What's Cooking?

Summary

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: What's Cooking?

Release Date: September 25, 2025

---

Episode Overview

In this lively episode, the Critics at Large team—Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz—investigate the evolving culture of home cooking, from family traditions to the explosion of online recipes and personalities. The discussion centers on Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook, Good Things, and broadens to explore the rise of culinary influencers, the allure (and pressure) of recipes, and the meaning behind today's dinner parties. Later, New Yorker food critic Helen Rosner joins the panel to analyze trends, the proliferation of choice, and the real emotional stakes of cooking at home.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure—and Anxiety—of Food Content Online

[02:13–04:54]

• Algorithmic Feeds: The hosts detail what food content their social media serves up, highlighting the visual and linguistic trends—“creamy, garlicky, lemony, unctuous, crunchy, herby, yogurty”—that define today's food videos (01:15–02:13).

  • Alex Schwartz sees women her age cooking in “a nice kitchen, well-appointed, making some crispity, crunchity, yummy stuff.”
  • Vinson Cunningham describes “youngish British women who like desaturated pictures, sunny kitchens,” cooking “one pot meals” like “roast chicken with some garbanzos.”

• Historical Shift: Naomi notes how, in the past, cooking was generational, then “we look[ed] to experts for...Julia Child, later on Martha Stewart, even...the Food Network.” Now, home cooks run the show online, often with highly marketable personal brands.

2. Personal Cooking Journeys: From Family to Individual Style

[07:08–13:08]

• Vinson: Cooking is about “the perfect version of a very simple thing,” drawing on family recipes and iterating to master specific dishes, sometimes independently.
  • Memorable moment: “My grandmother...would just be doing it. And my mom always complained because...What she was asking for is a recipe, but what my grandmother instead provided was like a folk tale...” (08:51)
• Alex: Grew up in a “drawer full of menus” Manhattan household—“it did not occur to me to learn how to make food I liked”—then learned to cook driven by craving comfort foods and inspired by food writers.
• Naomi: Positions food as both “lifestyle” and “life,” referencing books like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn as framing her ideas about the glamour and reality of cooking.

3. The Samin Nosrat Phenomenon & The New Cookbook (Good Things)

[13:08–16:50]

• Legacy: Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2017) presented four elements as the keys to improvisational cooking. “If you know the grammar of cooking, you can write your own sentences.” (Alex, 14:47)

• New Approach: In Good Things, Nosrat balances “the totally exacting and the kind of freewheeling”—moving from chef’s perfectionism toward permission for imperfection and joy.

  • Vinson: “Part of the logic of this book is I didn’t think I wanted to do a cookbook...because of these standards...And all of a sudden, I realized I did have recipes because of things that over the years, I’ve developed.” (16:17)

4. The Recipe Test: Trying Samin’s Methods at Home

[17:08–21:33]

Each host prepares a recipe from Good Things and shares their experience.

• Vinson: Attempts marinated eggplant, improvising without a “brush for olive oil”—he drizzles and smears with his hands. “It wasn’t the odyssey, but it was an odyssey.” (18:17)
  • Alex: “You had to confront so much about yourself to get that bowl of eggplant.” (19:05)
• Naomi: Makes crispy shallots, only to find her family ate most of them with mashed potatoes before she could try them on yogurt. “But I felt gratified. I was like, I’m feeding the family.” (20:22–20:36)
• Alex: Prepares simple soba salad, realizing she craves quick, rewarding recipes as a new parent. “I will be making soba noodles again.” (21:24)

---

Guest Segment: Helen Rosner on the Landscape of Recipes and Cookbooks

[24:40–40:30]

1. Is Everyone an Expert in Cooking?

• “...One of the secret facts about cooking...is that everyone is in a very real way an expert about cooking and food and eating. Because it is such an intimate thing to eat...You feel it digesting. If things go wrong, you poop it out seven hours later. Like, it is a deeply personal thing.” (Helen Rosner, 25:48)

• Samin’s resonance: She “gently and elegantly shows...that [cooking] is a fundamental extension of things you are already doing.” (27:29)

2. The Emotional Realities of Home Cooking

• Helen discusses her own pandemic-era burnout and pressure to find joy in relentless cooking: “...I don’t want to knead the sourdough. I want to not be angry, you know?” (29:00)

• She appreciates modern cookbook authors, like Samin and Alison Roman, for acknowledging frustration and imperfection: “I fundamentally distrust...professional home cooks...who are only ever happy and only ever love doing it...The sales pitch inside virtually every cookbook is, you kind of hate doing this. This is an obligation.” (28:01)

3. Categories and Evolutions of Cookbooks

[30:12–34:56]

• Drawing from Ruby Tandoh’s framework, Helen breaks cookbooks into:

  • Self-improvement
  • Problem-solvers (“Get dinner on the table quickly”)
  • Aspirational (beautiful, escapist meals/lifestyles)

• The Influencer Chef: Spotlight on Meredith Hayden (Wishbone Kitchen), who merges the Ina Garten “Hamptons compound” with social media performance, and whose aspirational private-chef lifestyle is “cooking as performance, not necessarily cooking to be consumed by the person doing the cooking.” (33:51)

• Cookbook Milestones:

  • Remembering how Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem marked a generation’s dinner parties with daunting, multi-step aspirations (34:26)
  • The move to “Nothing Fancy” with Alison Roman’s relatable, small-kitchen celebrations

4. The Glamour and Ideology of the Modern Dinner Party

• The dinner party, Helen says, is now “a form of performance” and a marker of adulthood (36:06):

  • “There is nothing effortless, easy, organic...about a dinner party. However, what people like Alison Roman do...is make the act of feeding others...feeling doable.”
  • Grossy Pelosi (Dan Pelosi) and others foster a vision that is “anti-beige,” “joyful,” and that rejects suffering for those you feed: “No, man, don’t bleed for your loved ones. Just feed them.” (38:31)

• For millennials—those whose adulthood was “constantly being deferred”—the DIY dinner party represents agency and real, if cobbled-together, adulthood (39:03–40:15).

---

The Glut of Choice: Blessing or Burden?

[40:40–47:02]

• Explosion of Options: The New York Times Cooking boasts over 24,000 recipes and 456 million site visits last year. There’s “so much choice,” but this can be overwhelming.

  • Alex: “Some of this...made me into...too much of a perfectionist recipe person...It’s only dinner.” (43:33–44:21)
  • Naomi: The abundance creates anxiety of “being behind,” but Good Things helps her feel encouraged to try, even if it’s just crispy shallots.

