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.

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