Cookery by the Book

Now & Again
Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers

By Julia Turshen
Photographs by David Loftus

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery By the Book podcast, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Julia Turshen:                  My name is Julia Turshen, and by latest cookbook is called Now & Again: Go To Recipes, Inspired Menus, and Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers.

Suzy Chase:                  The last time we chatted on my podcast we were talking about Feed the Resistance. With your latest cookbook, Now & Again, I noticed some themes from Feed the Resistance also in this cookbook. What are the three goals you had in mind while writing Now & Again?

Julia Turshen:                  When I sat down to write Now & Again I had three goals in mind. The first was to dismantle the idea that making a full meal, cooking an entire menu, had to be both difficult and expensive. My second goal was to really show that leftovers are great, and that they're an invitation to fun and inventive cooking. The final goal was just to make sure you had all the tools you need. Both the inspiration and the information to bring people into your home and around your table, because to me that's the best part of home cooking.

Suzy Chase:                  You have such diversity in this cookbook, from a Sunday morning Bangladeshi breakfast, to a steakhouse dinner for vegetarians, to tortilla soup for a chilly spring evening. Now you gathered 150 recipes to develop 20 menus. How did these recipes make the cut?

Julia Turshen:                  That's a great question. You know, I think they made the cut so to speak if each menu felt really kind of perfectly composed. I started the book by writing down the menus and the ideas of the menu before I wrote down each and every recipe. The steakhouse dinner for vegetarians, which is one of my favorite menus. It always makes me laugh whenever I say it. I had that idea for a menu and I had one or two of the recipes in mind. But the rest kind of filled themselves in so to speak. I started kind of with, I guess you'd say kind of the framework. The menu or the meal, and then I kind of filled in the blanks.

Suzy Chase:                  Let's say it's a random Monday and you're thinking about cooking dinner. You tend to cook a few things, not just one. Walk me through your process. Do you get inspiration from what's already in your fridge and pantry? Do you wander around the grocery store? Do you ask Grace what she wants? How do you do it?

Julia Turshen:                  Yeah, sort of all of the above. It's never always the same formula, which is part of what I love so much about cooking at home. The inspiration can feel different everyday and the needs can feel different. But I guess at the end of the day, we have to eat dinner, and we're lucky to be able to. I kind of start from, yeah, usually what's there. What's the one thing in the fridge that needs to be used up? Is that something leftover? Is that an ingredient I haven't gotten to?

                                                      I really, I hate throwing things out, which was a big part of where this book came from. Usually it is starting there. What's the one thing that needs to be used up? Then I sort of plan around it. Just as I said, I don't usually just make one thing. I'm a big fan of making a meal that has all sorts of things that compliment each other, and that does not need to be complicated or time consuming or expensive. It can be as simple as a bag of potato chips and an apple to go with my sandwich at lunch. It can be a green salad next to the roast chicken I make. Whatever it might be, I like just sort of rounding out the meal and not having just one single dish.

Suzy Chase:                  Have you always been intrigued by the idea of connection with dishes on the table and the people around it? Or did this kind of surface while you were conceiving Feed the Resistance?

Julia Turshen:                  I would say I've always been interested in that sense of connection, before I even had the words to describe that. I talk about in the book that my favorite way to sort of pass the time when I was bored in class when I was in school, you know, as I think we've all been before. My favorite way to pass that time was to write menus, like in the margins of my notebooks. Just to imagine meals. That sense of connection between dishes.

                                                      I would also think about who I would want to invite. Whether those were friends of mine in school, or I have notebooks from high school where I wrote kind of fantasies of meals. You know, fantasized about the types of friends I might have one day. That's always definitely been part of what has always drawn be to the kitchen and to cooking, is imagining the connection between both the dishes on the table and then the people around the table.

                                                      But I would say that real sense of community definitely crystallized for me when I wrote Feed the Resistance. Not really me writing it, but more me collecting all the people who wrote for it. Bringing together all those recipes and essays and really being in community with all the contributors. Then seeing that sense of community just expand almost exponentially when I got to promote the book and go around on tour and meet people, and just talk about the power of food to bring us all together.

                                                      I would say it threads through my whole life, but I think it's really felt more important to me than ever in the last few years.

Suzy Chase:                  As a home cook it's such a relief that you wrote Now & Again in plain English. There are no rules here. We can make a full menu, or we can mix and match from various menus in the cookbook. Talk a little bit about that.

Julia Turshen:                  Sure, yeah. The book is, it's broken down into seasons. Each season has a bunch of menus and each menu has all the recipes to make those menus. I wanted all the recipes to be both appealing, but also really easy to make, so that if you wanted to make each and every recipe and make that whole menu, that would be totally doable. You wouldn't strain yourself in doing that.

                                                      But I also feel very much that one of the best things about cooking at home is having freedom and agency to do whatever you want. If you want to pick one dish from one menu and mix it with another, or if you want to change some ingredients in a recipe, whatever you want to do is fine with me. My goal is just to hopefully help encourage you to be excited to be in your kitchen and invite people over. I feel so strongly that any cookbook reader, whether you're working with my book or someone else's, if you're going to spend money on ingredients and time preparing a recipe, that should be money and time really well spent. Hopefully you're really happy on the other side of it.

                                                      I want provide recipes that you can trust, but I also want to provide the framework to make you excited to cook, and to use whatever makes you feel good. If I call for, I don't know, say cilantro and something, and you're someone who hates cilantro. My mother, for example. I would not expect you at all to use it. Use a different herb or leave it out. There's no sense in making something you're not going to enjoy, because not only will you not enjoy it. It might dissuade you from cooking something else again soon. I'm all for recipes as kind of inspiration and helpful guidelines, but I don't see them as prescriptions. I think that you've got a lot of agency when you're in your kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  Well and I think it's great for the home cook that's not that confident in the kitchen, so you can make your whole menu, and when you get more confident you can start mixing and matching.

