336. Why SFAH

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When I was a kid, I often saw my mom (Hi, JG!) reading cookbooks as if they were novels, cover-to-cover. I never understood why she wasn't bored by what I saw as lists of ingredients. Then, when she cooked, I hardly ever saw her following recipes. I would normally never read a cookbook if I could read a romance novel instead. And here's the funny part: I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on American cookbooks, but after that research project, I would never have thought to pick one up to read out of the context of making a meal.

For years, I saw cooking as a chore I didn't have time for and didn't particularly enjoy. Our family ate every meal we could at the Dining Hall and had a lot of pasta and simple salads in the summer months when the DH wasn't available to us.

Flash forward a lot of years, and I'm finally having fun cooking. Instagram's algorithm discovered that I like watching people make vegetarian recipes, so a lot of those come into my feed. I save so many that I have cookbooks' worth in any category I might want to try: main dishes, sides, salads, soups, breakfast foods, breads, etc. During each vacation, I browse my files to find two or three days of dinner ideas and shop for a few at a time. Then, I have fun trying them out, and almost all of them have been terrific.

You might wonder if I follow the recipes to the letter. Hardly ever. My husband (Hi, CIO!) thinks it's funny that when he asks about what I've made, I usually reply with both what the recipe said to do and how I changed it. Usually, my variations (based both on what I like and on what I have in the house) come out great. Sometimes, they flop.

One time, I altered a recipe that I had successfully made before so that it would be vegan, as we were hosting a vegan guest. (Hi, MR!) The cake never became fully solid, so I called it pudding and served it anyway. The dish was the hit of the night!

Now, having read Salt Fat Acid Heat, I have a better sense of how to color outside of the lines in ways that will work. The basic principles of the text are ones that clearly apply to cooking and also, I think, to a lot of other aspects of life:

• we need balance;
• knowing how things work helps us improvise;
• following blindly isn't as good as knowing the terrain and making smart decisions about which way to go;
• science is incontrovertible;
• having too much of one thing (on a plate, in a baking dish, in life) makes everything come out wrong;
• bland is boring; and
• the more you know, the better life will be.

I've probably left off a lot of the important messages I got from this book, but I'm getting hungry again, so I'm off to make myself a snack. Please share your responses in the comments, and in case you want to see the same details for this book as I provide for my NetGalley reviews, here you go:

title: Salt Fat Acid Heat

author: Samin Rosrat

publisher: Simon and Schuster

publication date: April 25, 2017

pages: 480

peppers: 0 (on this scale), though she does talk about peppers

warnings: reading this book will make you hungry

summary: the author is a trained chef who understands and explains how to add the four titular elements of cooking so that everything you make will taste great and come out as you intended.

tropes:

• cooking at home is better for you and not as difficult as you think;
• one doesn't need to follow a recipe to make great food; and
• food is delicious and necessary.

what I liked:

• everything make sense; it's not complicated, even if I never would have thought of any of it myself;
• the illustrations are great: helpful and hysterical; and
• her writing is accessible, clear, and engaging.

what I didn’t like:

• I didn't know that I should read it with Post-it notes in hand, so I'm going to have to read it again...and maybe again after that.
• It made me hungry.

overall rating: 5 (of 5 stars)