammy Katz and Olivia McGiff, who I have to shout out, their new book is coming out tomorrow. It's called Spirited Women. But they wrote a book called Cocktails in Color. And we started collaborating regularly about a year and a half ago. And so now at every Tables of Contents event, not only do we have three small bites inspired by the books, but there are three cocktails inspired by the books. So there is, you know, you come in, you get your drink, you know, that's an inspired by any one of the books. Then you sit down and have the dishes. And it's brought a whole new element to the way we're interpreting books in the space of the meal.

[Alison Stewart]

My guest is chef Evan Hanzor, co owner of Little Egg and founder of Tables of Contents. We're talking about his process for creating literary inspired meals. You gave this to me when you came into the studio.

[Evan Hanzor]

Gotta bring a gift. You can't come empty handed.

[Alison Stewart]

Tell me what the Table of Contents Digest 2023, 2024.

[Evan Hanzor]

So this is our second sort of publication as Tables of Contents. We talked a few years ago when we put out our Tables of Contents Community Cookbook, which was our way to kind of do something with the project during COVID when we couldn't get together. But I've always been curious to kind of codify and share the experience of our monthly events with folks who don't get to make it there. And now that we've been working with Sami and Olivia, who's this amazing illustrator whose illustrations you're seeing as you're flipping through the book. We decided to try to put together kind of an end of year recap of our events, and that became the TOC Digest. So this has, I think it's 13 events from sort of the 2023, 2024 season, roughly three dozen authors, a bunch of different dishes and cocktail recipes. And we're hoping to make this an annual series and has recipes from me from cocktail, recipes from Sammy, recipes from Tanya Busch, our pastry chef. Josh Krigman, who works with us, edited it. Real sort of group effort, but a really fun way to share a bit of the taste of the reading series with folks who maybe weren't there in person.

[Alison Stewart]

Now, you said that when it comes to poems, it's different working with poems. What's unique about working with poems?

[Evan Hanzor]

Well, it's particularly interesting for me, working with poems. I was a poet before I started cooking, and so poetry has always had a special place in my heart, and it really lit up my brain in certain ways. And I think exploring or working with the form of a poem, there's so much that language is doing differently in a poem than it's doing in a novel or an essay or memoir. And it just feels like the work of the dish and the shape of the dish should reflect that in some way. So there's actually a recipe in the Digest that is from Megan Fernandez's collection of poetry. And there is a description in one of the poems of this, the flavors of a tagine and carrot is mentioned and uni, which you never would think of as part of a tagine. And it's in this, you know, very compact poem. And so we wanted to take that and channel it into a small poetic bite. So instead of making a big sort of what you think of a steamy stew, you know, a tagine, we made a really concentrated chickpea and miso and tagine spiced and carrot puree, and put that next to uni, which is similar in color. And they sort of echoed each other. It was actually inspired by, I think there's a momofuku dish that I remembered when I was reading that poem. I was like, I think this would be an interesting thing to riff on. And this is a way to pack the concentration of flavor into one bite. In the way I sort of feel sometimes a poem can pack the concentration of emotion into a few lines.

[Guest]

How has working on tables of contents affected your main gig at Little Lake?

[Evan Hanzor]

Yeah, it's interesting. They certainly flow back into each other. Logistically, we work out of the restaurant. Sometimes we do events in the restaurant. Some of our smaller events, maybe with a single author. We did one night with Leslie Jamison for her book Splinters recently, the Aftertaste Dinner you mentioned. So we have this space where we can host some tables of contents events there. But in another way, they kind of live parallel lives. Again, Little Egg is a restaurant for the community. It's a place for people to come in, have breakfast, have lunch, chat and hang. And we may have a copy of the TOC Cookbook somewhere and someone might ask about it, but it shares a different space and different goals in a lot of ways than Tables of Contents. I think the shared goal between them is to kind of build community and bring people together through food. And they're just kind of approaching that in different, in different ways.

[Guest]

This feels almost like a cookbook. Is there a cookbook in the, in the making?

[Evan Hanzor]

Yeah, I think there will be. We did the Community Cookbook that was a fundraiser for FIG nyc, this food justice program that I still work with. And that was an interesting experience to do it ourselves and publish it ourselves and to actually see the, the excited reception that it got. This is slightly different, but still has recipes and still is a way to show and share what we're doing. I think I'd be interested in what a bigger cookbook would look like and have lots of ideas around how it might need to be different than a traditional cookbook to really carry the spirit of the project and of the events. But yeah, it's something I'd love to explore.

[Guest]

My guest has been Evan Hansgroor. He's the co owner of Little Egg and founder of Tables of Contents. Where can people find out about you.

[Evan Hanzor]

When we announce our monthly events on our newsletter, you can subscribe to that through our website, tablesofcontents.org, that's S's at the end of Tables and Contents. And of course on social media, we're on Instagram Tables of Contents. And our next reading is next week, March 11th. I think there's still a few tickets so people can check it out in person if they want.

[Guest]

Evan, thanks for coming to the studio.

[Evan Hanzor]

Thanks, Alison.

[Progressive Insurance Ad]

Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody Award and a Dupont Columbia Award, among others. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.