Julia Turshen:                  Exactly.

Suzy Chase:                  You can grow with it. As you wrote in the beginning of the cookbook, you originally started out writing a leftovers book. You were going to call it, drum roll please, It's Me Again. I love that name. It's so cute. With every menu you have It's Me Again tips, which is a brilliant idea.

Julia Turshen:                  Yeah. I was going to just have a small kind of really fun book that was just going to be about reinventing leftovers. I came up with that title, It's Me Again, and thought it was the funniest thing I've ever thought of.

Suzy Chase:                  I love it.

Julia Turshen:                  Yeah. I sort of fell in love with that idea. But then the more I got to work on it, I realized it just wasn't enough, because it was sort of giving you the after without giving you the before. It was telling you how to reinvent something without giving you the something. The book evolved and it became this much larger book, and I believe truly a much more useful one, and I think more meaningful one too because I got to include just so many personal stories and memories with all the menus.

                                                      But I did get to still hold onto It's Me Again. All those leftover ideas follow each menu. The way it works is, every single menu has all of the simple recipes to make it, and then it's followed by these ideas of what to do with things that are left over from the meal. Some of them are super simple. There's an arugula salad in one of the fall menus, and it's just dressed really simply with lemon and olive oil and it has some toasted pine nuts and parmesan cheese.

                                                      Leftover salad is something most people I think don't see much potential in. It's wilted. The texture is not really that great. It's a little bit soggy. It's not real appealing. But to me when I see that I don't see a soggy salad. I see the base of a delicious pesto, so I just throw that all in the food processor and just add a little bit more olive oil if it needs, and turn it into a wonderful pesto. You can spread it on grilled bread, toss it with pasta, eat it with roast chicken. Whatever it might be. I think that's a really good example of really transforming something. Something that you might think has no more worth, and all of a sudden finding tremendous value in it.

                                                      That's kind of the crux of all the ideas. Really seeing potential for new life and transformation in leftovers. In a funny way, I mean I guess it's not funny, but in a serious way, Now & Again is, it's a book about food waste without ever saying so. It's not a book about what you're doing wrong by throwing anything out. It's I think an encouraging book about what you can do with the things you might throw out.

Suzy Chase:                  In the back of the cookbook you have a chapter called Seven Lists. Describe this.

Julia Turshen:                  Sure. This was one of my favorite parts of the book. Each list has seven items on it. It's nearly 50 kind of, what I think of as extra ideas. I think of this section as kind of like the bonus content. These are written in a very, I would say much more kind of informal way. They're not strict recipes whatsoever. They're just ideas. They range from seven things to do if you have leftover wine, which some people say is not a thing. But if you do have leftover wine there's fun ideas for ways to use it. Poaching eggs in wine. Cooking spaghetti in it. Braising pork.

                                                      Then there's seven things to do with leftover cooked rice. Seven things to do with produce that's kind of on its way out. Then seven things to bring if you're invited over to someone's home for diner. Then the last list is just less of a cooking one, but it's seven things that you can delegate when you're having people over.

Suzy Chase:                  That's my favorite.

Julia Turshen:                  Oh, good. I'm -

Suzy Chase:                  Like ice.

Julia Turshen:                  Exactly, yeah. I think it's one of the best things to ask someone to bring, because if you're like me, I don't have a very big freezer so I don't have room to store a ton of ice. It's not something you can buy in advance because you can't really put it in your cupboard. Yeah, I love asking someone to bring it over, because it's not an expensive thing but it really saves you time, and it means you're not running out of your house or leaving your kitchen just before you're about to have people come over.

                                                      I, like I think a lot of other home cooks, struggle with delegating. It was just helpful to put down a bunch of ideas and remember that you don't have to do everything. It's okay to ask for help, and it's actually great to ask for help because I think it makes other people feel just as invested in the meal.

Suzy Chase:                  I think this comes from seeing our moms and grandmas doing everything, don't you think?

Julia Turshen:                  I guess so. I mean, I didn't grow up with a mother or a grandmother who cooked very much. But I think I definitely saw that happening in other areas. Not so much in the kitchen. But yeah, for sure. I think women in general take on a lot, and I think they take on a lot of responsibility and feel a big sense of obligation. Sort of like we were talking about a few minutes ago, I think everything's better when we're in community. Whether that's a meal or work or whatever it might be. I think asking for help when you need it, offering help when you can. These are all great things.

Suzy Chase:                  In this cookbook you have integrate so many of your family photos. One that I love was, you taught your grandmother and her friends how to make fruit salad. That was so cute.

Julia Turshen:                  Oh, yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  You also incorporated your great grandmother's playing cards. Talk a little bit about your maternal grandmother's candlesticks.

Julia Turshen:                  Sure, yeah. One thing that is so amazing about getting to create a cookbook is getting to kind of weave in all these little bits and pieces. A cookbook's not that much unlike a big quilt, and you get these opportunities to sort of put in little bits of your history. It's something that means a lot to me. In the spring section of the book there's a whole menu for Passover, which is a Jewish holiday that I've spent my whole life celebrating with my family.

                                                      My mother's parents were immigrants. I mean really they were refugees. They fled eastern Europe during the pogrom, and ended up in America. They did not have the chance to bring all that much with them, but one thing that my grandmother did bring with her was her set of candlesticks. She is long passed, and I actually never had the chance to meet her. But she passed down her candlesticks to my mother. Then at every Jewish holiday, or even at other holiday celebrations that we would have at my parents' house growing up into my kind of early adulthood, my mom would always take out the candlesticks and light them.