• Vinson compares it to music streaming: the infinite playlist paralyzes some, keeping them looping on a handful of old favorites. “At a certain point, growing up is...about looking at whatever number of options you have, and then ruthless winnowing down...This is how I cook. This is what I’m listening to. This is how I dress.” (45:30–46:35)

---

Cooking as Lifestyle vs. Life

[47:02–51:18]

• Naomi & Alex discuss Nora Ephron’s “Serial Monogamy” essay—the journey from playing at adulthood with routines and recipes to finding “a kind of simplicity and...authenticity in her style of cooking.”

  • Alex: “Even though she’s talking about 1962, it really reminded me of all the things we’re talking about from now...” (47:11–49:38)

• Vinson: Cooking is “not just self-expression, but self-nourishing” and “can grow shoots in other aspects of life.” (49:38)

• Alex: Like a favorite pair of jeans, she always keeps arugula, lemon, olive oil, and salt for “a citrusy arugula salad”—“a reliable source of pleasure, especially to eat with something like schnitzel or pizza.” (51:03)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the pressure and relief of recipes:

  • “...The recipe is a rational document...and the other...is a folk tale. Sometimes the roads don’t meet.” (Vinson, 08:51)
  • “My eggplant journey...It wasn’t the odyssey, but it was an odyssey.” (Vinson, 18:17)
  • “You had to confront so much about yourself to get that bowl of eggplant. And that’s what it’s all about, folks.” (Alex to Vinson, 19:05)

• On Samin Nosrat’s impact:

  • “She just loves tasting and eating. She gets that kind of, like, tactility and pleasure and I think can really transmit that to people.” (Alex, 14:23)
  • “Samin Nosrat’s pared down approach to recipes feels like a real change for what we’ve been seeing.” (Naomi, 21:33)

• On modern home cooking’s meaning:

  • “Everyone is in a very real way an expert about cooking and food and eating...it is such an intimate thing to eat...” (Helen Rosner, 25:48)
  • “I fundamentally distrust...professional home cooks...who are only ever happy and only ever love doing it...” (Helen, 28:01)
  • “Don’t bleed for your loved ones. Just feed them.” (Helen, 38:31)

• On abundance and choice:

  • “Growing up is actually...about...ruthless winnowing down. At some point, we have to...close some doors.” (Vinson, 45:30)

---

Timestamps to Key Segments

• [01:15] Food media “adjectives” and algorithmic curation
• [07:08] Host cooking backgrounds & family influence
• [13:08] Introduction to Samin Nosrat and Good Things
• [17:08] Cooking from Good Things: the recipe test
• [24:40] Guest Helen Rosner joins: The state of recipes & cookbooks today
• [36:06] Dinner parties as millennial adulthood
• [40:40] Too many recipes? The glut of choice dilemma
• [47:11] Nora Ephron, authenticity, and cooking as life vs. lifestyle
• [51:03] Reliable pleasures: everyday comfort cooking

---

Conclusion

This episode of Critics at Large unpacks the pleasures, pressures, and possibilities of home cooking today. Via personal stories, culinary theory, and incisive guest commentary, the show deconstructs the allure of the recipe, the meaning of the dinner party, and the profound role of food in shaping identity and community. As Helen Rosner puts it: “Don’t bleed for your loved ones. Just feed them.” Cooking, it turns out, is as much about creating a life worth living as it is about the perfect crispy shallot.

---

For more episodes, visit newyorker.com/critics

Transcript

[A]

As summer draws to a close and the kids go back to school, I know I'm going to want to keep in touch with my kids at a price I can afford. Back to school. Shopping can be a hassle, but your phone plan shouldn't be. That's why I made the switch to Mint Mobile. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. So while other parents are sweating overage charges, I have a little bit more room in my budget for cool back to school threads. Say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plan's jaw. Dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages, Mint Mobile is here to rescue you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Dish overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a [e-mail] New Yorker.

[B]

That's.

[A]

That's mintmobile.com New Yorker upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

[C]

So what have we got here? We have creamy, garlicky, garlicky, lemony, Lemony.

[B]

Lemony and. Or citrusy.

[D]

Citrusy.

[C]

Citrusy. Unctuous, crunchy, Herby. Herby.

[B]

Herby is big.

[D]

Yeah, it's lots of yogurts.

[C]

Have to be the yogurty.

[D]

Yogurt.

[C]

It can be absolutely anything.

[D]

You know, the more adjectives, the better. This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[B]

I'm Alex Schwartz.

[C]

And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Hello, friends.

[B]

Hello. We got. Here.

[C]

We are. Yeah. I don't know how we got here.

[D]

But we'll find out.

[C]

But we got here. How's everyone doing?

[B]

Doing good.

[D]

Great. Feeling lemony this morning.

[C]

You're feeling lemony, you're feeling garlicky. You might even be feeling crunchity, crispity. Who knows? Speaking of all of these adjectives, do you guys, when you're online, do you find in your algorithm send you any food content and if so, what Kind, but of course. Okay, tell us, Alex.

[B]

Well, I'm getting women around my age cooking in their kitchens. Usually a small kitchen, but a nice kitchen, well appointed. Making some crispity, crunchity, yummy stuff that I might be interested in.

[C]

Vincent, what about you?

[D]

Every once in a while, yes, I do. In between the suggestions for stretches that I never do in the morning and yesterday's highlights, various sports, doomsday prophecy, I do sometimes get youngish British women who like desaturated pictures. Sunny kitchens make a lot of kind of one pot meals. It's always like a roast chicken with some garbanzos around it and some form of sauce. It's just nice to look at.

[C]

Yeah, I have to say I don't get much. I mean, I get a lot of cats. That's my sweet spot in terms of the algorithm cats and plastic surgery content. But I do occasionally get some food stuff and often it's something slightly not gross, but certainly not aspirational in any case. So talking about cooking, talking about cooking online, I mean, in the past, before we had all of these social feeds, cooking used to be a skill that was passed down through the generations. Right. And it was fairly limited, you know, especially for home Cooks in the 20th century, especially in the later 20th century, it became something we look to experts for, Julia Child, later on Martha Stewart, even possibly slightly later, the Food Network. But in the last decade or so, there's been a growth of a particular type of home cooking culture. A lot of it is happening online with the rise of kind of cooking personalities that make the lifestyle of a cook and the recipes that go along with it available to us 24, 7. But cookbooks are also a huge source of recipe inspiration and learning. The bestselling cookbook authors, Yotam Ottolenghi, Alison Roman, Samin Nostrad are personalities in and of themselves.

[D]

I think the hot recipe, et cetera.

[C]

The hot recipe, the thing we're all cooking, that's all something that's totally new and very, I think, significant.

