Samin Nosrat gets to the heart of cooking in ‘Good Things’

There were two breakthroughs that helped lead Samin Nosrat to her new recipe memoir, Good Things, released in September. 

The first occurred as the author and former chef struggled in her earliest attempts to pen the follow-up to her 2017 cooking guide, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat – a global phenomenon that sold 1.4 million copies, earned Nosrat a James Beard award, and spawned a Netflix miniseries of the same name, which she also hosted. The book pledged to teach readers the four “elements of good cooking,” which if mastered could free them from a reliance on recipes. And in sketching out her next project, Nosrat initially pursued a similarly high-concept idea.

“And the first real [breakthrough] came after I melted down and decided I couldn’t write the very ambitious book I had proposed, and which would have taken me 20 years,” said Nosrat, who intended to create a guide to help readers decide on a dish to prepare based on four constraints: resources, preferences, ingredients, and time. “And then my agent was like, ‘Why don’t you write a book of recipes?’ And I was like, ‘I hate you. Have you ever met me? I would never do that.’ And then of course that planted a subconscious seed. So, when I was cooking something a little while later that was super delicious and simple, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, if only there was an efficient way to share this with people so they could make it for themselves.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, crap.’”

The second and more important breakthrough emerged more gradually, with a series of circumstances combining to make Nosrat reconsider the value of time. 

Coming out of the early pandemic, Nosrat began to host small weekly dinner parties with neighbors and acquaintances who have since grown to become her chosen family – a routine that serves as the backbone to Good Things. Beyond serving as a needed reminder of the spirit of community inherent to cooking, Nosrat said the dinners allowed her to relax the perfectionist tendencies she harbored from youth and that carried over into her years in the professional kitchen, where for more than a decade she worked for acclaimed chef Alice Waters at the California restaurant Chez Panisse.

“My joke is that I that I grew up in a house with a mother who had high standards and was basically impossible to please, and then I left home and went to a kitchen with another mother who was the same,” said Nosrat, who will appear in conversation with Columbus author Hanif Abdurraqib at the Davidson Theatre on Friday, Oct. 10. (Nosrat constructed her book tour to mirror the feel of her dinner parties, allowing her to engage in wide-ranging conversations with similarly interesting people for whom she has long held admiration.) “The dinner parties are just something that’s outside of my control. And very little in my life related to food is outside of my control, because I was trained to be in complete control. And that part, I think, has been the greatest opportunity for learning.

“When there’s more than one person involved in anything, there’s more than one idea on how to do things, and it’s been amazing to give up my desire or my need to do everything and have it my way. And the dinner can still be really good if you didn’t brown the zucchini to the right point or something. It’s not about technical perfection every step of the way. The world still goes on. Ultimately, what really matters is us being together. And the food is in service of that but rarely the point of it.”

Concurrent to this evolution, Nosrat also navigated a series of personal losses, including the death of her father, from whom she’d been long estranged. “And he died a sort of sad, pitiful death as a result of the pain and chaos he had sewn throughout his life,” she said. “But I think watching him die was a real moment of clarity for me, like, oh, I’m going to die one day, too. … And when I’m in this position and I’m dying, I want to look back on love and friendship and nature and beauty and joy. And if I wanted that to be the heart of my life, I needed to change something. And that really became a focus in my own life and my own thinking and my own reading. And then eventually in my writing, too.”

Though billed as a cookbook, the heart of Good Things exists in these myriad personal revelations, which surface in the form of life lessons, stories, and advice – many rooted in the dearness of time, or how scarce it can feel. Cooking, she writes, can serve as a counter to this relentless march, enabling us to slow down and revel in those rare instances when we’re gathered together in community with the people we love most.

These lessons are especially relevant to these times, where social and political realities have led everyone from trans rights activists and immigration attorneys to harm reduction volunteers and advocates for the unhoused to focus more intently on mutual aid and building communities that exist outside of those more traditional power structures. In one interview, for instance, Nosrat talked about how as one person she can’t move the needle on global hunger, but she can still have an impact within her neighborhood – a realization that led her to make and jar jams for sale, raising $40,000 for local charities in Oakland, California.

“Things are so heavy right now, and so much feels out of our power and control,” Nosrat said. “And yeah, mutual aid, taking care of the people immediately in front of you is something that can feel within grasp.”