                                                      When I was doing all the photographs for Now & Again, I knew I was going to have this Passover menu. I really wanted to have a picture of those candlesticks in there, and it just felt like it would feel special. Whether or not even anyone realizes their significance, it just felt really important to me that they were in there.

                                                      My mom came over for the day when we were doing those photos, and she brought her candlesticks. Then when she was leaving I went to wrap them up and give them back to her, and then she told me I could keep them.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, really?

Julia Turshen:                  Which I can't say without crying.

Suzy Chase:                  That's lovely.

Julia Turshen:                  Yeah. It was just so sweet. They now live in my living room, and they're very proudly on display. I'm so happy to have them. Just touching them makes me feel connected to my family, and to family I never even got to meet but I feel so strongly tied to.

Suzy Chase:                  Well you're preaching to the choir, because every piece of furniture in my apartment I had growing up in Kansas. I can't get rid of all of my family furniture, so I get it.

Julia Turshen:                  Nor should you. I think that's amazing you have it, and I think these things we get to hold onto, whether it's a piece of furniture or a candlestick or a recipe, they have huge meaning. I think food is sometimes something we just eat when we're in a rush to go somewhere and we're hungry. I think at times it can just take on such a major significance. That really just again kind of fosters that sense of connection we were talking about.

Suzy Chase:                  The other night I made some dishes from your No Stress Thanksgiving Menu on page 63.

Julia Turshen:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase:                  Describe this menu, and talk a bit about how Thanksgiving has come to be your newest tradition.

Julia Turshen:                  Sure, yeah. The Thanksgiving menu I called the No Stress Thanksgiving, which is words you don't always find together. I have been cooking Thanksgiving since I was really young. 10 or 11 years old. The kid who was teaching herself to cook, Thanksgiving was always the day during the year I most looked forward to, and I think the day when I was most trying to show off these skills. Looking back on it I think it's kind of funny to think that I, the longer I've cooked and the older I get, the more simple my cooking is.

                                                      I was sort of a fancy, or wannabe fancy kind of kid and teenager. Really trying to show off. I think my cooking has gotten simpler, and that's something I try to really push forward in my recipes, because I think your meal can still be so wonderful and delicious and satisfying, and make people excited to eat, and it can also be really to make. That's sort of the feeling behind the recipe. That I would say even after these now couple decades of making the meal, the tradition that I've incorporated that means a lot to me is looking into organizations like, there's one called Women Empowering Women For Indian Nations. Another college fund for Indigenous Americans. Looking up these organizations and donating to them.

                                                      In doing so, I think it's really acknowledging, Thanksgiving has always been this really joyous day for me and my family. This day when we're all so happy to be together and eating this food we all love. But acknowledging at the same time, I think it's a day that brings up not great memories for other Americans. I think in fully recognizing that and doing what I can to hopefully extend some of my privilege, it means kind of holding the good with the hard and having a deeper kind of understanding of the holiday.

                                                      It also inspires me very much to think about who's at my table, and to make sure I'm welcoming as many people in my family and my community as possible. That's my newest tradition, which I guess I started doing a few years ago now. It's one that feels very important.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay, now to my segment called My Last Meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper, what would it be?

Julia Turshen:                  If I had to place an order. So I'm not cooking it?

Suzy Chase:                  Well you know what, that's a darn good question. You could cook it. If you could cook your last meal, if you wanted to, what would it be?

Julia Turshen:                  This is always such a funny question. I kind of like the idea of maybe not cooking. But I do enjoy cooking so much, that I think if I had the option to cook it I think I would take that option. I think it would just extend that time a little bit.

                                                      I guess, I mean the first thing that came to mind is, maybe because we're talking about Thanksgiving, is a roast chicken. Just a really really good roast chicken, and lots of delicious bread to kind of sop up everything that's in the pan. Roast potatoes and carrots and parsnips, and all that kind of stuff. Maybe a really tall coconut cake for desert. That would make me really happy.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Julia Turshen:                  My website is just juliaturshen.com, and everything about my books and my work is there. Then I'm on Instagram and Twitter, @turshen. Just my last name is my handle.

Suzy Chase:                  It's always so amazing talking with you. Thanks so much for coming on Cookery By the Book Podcast.

Julia Turshen:                  Oh, thank-you. Thank-you so much. This was really fun. It's always great talking with you.

Suzy Chase:                  Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, and while you're there please take a moment to rate and review Cookery By the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram, @cookerybythebook. Twitter is, @iamsuzychase. Download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify,  at cookerybythebook. Thanks for listening.

Joe Knows Fish
Taking The Intimidation Out Of Cooking Seafood

By Joe Gurrera
Owner of Citarella Fine Foods

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Joe Gurrera:                  Hello, my name is Joe Gurrera, and I'm here today to talk about my new cookbook, which I wanted the title to be Taking the Intimidation Out of Cooking Seafood, but I was outvoted by my project manager, my writer, my publisher, my wife, my assistant. They said, "The name's too long," even though that's the premise of the book, so they came up with the name Joe Knows Fish.

Suzy Chase:                  You're the owner of Citarella markets, New York's most respected seafood authority. First off, the burning question, well two burning questions. Why did you write this cookbook, and why are people afraid to cook fish?

Joe Gurrera:                  Being in the business for 40 years, that's all I've heard. That's a lot of what I've heard from my family, my friends, and my customers. How do I do this? How do I do that? How do I do this? How do I do that? That was the purpose, my incentive to write the book. I've been wanting to write this book for about 15, 20 years, but I was too busy building a business. Now I hired different people, and I've been able to take the time to write the book, so that's what I've done. That answers your first question.