[B]

Yeah. I think home cooking has gotten a lot more ambitious. I think the level of cooking skill in general has gotten a lot higher. Access to ingredients and the ingredients that are used has become much more diverse and it's become an expression of personality. I mean, you could date it to a lot of things, but to me, the 10 years pretty nicely encapsulates the amount of time that the Times, the New York Times has had its cooking website up, which is like a go to resource for hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis.

[C]

Yeah. And the fact that it even went from the website to an app, you know, that also I think is distinct. Like, you have your phone and you can type in an ingredient, or you can type in a type of cuisine or what have you.

[D]

And as they say in the business, voila.

[C]

And voila. Exactly. Food and cooking occupy a particular place in the culture. We've all got to eat every day, but there can be an art to it or not. And lately, there's been an art to it more and more. So today, guys, we're digging into the culture of home cooking and entertaining. And later on, we'll also be very excitingly joined by our colleague Helen Rosner, who will help us get the lay of the land and understand, as we say, how we got here. That's today on critics at Large. Why are we so obsessed with home cooking? Okay, you guys. So today we're going to focus a bit on the new cookbook by chef and food personality Samin Nosret. Good things. But before we get more particularly into it, I want to know, both for myself and for our listeners, what's your cooking style or cooking experience? Has it developed over the years? Have you kind of experienced an uptick in your interest in food culture over the last decade or so?

[D]

I feel like what you completely rightly described in the intro weirdly hasn't really entered my life because I like to cook, and I grew up. And it's so strange how talking about food always leads us back to our childhoods. Like, it's one of the.

[E]

Absolutely.

[D]

I think dressing makes sense. Yeah. Dressing and cooking are very connected in my mind anyway. To me, cooking has always been about having the perfect version of a very simple thing. My mom's baked chicken is, like, legendary. Every one of my friends is like.

[C]

How does she make it?

[D]

Well, I mean, that's a secret. The answers are endless. Exactly. I just like the way my mom makes rice, the way that she made both tuna salad and potato salad. Very, like, particular. So when I got older, in my 20s, it was like I had five years of, I'm gonna get good at collard greens.

[C]

But based on your mom's recipe or just on your own?

[D]

Collard greens was my own journey, and I, like, was not making it the Southern way. I'm like, nope, I'm gonna work on it. Sauteed collard greens. And it was like, my whole first half of my 20s. But so for four years now, I've been working on these carrots, and it's like, okay, like, I'm gonna broil. I'M gonna. I want char. I want some kind of, like, nut topping.

[C]

It's delicious.

[D]

A bed of, like, a garlic lobne. I'm gonna put the carrots on top. And it's, like, partially based on things I've seen in restaurants, partially based on my own taste. And I'm just gonna work on showing up to parties with the flyest fucking carrots. I did the same thing with cabbage.

[B]

For a while, but once you find it, is that it? Are you like, I've reached it. I've attained perfection, and I'm sticking with this. And now I don't vary it. Or do you never make the thing again? Or what's going on here? Like, are the collard greens still getting made or is that just you?

[D]

Then they're in my back pocket. And I'm always gonna, you know, taste change. I'm always gonna work with it. But I have a basis. It's something that I could, like, tell someone. My grandmother was a cook. That really good sweet potato, really good. Like, smothered chicken, rice with gravy, these great things. But she would just be doing it. And my mom always complained because it's just like, no, you just put in some. And my mom's like, how much. What she was asking for is a recipe, but what my grandmother instead provided was like a folk tale or something, you know what I mean? The sort of rational document that is the recipe. And the other, more surreal, it takes a life to learn thing that is like learning how to cook as a person. Sometimes the roads don't meet. And I feel like I was brought into this less structured world. And so recipes always feel intimidating to me, even though the stuff that I do on my own, I realize, has become a recipe. Do you know what I mean?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Fascinating.

[C]

Alex, do you go to the expert more than Vincent? Do you follow recipes to a T or are you an improviser?

[B]

Well, to answer these questions, I would like to tell you my story.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

Please.

[B]

I grew up in an ordering in household. I grew up, as some listeners may know, in Manhattan, where at the time we had that drawer full of menus.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

And that was it. I know the jar that was the relevant area in the kitchen was the menu drawer. We were also getting some prepared foods. And it did not occur to me to learn how to make food I liked. What it occurred to me to do is to complain constantly that no one was, like, catering to me or helping me out. But it didn't occur to me that I could have the power to turn Things around, if only I tried. So by the time I got to college, I really was under equipped. And that was okay because we were fed in the dining halls. And then one day I was really craving. I was living off campus at this point, and I was craving popovers, which in my mind were a product only of the Popover Cafe on Amsterdam Avenue between 86th and 87th Street. And I thought, oh, my God, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna have to, like, go get up and go to Popover Cafe, travel a distance to get there? And then, like, a light bulb, I thought I could try to make this myself. And meanwhile, I was very aware of cooking and cooking culture. I was obsessed as a child with Ruth Reichl's first memoir, Tender at the Bone. Ruth Reichl, who was the New York Times restaurant critic for many years and the editor of Gourmet magazine. So I started with these recipes, trying to, like, search for things that I wanted that I could recreate. And when I had a little bit of success, I realized, this is amazing. I can decide what I eat and, like, I can customize it to my enjoyment. So I really went on a journey in my 20s from basically not being able to boil an egg to being able to cook, I think, quite a good meal. And cooking became really central to how I saw adulthood.

[C]

I'm hearing two things from you, Alex, which are both really interesting. First is your thinking about cooking and about food as more of kind of a lifestyle thing. And I had a similar thing. I love reading about food. I loved, of course, heartburn, like Nora Ephron's heartburn, you know, the Romana Clay about her own life and her, you know, breakup with Carl Bernstein. But she's a cookbook writer in the novel, and there are recipes throughout the book. And that struck me as just so glamorous. And it didn't even occur to me that I would be able myself. So that's kind of like, one thing. And the other thing is the actual point of, like, food as a part of life, right? Like, how does cooking serve me, serve my family? How I can make for myself a kind of reality that I create, right? So we did say that we would focus on good things. The Samin Nosrat cookbook that just came out. And maybe one of you guys will give us a little bit of a primer on Samin and tell us who she is.

[B]

So Samin Nossrat is known as the author of the mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega bestselling Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, which I believe has sold something like, one and a half million copies, which is a huge number of copies.

[D]

Unreal.

[C]

That's crazy.

