An Everlasting Meal

Cooking with Economy and Grace

customer reviews

Reviving the inspiring message of M. F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf— written in 1942 during wartime shortages—An Everlasting Meal shows that cooking is the path to better eating.

Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs know: that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them.

She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.

Choose a format:

Book details:

Scribner |
272 pages |
ISBN 9781439181874 |
October 2011

$25.00 List Price

This title is temporarily out of stock, please check back soon.

Teaching Resources

To download a file to your computer right-click on the link and choose 'save file as'

High Resolution Images

Book Cover Image (jpg): An Everlasting Meal
Hardcover 9781439181874

(3.2 MB)

Author Photo (jpg): Tamar Adler
Photograph by Dan Kim

(0.1 MB)

Any use of an author photo must include its respective photo credit

Praise

“

”

“An Everlasting Meal is beautifully intimate, approaching cooking as a narrative that begins not with a list of ingredients or a tutorial on cutting an onion, but with a way of thinking…. Tamar is one of the great writers I... ”

– Alice Waters, from the Foreword

“It can be tricky, in this age of ethically charged supermarket choices, to remember that eating is an act of celebration. Tamar Adler's terrific book wisely presents itself as a series of how to’s--How To Boil Water, How to... ”

– Dan Barber, Chef/Co-Owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

“Tamar Adler understands a simple truth that seems to evade a lot of cookbook writers and self-proclaimed ‘foodies’: cooking well isn't about special equipment or exotic condiments or over-tested recipes (and it sure... ”

– Colman Andrews, author of The Country Cooking of Italy and Editorial Director of TheDailyMeal.com

“In this beautiful book, Tamar Adler explores the difference between frugal and resourceful cooking. Few people can turn the act of boiling water into poetry. Adler does. By the time you savor the last page, your kitchen will have... ”

– Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed and Starved

“An Everlasting Meal is a great thrill to read. Anyone who cooks is engaged in a re-creation of the Enlightenment Age--beginning with alchemy and mystery, always grasping towards chemistry and a tasty supper. With this book, Tamar... ”

– Jack Hitt, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine

“Lessons so right and so eloquent that I think of them as homilies.”

– Corby Kummer, The New York Times Book Review

“Reads less like a cookbook than like a recipe for a delicious life.”

– New York Magazine

“Reading [An Everlasting Meal] is like having a cooking teacher whispering suggestions in your ear.... Mindfulness, I’m discovering through this terrific book, can be delicious.”

– Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

“Tamar Adler has written the best book on ‘cooking with economy and grace’ that I have read since MFK Fisher. ”

– Michael Pollan

“What it really is is a book about how to live a good life: take the long view, give to others, learn from everything you do, and always, always, always mindfully enjoy what you are doing and what you’ve done. The fact... ”

– Forbes.com

“Adler proves herself an adept essayist in this discourse on instinctive home cooking. Though highly personal, it’s much less a food memoir than a kind of cooking tao.”

– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Simultaneously meditative and practical, about how to appreciate and use what you have and how to prepare it appropriately with a minimum of fuss, space, equipment, or waste. ”

– The Austin Chronicle

‹ ›

Read an Excerpt

One
How to Boil Water

When is water boiling? When, indeed, is water water?

—M. F. K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

There is a prevailing theory that we need to know much more than we do in order to feed ourselves well. It isn’t true. Most of us already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire. This gives us boiling water, in which we can do more good cooking than we know.

Our culture frowns on cooking in water. A pot and water are both simple and homely. It is hard to improve on the technology of the pot, or of the boil, leaving nothing...