                                                      The second question was why. The reason why, in my opinion, is because it's delicate. Handling a piece of fish requires finesse. I'm going to make you laugh, but even when I used to hire seafood guys, I would look to see how they picked up the piece of fish because you had some guys, they would pick it up like a bricklayer. You can't do that. You could pick up a steak like a bricklayer or you could pick up a chicken like that, but you need soft hands because of the delicateness of it. I know it sounds funny, but it's really true. Because of that, people even years ago when they're cooking, when you cook a steak, you cook your chicken, it's going to take you 20 minutes, whatever you're going to do. When you're cooking a piece of fish, literally it could take you two minutes on each side. In the cookbook, I joke around. I say, "Don't answer your cell phone because if you do, it's going to be more than two minutes and you're done, and you're not going to achieve what you want to achieve.

Suzy Chase:                  For cookbook lovers outside of New York City, give us a little background on Citarella.

Joe Gurrera:                  I bought this little seafood market that was 12 feet wide in 1983, and it was just a seafood market. I was in my 20s. I was always entrepreneurial, I guess, my aggressive nature. I started expanding right away. My store was a middle store of the building. On the 75th Street corner side, to the north were three other stores, a candy store, a dry cleaners, and a shoe repair. They were all older people, so one by one I took the three of them over. Shortly thereafter that, I was able to purchase the building. On my other side was a clothing store, and the clothing store was paying me rent.

                                                      I'm going to say six months after I purchased the building, I got a knock on the door. "Yeah?" The IRS. I said, "What did I do now?" They said, "It's not you, it's your tenant. We're locking him up. He hasn't paid taxes." They put a lock on the store, and they closed every bank account the guy had, whatever it was. In 30 days, they gave me the store back even though that guy had a lease. They gave me the store back, so now I said, "What am I going to do?" I started talking to people, and I started thinking, and I went into the meat business. I made a separate store called Citarella Meats. That was in 1991. I didn't want to damage my seafood reputation, which I had established. I was afraid. I didn't want to damage that reputation, so I kept it separate, and I started a meat store. Shortly thereafter, I realized what a mistake it was. Then I took the wall down, and that's when Citarella became the full grown Citarella as you know today.

Suzy Chase:                  Describe growing up as an immigrant fisherman's son.

Joe Gurrera:                  When he came to this country, I believe it was 1948, I think he went to Boston, then California, then back to New York. He was working for a mattress company, working for different things. At that time in New York, from where he's from in Sicily, which is a town called Sciacca, S-C-I-A-C-C-A, there was maybe a dozen people from Sciacca that had fish stores in the five boroughs. That's how he got into the seafood business. He opened a one-man seafood shop. I think he went to work for somebody first, and then he opened his own once he learned the business.

Suzy Chase:                  Take us back to the days when the Fulton Fish Market was downtown underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

Joe Gurrera:                  There was a lot of warmth. There was a lot of character. The conditions were a lot rougher working down there because shortly after I conquered Citarella, I became a partner in a concern in the Fulton Fish Market. Shortly after that, I was working there. I was working two jobs. I'd be getting up at 2:00 in the morning, going to the fish market, working there. When that's done by 10:00, then I could be coming up to Citarella and doing my second job. Working in the fish market, there was a lot of character. There were a lot of characters also. The winters were cold right underneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the river. Even though I loved it and I still miss it, it's a sign of the times. You had to get into health code, a refrigerated building in the cold chain to preserve the seafood, so it was time. That building lasted over 100 years.

Suzy Chase:                  I miss it, too. I miss being over there with the sites and the smells. You could see the fish flying in the air.

Joe Gurrera:                  Listen, it was quite an interesting place, it really was.

Suzy Chase:                  I'm dying to hear your thoughts on sauces.

Joe Gurrera:                  On sauces. First of all, I'm a really simple guy. I eat simple. I like grilled. I'm not a saucy guy. Don't get me wrong, I've gone to those tasting meals, and Jean-Georges is my friend. They're all my friends. I know them all. For me, I just want a plain, simple grilled piece of fish. If you want, I'll put some olive oil on it. That's what I like. Again, that's me.

Suzy Chase:                  Speaking of olive oil, I was surprised to read that you don't cook fish with butter.

Joe Gurrera:                  I never cook fish with butter.

Suzy Chase:                  How come?

Joe Gurrera:                  For me, it's more of a personal preference. I do use butter for other things, but the dairy will overpower the seafood flavor. Even to make a seafood stock out of shrimp shells or whatever it is, it will be camouflaged. I love oysters. I was just in Europe, and I had oysters in Spain, I had oysters in London, and I had sea urchins in Sicily. When I eat them, I want to taste the oyster. Matter of fact, when I was in London, they also had some oysters from Ireland, which were very good also. But I get the oysters on the half shell, and I eat them.

                                                      I'm ordering oysters, and the guy at the table next to me, he got a dozen oysters, but he's putting his cocktail sauce. He's squeezing his lemon. If I get four Wellfleets, or four Maine oysters, or four Rhode Island oysters, I want to taste the salinity. I want to taste the plumpness. I want to taste everything. The guy that put the cocktail sauce, or the lemon, or the vinegar, the mignonette sauce on it, he's not going to be able to tell the difference. That's not what I do. It camouflages. You've defeated the purpose of ordering three different types of oysters, because you want to taste the difference. Once you put the cocktail sauce on it, you're not going to know the difference of anything.

Suzy Chase:                  This cookbook is dedicated to your wife and the memory of your mentor and friend, Tony Marotta, who taught you the rules of the road. Once you settle for mediocre, they will sell it to you every time. Tell us about Tony.