[B]

It's unreal.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And there was a Netflix show that was also called Salt, Fat, Acid Heat. Four episodes, each one devoted to one of those elements of cooking, because that was the theory that she put forward in that book, which came out in 2017, that these are the four elements you need to cook. And adjusting these elements will give you any number of delicious things to eat. And mastering these elements will help you cook without a recipe, which she kind of positioned as the ultimate goal. And one thing that made that book and the show so appealing, and I rewatched the fat episode last night, is that she has a joie de vivre and a very, like, earthy way of being that I think is. It is aspirational, but it's also quite relatable. You know, she's not like, the perfect chef showing you exactly how to do everything. And here's what. It's gonna look so elegant and beautiful. She just loves tasting and eating. She gets that kind of, like, tactility and pleasure, and I think can really transmit that to people.

[C]

Mm. Mm. And Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, as you said, Alex, very much stress the letting of recipes. Right. Like, you don't need to sort of like, ploddingly or very particularly follow a set of instructions, but you can learn how to improvise by thinking about these different groups or building blocks. Building blocks.

[B]

It's like critical thinking for cooking. If you know the grammar of cooking, you can write your own sentences, I think is kind of the idea.

[C]

So what happens in this book in Good Things, because it has a slightly different relationship. I mean, it builds. It's another building block kind of in her own language as a cook, but it has a slightly different relationship to the recipe.

[D]

Well, this is part of the logic of Good Things is that it is partly narrative. There are these section heading essays that sort of lead into a bunch of recipes, and part of it is precisely this. She talks about not only her depression, she talks about the pandemic being a big part in this. After Salt, Fat, Acid Heat came out and wanting to step away from the exacting standards that she had already, especially from her training at Chez Panisse, that she had internalized and understanding for the first time that there really is a difference, not just in degree, but like, in kind, between restaurant preparation of food and home cooking. There's a really, I thought, really interesting part where she was like, I had such high standards for just the making of A dressing that she had turned in her mind salad into a special occasion food because she had erected all these barriers between herself and the making of a salad. So part of the logic of this book is I didn't think I wanted to do a cookbook partially because of these standards that I have. And all of a sudden, I realized that I did have recipes because of things that over the years, I've developed.

[C]

In my own cooking, much like you, Vincent.

[D]

I did find myself relating. And interestingly, because of her real interest in specific dishes, produce, and this weird line between the totally exacting and the kind of freewheeling in her personality, the Alice Waters thing of like, yeah, it's just my table, and I'm gonna wear a loose, flowy white shirt, and I'm gonna bring things to a, you know, a wooden table that's kind of outside, under. I have a vision. You know, on the other hand, there's so much, like, exact. And she's, like, interestingly skirting that line in this book, I think.

[C]

So, you guys, we tried something we haven't tried before in the critics at large universe, and we each chose a recipe to prepare at home so we could bring our impressions to the class and share them with our friends.

[B]

We had a deconstructed dinner party.

[C]

We had a bit of a deconstructed dinner party.

[D]

I'll go first.

[C]

Go ahead, Vincent.

[B]

I want to know.

[D]

So true to what I mentioned before about individual things, that's what I like about this book, is that she's really teaching you. Like, here's how to make my favorite garlic labneh. Here's how to make all these little things. True to my ethos. It was like, oh, I've been thinking about eggplant for a while. I like eggplant, but how am I gonna do mine?

[C]

A famously tricky vegetable, by the way.

[D]

Tricky vegetable. So I'm like, okay, she's got a recipe for. First, she just tells you about roasting or grilling vegetables. And then having established that, she moves on to, here's some of the things that you can do. So she's like, here's an Italian style marinated eggplant. And I have no marinade game. So I'm like, this is my foray. All it is, all the recipe is, is, you know, roasting an eggplant in the oven and then subjecting it to this marinade, letting it sit in the marinade. But, you know, you just realize, like, at the beginning of the book, she's like, here are some things that you need in your kitchen, one of them is a. A brush for olive oil and other things. I mean, it wasn't the odyssey, but it was an odyssey.

[B]

Did you have a brush or did you have to get the brush?

[D]

I have no brush. Okay, so I'm drizzling.

[C]

Did you use your paws and then.

[D]

Using my washed paws to, like, sort of smear so that I could create the impression of brushing.

[B]

You did a drizzle and smear. Interesting.

[D]

Oh, you know, just get a jar with a screw top. I don't have those sitting around. I considered using a baby bottle to make my marinade.

[B]

Love it.

[D]

I later found something else. So every step, I'm like, okay, there's a whole, like, lifestyle behind the scenes.

[E]

Yes.

[D]

Every time I'm like, am I gonna be one of those assholes in the New York Times recipe comments where it's like, well, I changed every single thing about the recipe and I made it gluten free, but it didn't work. What the fuck? So I was like, okay, how much am I deviating?

[C]

How did it turn out?

[D]

It was delicious. It was step one in my.

[C]

In your journey.

[D]

My eggplant journey.

[B]

Wow. You had to confront so much about yourself to get that bowl of eggplant. And that's what it's all about, folks. That's what it's all about.

[C]

So I was a little. I have to say, we didn't talk about my cooking history. It's not that interesting. I do need a recipe. I'm a bit of an improviser, but I need some sort of guideline. And so I was looking among the available recipes on the book. I was like, I'm gonna start slow. I'm not a great cook. There are a couple things I know how to make well, among them chicken, which is good, but I'm interested in expanding. So I was like, I'm gonna start small. There was a kind of a condiment recipe. It was for crispy shallots, and I made it. And I was like, oh, this seems to have turned out okay. I tasted it a little bit, but I was like, oh, I need something to put it on. And I was like, before going to do the podcast, I'll have it with some yogurt. And I wasn't home last night. I approached the box this morning to sprinkle some in my yogurt. And I see that it's almost. And there are, like, very few strands of golden, crispy shallots. And I'm like, we have a friend visiting. So Ohad. My husband and her last night apparently ate almost all of it with mashed potatoes.

[D]

Ooh.

[C]

Which I was. I thought it was great.

[B]

Creamy and crunchy. Sounds great.

[C]

And so I sprinkled the meager remains on my yogurt. It was quite good. But I felt gratified. I was like, I'm feeding the family.

[B]

You fed loved ones. That's beautiful.

[C]

Yeah. So that's my story. I thought that went well. People ate it.

[D]

That sounds great.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

That's a dream.

[B]

It sounds like it was a smash hit. Well, I'll just quickly tell you guys. I made Simple Soba salad from page 174. It serves four. I made a serving for one me for lunch yesterday as my child slept. Because I need quick recipes right now. I need stuff that is really low effort, potentially high reward. And it's very simple. It's just boiling soba noodles. I already had scallions chopped up in my fridge from something I'd made earlier in the week. I did toast some sesame seeds. I had cilantro around and then I made this peanut ginger dressing.