Joe Gurrera:                  Boy oh boy, okay. Tony was a class act. Tony was the kind of guy who was like Mr. Clean. He had a brand new white jacket every day with a white cap. He was Mr. Perfection. His fish store happened to be in Brooklyn. We met because we parked our trucks next to each other, so we started to become friendly. I was in Manhattan, and he was in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, the items that you sell here, you sell a fuller line of products, where in Brooklyn in an Italian neighborhood or in a Jewish neighborhood, you're not going to sell the oysters or you're not going to sell certain items. In Manhattan, you sold everything. Tony gave me a lot of pointers, and then I just applied myself and I just took everything further. He was a great guy.

Suzy Chase:                  What was the best thing he ever taught you?

Joe Gurrera:                  Quality, always the best. Knowing what the best is. The quality, absolutely.

Suzy Chase:                  I like how this cookbook is divided up by styles and not by fish types. For example, you have a chapter dedicated to poaching and steaming and another one for tossing with pasta. Talk a little bit about that.

Joe Gurrera:                  The reason why I have the chapters the way I did, again, it's all related to taking the intimidation out of cooking seafood. The first one is grilling. The grilling is the easiest one, and it'll be most comfortable for people that are intimidated because I'm sure they know how to grill a burger or they know how to grill a steak. Cooking a piece of tuna and swordfish would be very similar. That's why I started with grilling. Then after grilling, I go to baking and roasting. Again, there's not as much work involved. You put the fish on a pan and you put it in the oven. The same thing with the broiling. Then when you go down, the next one is sauteing. Sauteing requires a little movement. You've got to take it, you've got to flip it. It requires a little more work. Similar even to the frying part or even the pasta part whether it's clams, the cuttlefish ink, or the bottarga, it requires a little more movement and putting things together. That's how I wanted to write the book, as more complicated as it goes down.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. Home cooks have their seafood shop or even the seafood section in our grocery store. What are the top three things we need to look for in terms of picking out fresh fish?

Joe Gurrera:                  First, you have to trust your fishmonger if the place has a good reputation, number one. Everyone says, "What do I look for? Do I look at the eyes? Do I look at this?" Looking for fresh seafood, the best way that I could describe it simply is it has to look like it's in HD.

Suzy Chase:                  Did you see a couple of weeks ago in the news a fish market in Kuwait stuck googly eyes on their less than fresh fish to make it look like they were fresh?

Joe Gurrera:                  Really? I didn't see that.

Suzy Chase:                  You have to look it up. It's hilarious. Anyway, that's-

Joe Gurrera:                  Can you send it to me?

Suzy Chase:                  Yes, I'll send it to you.

Joe Gurrera:                  [email protected]. Send it to me.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. It was really funny. Anyway, is it bad that I hate deboning fish?

Joe Gurrera:                  I'll make you laugh. I have a friend who happens to love spaghetti and clam sauce, and I have a favorite place that does it pretty well. I said, "Tom, you want to go?" He doesn't like to get his fingers dirty to take the clam shells out.

Suzy Chase:                  I love him.

Joe Gurrera:                  I looked him, I said, "Tom, I'll do it for you, for Christ's sake." I said, "I'll do it for you." He goes, "Okay," so we went. People are different. To me, I only want that. I want a whole fish. I love a whole fish. That's one of my top five.

Suzy Chase:                  Can I have your guy at Citarella debone it for me?

Joe Gurrera:                  Of course you can. They could debone it. They could filet it. Any good fishmonger will do anything that you want.

Suzy Chase:                  The other night for dinner, I made your recipes for salmon tartare, baked cod, chunky mashed potatoes, and your tomato and red onion salad. This whole meal was quick and so delicious. The cod, I got it at Citarella, naturally. I got everything at Citarella. The cod was flaky and moist, and the salmon was like butter. Fish is such a good family weeknight dinner option, don't you think?

Joe Gurrera:                  Listen, I think not only that, with all its oils and all the health reasons for it.

Suzy Chase:                  Now to my segment called My Last Meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper, what would it be?

Joe Gurrera:                  Probably would be I'd start it off with a little caviar. Then I'd probably have some oysters. Then I'd have a little bit of, whether it's spaghetti and clam sauce or even spaghetti with the bottarga, which I had in Sicily two weeks ago, which was out of control, ridiculous. Then I would have a grilled piece of whole fish. That would be my last meal.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web, social media, and in New York City?

Joe Gurrera:                  On the web, it is Citarella.com. There is also joeknowsfish.com. We area also on Facebook.

Suzy Chase:                  Where are your locations in New York City?

Joe Gurrera:                  New York City, we are on the Upper West Side on 75th and Broadway, on the Upper East Side on 75th and 3rd, and we are in Greenwich Village on 6th Avenue and 9th Street. We have three stores in The Hamptons, one in Bridgehampton, one in East Hampton, and one in Southampton. I have a Citarella in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, I didn't even know that.

Joe Gurrera:                  Now we are opening in Hudson Yards.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, really? That's exciting.

Joe Gurrera:                  It is.

Suzy Chase:                  That's the hotspot.

Joe Gurrera:                  It's going to be some project, I'll tell you that right now.

Suzy Chase:                  Thanks, Joe, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Joe Gurrera:                  Thank you very much for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at cookerybythebook, Twitter is ImSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mixtapes, music to cook by on Spotify at CookerbytheBook. As always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Rich Table

By Sarah and Evan Rich
with Carolyn Alburger

Intro:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking the cookbook authors.

Sarah Rich:                  My name is Sarah Rich and my husband Evan and I have just come out with our new cookbook called Rich Table.

Suzy Chase:                  It was so nice to meet you at High Street on Hudson, Wednesday night, and taste dishes out of this cookbook. I want to kick things off by talking about some of the incredible dishes I had. First, let's start with one of the snacks. The cranberry bean dip on page 66. Describe this dish and what are cranberry beans?

Sarah Rich:                  Cranberry beans are a fresh shelling bean, and they're really, really delicious, and we love to use them at Rich Table. One of the things that we're really lucky to have at Rich Table is, being in San Francisco, we have these great farmers markets and we got so much great produce and we can change the menu constantly.

                                    With the cranberry bean dip, we wanted to make something that was sort of like ... similar to kind of a hummus because that's one of our favorite things to eat, but a little bit different, and we use cranberry beans instead, because they have kind of that same rich creaminess, but just something a little bit different.

Suzy Chase:                  And then talk a little bit about the plancha bread. Is that how you pronounce it?

Sarah Rich:                  Okay. Yeah. Yes, plancha bread. We call it that. We have something in our kitchen called a plancha, which is basically just like a flat top or a griddle. We make this bread. It's really, really easy bread to make, and we roll it out into little balls and then roll that out into a nice, long, sort of oval shape and grill it right on the plancha, so it gets ... it has a nice sort of yeasty flavor. It's got some whole wheat in it, so it's got a little nice texture to it, nice chewiness, but then cooking it right on the flattop or the griddle gives it a really wonderful flavor and a little crispness to the outside.

                                    It's kind of like a pizza dough but instead of puffing it up in the oven, we just grill it flat on the griddle. We serve the cranberry bean dip with that, and then we have some fresh wax beans or you can use runner beans or green beans or broad beans. Whatever sort of pole beans like that. Slice it up nice and thinly, dress it with a little bit of our [inaudible 00:02:35] vinaigrette and some padron peppers that we've charred, which gives it a little spiciness.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah. It was kind of a fresh take on the pita and Hummus.

Sarah Rich:                  Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. A very California, Rich Table take on that.

Suzy Chase:                  By the way, my husband said if we lived in California, we'd go here once a week.

Sarah Rich:                  Oh, good. Well that's what we want. We do say that about Rich Table. We wanted to be the kind place where you could go for a special occasion where you could go every Tuesday night for a grilled steak and pasta.

Suzy Chase:                  I wish you'd come back to New York City, but anyway, that's beside the point. And I digress. Next I had the sprouted quinoa cakes with summer squash and chevre on page 178. Described this dish.

Sarah Rich:                  We really try to have a lot of vegetarian options. The way our menu is broken down, we've got our bite section, which are really tiny little things to eat, snacks to have when you start your meal, appetizers. We have pastas and then we have our main courses, of course. We always have a steak, we always have some sort of fish or something like that, but we like to also have a nice vegetarian option and we want to do something beyond just like sauteed vegetables on a plate, and so this is an example of that.

                                    You've got the sprouted quinoa. Sprouting it kind of gives it ... softens it a little bit and helps it, actually, your body digest it a little bit easier, and then we make the cakes out of that and grill them, again, on the plancha. The chev goes really nicely with that.

Suzy Chase:                  For my main course, I ordered the buttermilk poached chicken that's on page 205. I don't think I've ever had poached chicken at a restaurant. I cannot tell you how buttery and moist it was. Describe this dish.

Sarah Rich:                  Exactly. My husband and I met at a restaurant called Bouley, which is downtown in Tribeca, and this was actually something ... a technique that we learned there. Chicken on the menu ... even Evan's mom, she ordered the same dish. She came to the dinner as well and she said, "I never order chicken when I go out to eat.", and I think a lot of people feel that way because they're like, "Chicken. I make chicken all the time at home.", but this is a way to make chicken. It makes it, just like you said, very buttery. It's a beautiful texture.

                                    We take the breast and put it in a bag and add buttermilk, season it really nicely, and then you just poach it in a water bath really slowly and gently so that, that buttermilk, it's its own little warm bath for the chicken. It kind of permeates the meat, it gets that ... buttermilk has kind of a tangy saltiness to it, a richness to it that gets into the meat, makes it super tender. Then cooking it slowly like that just keeps it really, really nice and makes it buttery, like you said.

Suzy Chase:                  The salted caramel panna cotta on page 240 was interesting and I thought the coffee was all the way through, but it was just the crumble that was the coffee.

Sarah Rich:                  Yes. Yeah. I like ... with my desserts, texture is very important to me, and also I actually have a savory background. I make the desserts at Rich Table, but the majority of my training is on the savory side of things. I come to desserts from that perspective. For me, I think a lot of people make desserts that are overly sweet, really heavy and I like a little saltiness to what I do. Obviously, a little salt in the caramel panna cotta, and then the crunch from the coffee crumble, which gives ... a lot of people are afraid of bitter as a flavor, but I think bitter is a very useful tool, so I add a little bit of bitterness to kind of counter the sweetness of the caramel and then the whip cream kind of balances everything out and adds a little nice smooth texture as well.

Suzy Chase:                  Last but not least. I don't drink coffee, I don't even like coffee, but your Rich Table coffee, knocked my socks off. The recipe's on page 278. Talk about this cup of deliciousness.

Sarah Rich:                  When you come to San Francisco, one of the things that you do as a tourist, is you go to The Buena Vista Cafe, which is down near fisherman's wharf, and they make a classic Irish coffee and they do a fantastic job of it. We wanted to sort of put our own spin on that classic San Francisco cocktail. We use Fernet Branca, which is an Amaro, which is very, very popular out in San Francisco. In fact, when you are a line cook working in the city, that is what you drink at the end of a shift. Which, coming from New York, we had ... we didn't really know that, and so that was something that we learned being out in San Francisco. We included that in our Irish coffee and then we also add a little pistachio cream to it, which you can't .... pistachio and coffee go really wonderfully together and it's just such a sort of rich, luxurious ingredient to add that makes it really delicious. Nobody doesn't like the Rich coffee.

Suzy Chase:                  I could literally drink this every day. It would make me a coffee drinker.