[C]

Is it supposed to go with it?

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

And I put that on and I had some shrimp in my fridge that I cooked. I had a lovely lunch.

[C]

That sounds really good.

[D]

Sounds good.

[B]

And later I realized what I'd made. I'd made cold sesame noodles. That's what it was. Delicious. And it was definitely good. And I will be making soba noodles again.

[D]

Amazing.

[C]

Amazing.

[D]

Thank you, Samin.

[C]

Samin Nosrat's pared down approach to recipes feels like a real change for what we've been seeing. After the break, Helen Rosner joins us to talk about the landscape today on Critics At Large. From the New Yorker.

[B]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.

[D]

I'm Michael Coloury, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.

[B]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.

[D]

Right?

[B]

So whether we're talking about privacy, AI.

[F]

Social media, or a major tech figure.

[D]

We will always explain the Silicon Valley.

[B]

Forces behind these stories.

[D]

Stories and how they affect you.

[B]

Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[F]

Hi, I'm New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein. I'm a long sleeve kind of guy. And fall is my season. It's the perfect time to refresh my wardrobe with pieces that feel as good as they look. Luckily, Quince makes it easy to look polished, stay warm and save big without compromising on quality. Personally, I'm eyeing that 100% Mongolian cashmere sweater for $50 because sweaters are what I live in. By partnering directly with ethical top tier factories and cutting out the middleman, Quintz delivers luxury quality pieces at half the price of similar brands. It's the kind of wardrobe upgrade that feels smart, stylish and effortless. At this point, I've become more sweater than person. And Quince's organic cotton turtleneck sweater that is my uniform all fall long. Keep it classic and cozy this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com nycritics for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I-n c e.com nycritics to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com nycritics.

[C]

Hey guys, good news. We're preparing an episode of our favorite series. I need a critic, but we cannot.

[B]

Do it without you and your cultural conundrums. Conundra could be a conundrum.

[D]

So if you have a burning, I mean life altering cultural question that you just can't solve, let us help.

[C]

The lines, my friends are open. Email [e-mail] with critics and the subject line.

[B]

Yep, that's themailewyorker.com we're here to help.

[C]

So we've been talking about our own forays into home cooking, but we're not the experts here. So we've invited our beloved colleague Helen Rosner, a food critic at the New Yorker, to help explain this whole landscape to us. She's edited cookbooks, she's reviewed restaurants, she, like Samin, is a James Beard Award winner and she's walking into the studio right now.

[B]

Ba ba da ba. Hi Helen.

[E]

How's it going?

[B]

Going good just for you.

[D]

So excited to have you.

[C]

I know we're really excited. This is the first time we're having Helen on our show and we're happy to have her here because it's just delightful to have a smart guest. But specifically, we're excited to talk to you today, Helen, about the landscape of recipes and cookbook and trends in home cooking. And obviously this is your area of expertise. We are just visitors in this world. So maybe we can start by you helping us place Samin Nosserat's New cookbook in kind of the recent pantheon of cookbooks, recipes. Right now at this moment, what are the main things that people should know about how recipes are being written and disseminated? Now for the home cookbook.

[E]

Oh, my God. I mean.

[C]

I mean, I know this is a.

[E]

Huge question and this is an enormous question. Cause I think talking about cookbooks and cooking and recipes, it's like talking about fiction, like it is an enormous landscape. But I wanna pick up on something you said when you were introducing me, which is that you're so pleased to have an expert here because it sounds wishy washy, but the truth is that I think one of the secret facts about cooking and home cooking in particular, and one of the things that I think makes good things, I mean, cookbook so great, and salt, fat, acid, heat as well, is that everyone is in a very real way an expert about cooking and food and eating. Because it is such an intimate thing to eat. We take it into our bodies. You know, like, you listen to music, you read a book, you go see a play. That is a largely external engagement with something that gives you pleasure or thought. You eat food and then you digest it. And like, you feel it digesting. If things go wrong, you poop it out seven hours later. Like, it is a deeply personal thing. And I think one of the reasons that Samin's approach to cooking has been so resonant with people, that people love her, besides her inherent phenomenal charisma and her writing skills and things like that, is that she communicates in subtle but unignorable ways that cooking is not as hard as you think it is and you can do it, but also that you should do it because it will help you connect to yourself and to your world and to your community and to your body in a way that you already fundamentally, in some inherent way, know how to do. So what Samin is doing is gently and elegantly showing you that not just that it's not that hard, but that it is a fundamental extension of things you are already doing in your life. It doesn't have to be a new skill.

[B]

It's so interesting that you say that because you know, this book has a couple of origin stories that. And one of them is about, I feel like Samin herself struggling with exactly what you're talking about and trying to braise a ton of pork and failing at her braise and feeling like she's failing. And a friend of hers happens to call and just says, like, oh, come bring it to my house.

[E]

Exactly.

[B]

And we can Just eat it. Yeah. And I think.

[C]

Or we can do it together.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

I think we have community.

[B]

Yeah. I think one thing that makes her an appealing figure and a good avatar for what you're describing, Helen, is that she, like, owns up to it herself.

[E]

Yeah. And I think I fundamentally distrust, on certain levels, professional home cooks performing through cookbooks or through video or whatever it might be, who are only ever happy and only ever love doing it, because the sales pitch inside virtually every cookbook is, you kind of hate doing this. This is an obligation. Right. Like, we have to feed ourselves multiple times a day. When you become a parent or you're taking care of other people, you have to feed other people, you have to do the budgeting, you have to do the shopping, you have to do the goddamn cleaning up. Like, it is infinite and perpetual, and unlike virtually any other cultural avenue, if you don't do it, you die. So the stakes are incredibly high, and that kind of sucks after a while. And I think that this sort of.

[C]

And you've written about it yourself. Yeah. Like, you're in 2020, late 2020. You wrote about your burnout as a home cook.

[E]

You know, it was a deep pandemic, and I was cooking a lot, and on some level, it should have been the most joyful and phenomenal cooking experience of my life. I was staying at my uncle's house that has one of the most incredible home kitchens that I've ever cooked in. We were using beautiful ingredients, and everything was just, like, pastoral and lovely within the nightmarish chaos of the first year of the pandemic. And yet the relentlessness of cooking was just wearing me down. And along with that was also this messaging that I was getting that I think everybody gets all the time. But at that moment, it was so acute that cooking should be an outlet, it should be an escape, it should be a release. It should be a form of artistic or creative expression or stress release. Like, needing the sourdough is like a place to put out your anger. And it's like, I don't want to need the sourdough. I want to not be angry, you know? And I love that about Samin. And she's not the only cookbook author, I think, who connects in that way. I think a big part of Alison Roman's success, for example, to bring up another incredibly popular contemporary cookbook author is that she's really open about what she likes and she doesn't like. She's kind of bitchy in a way that's relatable, not in a way that feels mean. She's like, I'm not gonna put rice in any of my cookbooks. I don't like rice. Like, there's some dislike is just sort of a different form of dissatisfaction. And that's true and real, you know, like, why would I cook something I don't like?