Sarah Rich:                  Yeah, yeah. We had ... that is a common opinion. My mom is not a coffee drinker. She loves the Rich coffee. Evan's parents don't drink coffee too much. They love it. Anybody who has it loves the Rich coffee.

Suzy Chase:                  You're traveling to a few different cities cooking out of this cookbook. How is it cooking in a different kitchen? Does it throw off your flow?

Sarah Rich:                  For sure. That is always a difficult part of it because you're in your own kitchen, you're used to where things are you, you're used to how things are done. You don't have to run around searching for things because you know exactly what you're looking for, where to go. You've got the team that you're used to working with that ... working in a kitchen, it's kind of like being in a ballet. There's a little dance that you do in your movements and where you go and who you're dancing with, and so you don't have that sort of flow in a different kitchen.

                                    It's always challenging. We've done dinners in some of the nicest kitchens in the country and it's difficult to even in those. Yeah, it's a challenge, but it's also really fun. It's really fun to see how other people experience your food and their reaction to it and especially working with cooks, how they react to your food or the questions they have. It's fun. It's challenging, but it's fun.

Suzy Chase:                  You learned your techniques and flavors working at some of the best restaurants in the United States. Where did you and your husband, Evan, hone your skills?

Sarah Rich:                  We definitely, like you said, we worked in some really great restaurants here in New York and then also out in California, and that's where you really, for sure, learn those basic techniques that you need to master how to be a good cook. Then when you ... we opened our restaurant. You sort of draw from those experiences and you draw from things that you've learned in terms of flavor and texture and how to put a dish together, and then you just sort of have to break free from just doing what you're comfortable with and start to kind of develop your own perspective.

                                    I guess what I mean is, when we first opened Rich Table and we were definitely drawing from all the places we've worked. Even, for example, the buttermilk poached chicken. That was a technique that we learned at Bouley, we brought it over to Rich Table. And then, years later, you sort of evolve and start really putting your own solid perspective into things.

Suzy Chase:                  One thing I hate about fine dining is that you have to dress up. When my husband and I want to eat out in New York City, we don't want to dress up like it's prom. I'm so happy to see that you embrace a casual atmosphere with sort of fine dining level food.

Sarah Rich:                  Right. Yeah. That is also very important to us. I mean we have the same experience and the same feeling. In fact, being back in the city, we've been eating around town and we notice that. We leave our hotel room and we're wearing jeans and a tank top and some sandals, and let's go in anywhere in San Francisco wouldn't be a problem, but here you walk in and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm clearly the least properly dressed person in this restaurant.".

                                    It is kind of, on one level, just sort of a California mentality. But it's also true that we don't like dressing up. Evan hates it more than anything. He just wants to be able to go as is, a button down or whatever, but feel ... he doesn't like that feeling of feeling uncomfortable when you walk into a space, and so we don't want our guests to feel that way either.

                                    We worked in so many restaurants where our friends want to come visit us, but they feel awkward, so they don't. We want ... It was really important to us to create a space where everybody felt welcome and Rich Table is like that. It can be an event kind of dinner. You can get dressed up. You can go to the opera, wear your nice dress, wear your nice suit, stop at Rich Table, have a meal, but you can also just go into the movies that night or maybe you just want to hang out at dinner and there is no dress code.

Suzy Chase:                  I love that. In the cookbook you wrote, "We choose ingredients and put them together based on our understanding of what makes your pallets sing.". A couple of ingredients you love, are gelatin sheets, Douglas fir powder, isomalt, and pop sorghum. Describe a few of these.

Sarah Rich:                  Yeah. That is an interesting grouping. Yes, we do use all of those things. Douglas fir is something that we really started using when we were doing ... Before we had opened Rich Table,  we started doing popups, and we were trying to figure out menus and we would take these hikes through Marin and specifically, actually one of the first hikes we ever took was when Evan was ... he was interviewing for the chef de cuisine position at a restaurant called Quince, which is one of the best restaurants in San Francisco. At this point it has three Michelin stars, four star restaurant in the chronicle, it's a fantastic restaurant. He was trying to think of dishes to put together and we're wandering through hiking Mount Tamalpais and there are all these Douglas fir trees around and they've got their fresh springs shoots with these little tiny soft feathery green shoots.And we're picking those off and smelling them. Evan was like, "I think I'll use this in something.", and put together a dish and ended up getting the job, and was there for about a year.

                                    That's how we sort of discovered this flavor of Douglas fir, and so we started incorporating it into our dishes in our popups, and then later when we opened Rich Table. It's just something that ... it's just so California. It's just, to us, the flavor, the smell, all of those things just are very so much a part of our experience in California and so we love it. We use it in our bread, we use it in cocktails, I've used it in a desert, and it's ... a little bit goes a long way. You don't want the food to taste like a Christmas tree, but just that little essence of like tiny, citrusy quality is really nice.

                                    Then isomalt. We make lot of little tuiles, kind of like a cookie, crackery sort of thing. Very crunchy. Isomalt is a ... it's kind of like a type of sugar where it has the qualities of sugar when you cook it, so you can get that brittleness, but it doesn't have all of the sweetness. It's really useful in ... if you're making a savory tuile. You want it to sort of shatter like glass, like you could do if you made caramel, but it doesn't have that sweetness.

                                    The gelatin, we use to give body to things or to set things like panna cotta. And then, what was the other one?

Suzy Chase:                  Popped sorghum.