[C]

Yeah. So we have Samin, we have Allison Roman. So who are some of the other kind of like key icons of this landscape?

[E]

Well, it's an interestingly fragmented landscape. And I was recently reading Ruby Tando's new book, All Consuming, which is a collection of essays about food culture. And she's so insightful and it's really great. Yeah. And she deeply reported all the essays in this book. But there's also just so much tremendous, like, analysis and insight. And she breaks down cookbooks into three categories. She says that cookbooks are either self improvement, which are sort of health oriented, diet cookbooks, special diets, things like that. They are problem solvers, like get dinner on the table really quickly, I have to feed my family, everything is going to chaos. Or they are aspirational. So this is like a dream meal that I might not ever want to make, or it's the food of a place that I might not ever go, but I want to go there. And that was a really interesting way to break this down for me because personally, in my many years of consuming cookbooks, I always thought of cookbooks as either descriptive or prescriptive. Right. They're cookbooks that are telling you what's happening somewhere in a restaurant, in a place. They're documentary or they're cookbooks that are telling you how to make something in your home. But when we're talking about prescriptive cookbooks, you should actually be making this combined with like maybe a hybrid of rupees. Second and third categories, we're going to solve a problem, which is you think you should be a person who cooks. And also her third category, which is, you know, dreamy, inspirational stuff. That's where I think the real sweet spot in cookbook world lives. And that's Samin Nosrat. Alison Roman. Wishbone Kitchen is a really fantastic example.

[C]

Meredith Hayden.

[E]

Meredith Hayden.

[C]

What's she about? Yeah, because I keep hearing Wishbone Kitchen. Wishbone Kitchen.

[E]

So she's a fascinating figure and like, I put her directly in the lineage of an Ina Garten. Ina Garten is the undisputed monarch of the cookbook world. Ina Garten lives in the Hamptons in this exquisite, picture perfect compound. She lives with her husband Jeffrey, who is Charming. She has friends dropping by all the time who she's cooking for, cocktail parties, garden parties. She has this life that is just rich in found and chosen family, but also the Hamptons. And then we come to Wishbone Kitchen, who's a younger woman. She's I think in her late 20s. She also is in the Hamptons. She recently, in the last year, bought and created an extraordinary compound in the Hamptons full of hydrangeas and long flowing lawns and whitewashed walls.

[D]

God damn it. Anyway, continue.

[C]

No, it's hugely aspirational.

[E]

Hugely aspirational. So she kind of came to extraordinary fame through social media, which is an avenue that is distinct from the Samin path. She amassed an extraordinarily large following on Instagram and TikTok because her life is beautiful. She is beautiful. She's thin, she's blonde, she's lovely, she's compelling. And she cooks food that looks lovely.

[C]

She started out as a private chef. She did, actually.

[E]

And I think that's a really important part of this. Right. Because I think that private chefing, which is itself a tremendously successful niche within TikTok and Instagram cooking videos, is. I'm a private chef. Here's what I've cooked for today is cooking for someone. And private chefing is a fascinating middle ground between restaurant cooking and home cooking. If you think about, if we rewind way, way, way back and sort of think about the fundamental kind of gender dynamic and home economic elements of having one adult in a household who cooks for everybody and other adults who do other things, cooking three meals a day for a bunch of people is a full time job. Like it is a total fiction that you can do this sort of have it all 90s power mom narrative. Right. And the private chef exists to cook for everybody and to follow their whims, but also to make things feel. And you know, now that you say that it is all coming together for me, I'm having an amazing revelation right here in the podcast studio.

[B]

That's what we're here for. Yeah.

[E]

Which is, I think that maybe part of why Wishbone Kitchen doesn't speak to me personally is because it is private chef y cooking. It is cooking as performance, not necessarily cooking to be consumed by the person doing the cooking.

[B]

Yeah. You know, I'm thinking back to my generation's cooking milestones. We are post Ina Garten. I mean, obviously Ina Garten is. She's still going strong, but she was not the big figure where post Martha Stewart, she was not the big figure. The first real Cookbook moment. I remember where everybody in their early 20s was like, let's have a dinner party. I'm cooking from Yotam Adelingi.

[D]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Yeah. Jerusalem. I got a copy of Jerusalem, which is now spattered with so many different tomato sauces and olive oils and this and that. And to me, that book is really that hybrid creation of. Yotam Omahalenghi is a restaurateur. All of his recipes comically involve so many different prep steps that he later created a cookbook called Simple. I think.

[C]

Yes.

[E]

Which is. It's a great book, but not simple exactly, even though it says it on the COVID That's actually a good rule of thumb. By the way, any cookbook that advertises it as simple has probably not what simplicity is.

[B]

I mean, I remember just being over my kitchen with Jerusalem, just craving this particular chicken that involves so many Jerusalem artichokes. And then I discovered, oh, my God, I have to boil these things, I have to cut them up, I have to do this, I have to do that. And then I made the chicken many times, but I never used the Jerusalem artichokes against a single thing from that.

[C]

Book, even though I bought it, of course.

[B]

But my theory is this. I do think that we hop from the Ottolenghi to the Alison Roman of it all. Alison Roman's books are called Dining in Nothing Fancy like that becomes this kind of glamour of like, you know, for another my generation milestone cooking moment, when Alison Roman made her video with the New York Times of her Thanksgiving meal in her, at the time, absolutely tiny kitchen with a stove and an oven, you couldn't even imagine that more than half a sheet pan would fit inside of. And she's cooking this whole Thanksgiving meal. You know, I, like a member of my generation creative class, whatever, said, like, I shall cook this very Thanksgiving meal for my entire family. And that's what I did, 100%.

[C]

So how did it turn out?

[B]

Great. It was delicious.

[E]

Oh, great.

[B]

But I wanna know why. I wanna know why this is our idea of glamour.

[E]

Gosh.

[B]

Tell us, Helen. Sorry.

[C]

No pressure, though. No pressure.

[E]

I think that the dinner party as a touchstone, which is the cornerstone of so many cookbooks. One of my favorite cookbooks that just came out is called let's Party by Dan Pelosi, and it's his second book. He's grossy Pelosi on social media, and I love him. I love his recipes. His recipes work. Samin's recipes work. Alison Roman's recipes work.

[B]

They do work.

[D]

And there's also Shallot jam.

[E]

Oh. Anyway, why is that glamorous? Okay, so the dinner party, the reason I brought up all this stuff. The dinner party, I think, has become a touchstone of, I hate to use this word, adulting. Like, I have a home. I have a table. I have a tablecloth. Like, you put together the dinner party as a form of performance. The lighting, you know, the sets, the music, the soundtrack. It's a way of throwing a party that is not just like a rager. And it's also a sort of statement of sophistication, of connection, of community. Like, and there's a little bit of a tail wagging the dog on this. I think that very few people, and Ruby and Samin both talk about this in their books. Very few people just throw a dinner party. Like, a dinner party is almost always an incredibly affected thing. I love them. I love them. Invite me to all of your dinner parties. But, like. But there is nothing effortless, easy, organic, fitting into your daily life about a dinner party. However, what people like Alison Roman do, what people like Dan Pelosi do with extraordinary skill, is make the act of feeding others in that found family community entertainment. We are all together just because it's a Thursday way, feeling doable without having to have, like, a multi tiered porcelain thing with grapes hanging down and, you know, beef Wellington and all these things. It's just people together at a table.

[B]

What you're saying is making something really click for me, which is that. And I also love Grossie Pelosi. And his lifestyle content on Instagram now includes this beautifully remade home that I gather is somewhere in the Hudson Valley. And I'm looking at all the colors in that house and thinking, it's fabulous. It's so great. The Joseph Frank wallpaper. Yeah. It's a whole lifestyle. It's a whole lifestyle that I want to buy into.

[E]

And it's anti beige, it's anti racist. Refined. And I mean, it's refined. He's incredibly sophisticated, right? Like, the level of taste he has is phenomenal, but it's joyful. And so many cookbooks are about misery and drudgery and telling you that you should like it. Saying, this is a nightmare. But if you're a good person and you love your children or you love your friends, you will bleed for them. And Dan Pelosi, Samin Nosrat, Alison Roman are all saying, no, man, don't bleed for your loved ones. Just feed them.

[B]

The other thing you're making really click for me, Helen, about the appeal of this generation, and we're Talking about, fundamentally, the millennial generation of cooks and cookbook writers. This is a form of adulting, as you say, for a generation that felt that adulthood was constantly being deferred because of the economic crisis that hit right around the time that everyone was getting out of college, because of all these realities that have plagued millennials, the kinds of, you know, finger wagging. Why are millennials sleeping on their parents couches and still in the basement?

[C]

Avocado toast.

[E]

Avocado toast. Avocado toast is, I think, a fascinating thing that connects all of this because it is an intentionally constructed foodstuff, and it has an aesthetic component, and it is food that allows you to enjoy both its preparation and its consumption. And as a result, it is an embodiment of evil. Right. Like it is, like, the anti Protestant. Like, it is anything but stuff.

[C]

How dare you? How dare you enjoy this?

[E]

How dare you indulge in visual pleasure when you should be suffering in poverty?

[B]

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that there's an ethos that's so good around this idea of the dinner party, which is don't wait to have the napkins. Don't wait to have the plates, which, by the way, traditionally, when did you get those things? You got those things when you got married and you had a registry. And that's gonna be the start of your adult life. No, for people of our generation, we're going to ikea. We're getting the dishes ourselves. It's mismatched. It's. Whatever it's gonna be, because we're getting married later, we're living alone longer. We're just trying to work it out. And so these are dinner parties for, like, that's adulthood now. You know, if you have to sit on a crate, sit on a crate. If you have to have your plate in your lap, have your plate in your lap. We're gonna do this. This is fun. This is entertaining, and that's very appealing.

[E]

Yeah. We're not gonna put our lives on hold until we reach some totally fabricated and aspirational ideal of adulthood that is economically and socially not even feasible anymore.

[D]

Helen, you killed it. Thank you so much. Helen. Thank you so much.

[C]

This was awesome.

[B]

A delight.

[C]

A delight. Samin Nusrat's mission is to free your readers from the recipe. But there are just so many recipes out there, and it's easy to become intimidated. This is critics at large from the New Yorker. We'll be right back.

[B]

Lights, camera, fashion.

[C]

This year, Vogue World is heading to Hollywood. The scene, the legendary Paramount Pictures Studios lot.

[D]

The plot.

[C]

Cinema's most iconic costumes meet fashion's biggest designers.

[B]

Think Edward Scissorhands tailoring and Marie Antoinette opulence. It's drama, it's decadence.

[E]

It's a costume department come to life.

[B]

The countdown starts now.

[E]

Learn more about the livestream event of.

[B]

The [e-mail] and cut.

[C]

Okay, so we had Helen here. We talked about home cooking as a kind of cultural force, as a lifestyle force, how important it has become. And one thing that we, I guess, maybe haven't talked about explicitly is how vast the numbers here are. You know, if we look specifically at the New York Times cooking vertical, since 2014, they've published nearly 10,000 new recipes. They're now at more than 24,000, which is kind of an enormous number. I mean, think about the choice there, right? The website and the app attracted more than 456 million visits, individual visits, last year. The Cooking vertical now publishes 75 to 100 new recipes per month. And this is just the Times, right? We're not even talking about TikTok. We're not talking about Instagram. We're not talking about the extremely popular cookbooks. And so what does this mean to us, the fact that there is so much choice? You know, we had an episode about the glut of choice and modern life. This seems to me a particular landscape in which this issue is all too true. Of course, there's a lot of positive in it, but on the other hand, maybe there are certain things that aren't as positive about it. Alex, what do you think?

[B]

I just think it's a fascinating window into the way we cook now, which also is, of course, a bigger window into the way we are now, because, as Helen was saying, cooking and eating is so fundamental to everyday life. You know, I'm thinking back to the time when I first started to get into cooking myself. And a book that I wanted at the time was Mark Bittman's how to Cook Everything. And the title of that book, I remember that totally.

[C]

I remember I got that.

[B]

Everything I wanted the knowledge, I wanted to know how to cook everything.

[D]

Why wouldn't you want that?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, how to Cook it just sounds like it could be you become all powerful if you could do that. So now I'm not looking at how to cook everything on any given night. I am indeed going into the Times app. On the one hand, it's definitely expanded my sense, my range of what's possible. There are certain recipe writers who I trust. Melissa Clarke, Ali Slagle, Love Melissa Clark. Yeah, just like, I know it's gonna be solid and good and at the same time, you know, I do think that some of this having easy access to these specific recipes all the time made me into a little bit too much of a perfectionist recipe person. Like, oh my God, I don't have the panko breadcrumb. My God, I only have the regular ones. I'm gonna have to go out and. And I don't. You know, it's like, roll with it, Schwartz. Just roll with it. It's only dinner.

[D]

Is this how you talk to yourself sometimes? Roll with it, Schwartz.

[B]

Sometimes you gotta just.

[D]

Are you a football coach to yourself and are you fat? I try to be.

[B]

Honestly, I try to be.

[C]

That's good.

[B]

And I think a lot of this is really great and world expanding. And I also think, just as we discussed in the Glut of choice, it can make you a little bit nutso.

[C]

I really relate. Like the glut of choice thing for me, it's weighed me down a little bit and my desire or like ability to like go for it. I'm so behind is my feeling, like all of these people know so much, like they've made so much. And here I am with like the two things I know how to do. But I have to say that cooking from this book and just choosing. I know this is a little pathetic. Like I chose like the crispy shallots. I was like, I'm gonna choose something very small.

[B]

I think it's adorable.

[C]

But. But I was like, okay, my daughter is getting older. Maybe at some point I'll have kind of more time to take a self care, like two hour break and listen to a podcast and try cooking something new. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe I need to put aside my fears if there's too much and I'm so behind. I don't know. Vincent, what do you feel?

[D]

Yeah, it's just like going on Spotify and being weighed down with the whole history of music being right in front of you.

[C]

That's a really good comparison. Yeah, it's like, oh my God, I'm so behind. And so I'm just gonna stick to the one thing I know how to listen to from like 20 years ago.

[D]

That's right. Or beyond Instagram and looking through, speaking of our algorithms, like trend after trend after trend in dressing. And therefore like all of a sudden, like nobody has any style because they're just like pulling from every single. At a certain point. Growing up is actually to me about looking at whatever number of options you have, and then ruthless winnowing down. At some point, we have to. To close some doors. This is how I cook. This is what I'm listening to. This is how I dress. Maybe the opposite of that is what we have started to call AI slop. It's just everything all together, all the time. Never achieving expertise, but kind of just skimming among things. It seems to me that all of this is helpful insofar as you can make decisions about what fits into your life. This is what I like about the Samin Nasrat book. It's like, here's something you can make, and then it's just around your house, and then it's part of a life that you've chosen.

[C]

Right. Maybe a life, not a lifestyle. Right? That's right. I mean, that separation, that distinction between something that you're doing outwardly to look a certain way, to try to seem a certain way to others, even to yourself, rather than a life which is like, yeah, I, like, enjoy eating this or whatever. This is a reliable way for me to go on living in a way that's also maybe a little pleasurable.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, Alex, I know you wanted to mention this Nora Ephron essay that we all read from 2006 from the New Yorker.

[B]

Yes, I did want to mention this essay. This essay is called Serial Monogamy, and the subtitle is My Cookbook Crushes. And it's a bit of an autobiography through cooking and a journey towards, I think, what Vincent is describing, which is knowing yourself and knowing your own tastes and pleasures and being able to provide for yourself. And I love it, because even though she's talking about 1962, it really reminded me of all the things we're talking about from now, because cookbooks represent that. They represent aspiration. They represent, this could be your table if only you do this. You know who is a genius at this? Martha Stewart. Not just giving you the food, but giving you every piece of the lifestyle that could come with it. Here's the special way to fold your napkin. Here's the way to arrange the flowers. I'm gonna give you a whole life. And I think a lot of people who didn't make those recipes or fold those napkins still loved watching the show because how comforting to relax into someone else living that. But here is Nora. I'm just gonna first name her. Here's Nora talking about going through the motions, just trying to imagine this lifestyle that she would be leading. Starting to cook from Julia Child, all of this. And it's not that it's not working for her, but it's that she's kind of playing at these recipes in a way that doesn't feel fully integrated into the way she's actually living. And eventually she hits her stride and really discovers a kind of simplicity and I guess what we would call now authenticity in her style of cooking that clicks for her, that she feels she can embody and improvise with, and that, you know, really is her own. And I love this essay because it's funny, because it doesn't take itself too seriously, which, by the way, is hugely important when you're cooking anything. Yeah. Stuff is gonna burn. You're gonna have an absolute disaster, and you're gonna have a bunch of people waiting for dinner in the other room and you're just gonna open the oven and it's gonna be a nightmare in there. And what are you gonna do when that happens? You gotta kind of pick yourself up and keep going. But eventually she reaches a place where she feels that she can cook in a way that she actually just enjoys and like enjoyment is it. Again, going back to good things. I was very struck by the bibliography here, which is not just a cooking bibliography. I mean, there's everyone thanked in this thing from Annie Dillard to Abraham Joshua Heschel.

[C]

Not Abraham Joshua Heschel.

[B]

Yes, because this is a way of life and thinking about life.

[D]

And it reminds me that not only is cooking supposed to be a part of a life, but specifically it can be a part of the life of the mind. Like that what we do in this room all the time. I prefer this over that. I think that this can be something that a long running process of development that happens alongside your notions of the self. You know that everything that's happening in your life can be connected to this act. Not that you're like always going to the farmer's market and picking out the perfect tomato, but your choices in the kitchen can be deeply connected to desires outside of the kitchen. And therefore not just self expression, but. But self nourishing can grow shoots in other aspects of life. That's really. I mean, I guess we've been saying aspirational a lot, but that is deeply connected to how I think about the rest of how we build identity over time.

[B]

Yeah. It's also the other side of aspirational, which is just practical reality, like the way you actually live. Like, just as you may always have a certain pair of reliable jeans in the closet that you know you're gonna feel good when you wear, I will always have arugula in my fridge. It needs to be there. I will always have lemon and olive oil that I can eat it with and salt because I need a very lemony, oily, salty. Arugula salad is a reliable source of pleasure, especially to eat with something like a schnitzel or pizza.

[D]

Yeah, but good stuff.

[B]

Or roast chicken. Like if I can just put a chicken in the oven and have an arugula salad. A citrusy arugula salad. Everything is okay. That's my uniform. Everything is okay.

[C]

I'll drink to that and eat this has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle o'. Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino, Condonest's Head of Global Audio's Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed Arthemus. And we had engineering help today from James Yost, with mixing by Mike Kutschman. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] Critics.

[B]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Kollori, Wired's director of consumer Tech and culture. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[E]

Right?

[B]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin.

[D]

Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always.

[B]

Explain how the Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[C]

This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales.

[E]

Odoo is all connected on a single.

[C]

Platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out.

[B]

On the features you need.

[C]

Check out Odoo at odoo. Com. That's O D O O Com prx.