Sarah Rich:                  Oh, popped sorghum. Oh, that's a great one. Popped sorghum .... sorghum is a grain and it gets used ... a grass seed, sorry. It gets used a lot of times as a syrup in the south, but it also ... it's like a little tiny seed. You can actually buy the seeds online really easily at this point, and we pop it just like you pop popcorn. We get oil really hot, throw the seeds in and they pop just like tiny ... they really ... they look exactly like tiny, tiny popcorn. And so it's a fun little way to add a little texture. I keep coming back to that because the texture is just so important to us in our food. So it's a little crunch. It's actually a little bit nuttier than popcorn. It's really fun. Everybody who sees it is like, "Oh my God, tiny popcorn.", and I make it for my kids sometimes. I'll take it back home and just pop it. They love to see tiny popcorn. We've used it all over the place.

Suzy Chase:                  Did you know there's a region in China, and they eat things just for the texture?

Sarah Rich:                  I believe it.

Suzy Chase:                  They prioritize the texture over the flavor.

Sarah Rich:                  Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a really important part of the enjoyment of the food, I think.

Suzy Chase:                  You also wrote in the cookbook, "You have to understand, to a girl from a small southern town, there's this fascination with New York City. It's where life happens.". And I thought the very same thing growing up in Kansas, and now I live in New York City. What was it like for you coming to the big city to go to the French Culinary Institute?

Sarah Rich:                  Oh, it was amazing. It was like a ... I don't want to say a dream come true because that sounds so cheesy, but it was a ... I never would have thought that I would have done that. I'm a pretty ... I was saying this to somebody the other day. I'm a pretty shy kind of quiet person and not super brave about things like that, and I don't think it was something that anybody would have expected of me. There were plenty of people, when I told them I was moving to New York, they laughed at me and they said, "You'll never make it. That city's gonna eat you up.", and it was really fulfilling a dream. It really was. We used to watch these movies. Like I say in the book, Working Girl, and Melanie Griffith is on the Staten Island ferry looking into Manhattan, and it just seemed like such a vibrant, exciting place where you could make anything happen. And it was that. That's exactly what it was for me.

                                    I remember moving to the city, I lived in Hoboken at the time and was going to the French Culinary Institute in Soho and it was so exciting to take the path train and walk from the World Trade Center up to Soho. I tried to walk as much as I wanted to or could so I could see everything. Working down in Tribeca, later at Bouley. It was amazing. It was everything that I wanted it to be.

Suzy Chase:                  I just posted something on Instagram telling about how I grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas and I would stay up late watching Saturday Night Live every weekend, and just the intro, I was like, everyone's asleep in Prairie Village, but everyone's out in New York City and was like, I'm missing something.

Sarah Rich:                  Yes, exactly. People will sometimes have a young cook in their twenties or even early thirties, and they say, "Hey, I'm thinking about maybe moving to New York City for a while, what do you think?.", and I always say, "Do it. Do it now. Do it. Absolutely.". Because there's a point where you won't. There's a point where your life will have moved past the point where you're willing to take that leap. I 100% always encourage people to do it if it's something they want to do.

Suzy Chase:                  Since your food is so unique, I can only imagine Rich Table, your restaurant in San Francisco, is too. Describe the space.

Sarah Rich:                  It's actually a really lovely space. It's a corner restaurant and we have these huge windows that go floor to ceiling almost. It lets in the most wonderful lights. When ever we do photo shoots, the photographer is always just beside themselves with how great the lighting is. They almost never have to do any sort of tweaking. It's really warm and really just light and really nice.

                                    It's funny, when we first found the space, there were a number of people that were like, I don't know why you chose that space, because it's a little bit off from the main area of Hayes Valley and a little bit closer to the mission. But now people who are ... they want to know how did we find it? It's such an amazing space. They're a little jealous. But it's a corner space with big windows.

                                    You walk in and there's the host stand right there. A nice long bar over to your right, and then we've got an open kitchen. On the other side of the bar is where the pass is, where the chef stands and all the line cooks and the sous chefs are there on the hotline, cooking the food, passing it over to the chef. The service are coming up, picking up the food, taking it to tables. It's very vibrant and you feel that sort of energy throughout the entire space. We've got a banquette along one wall with long boards that go up to the ceiling that were from an old barn up in Petaluma. They were salvaged, and so those line the walls. Yeah. That's Rich Table.

Suzy Chase:                  Now to my new segment called my last meal. If you had to place an order for your last supper on earth, what would it be?

Sarah Rich:                  Oh, it's so easy. It would be a grilled steak with a fully loaded baked potato.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow, that was fast. People are usually like, "Hmm.".

Sarah Rich:                  No. You know what? Normally I would be. Normally, I'm terrible at answering questions like that because it's like, I don't know. I like this. I like that. What would it really be? But the last couple of times I have made myself a steak and a baked potato, I have thought this is just it. This is my last meal. Now I just know, that's it. There are many things to love. There are many meals to be had. There are many things that would satisfy me, but I really just think that's it.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web, Social Media, and in San Francisco?

Sarah Rich:                  We are found on Instagram @RichTable. It's just that simple. I am Sally Hurricane and Rich Table is located at 199 Gough Street, in San Francisco.

Suzy Chase:                  And what's your website?

Sarah Rich:                  RichTableSF.com

Suzy Chase:                  It was so nice to meet you in person and taste food out of this glorious cookbook, and thanks for coming on cookery by the book podcast.

Sarah Rich:                  Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fun talking to you.

Suzy Chase:                  Subscribe in Apple podcasts, and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review Cookery by the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram @CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. Thanks for listening.

Breakfast: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT THE BEST MEAL OF THE DAY

By The Editors of Extra Crispy

Speaker 1:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.

Kat Kinsman:                  Hi. I'm Kat Kinsman. I'm the Senior Food and Drinks Editor at Extra Crispy, and we've got a new book, Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day.

Suzy Chase:                  This book was written by you and the other editors of Extra Crispy. Tell us about Extra Crispy.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, wow. It's such an exciting ... This book, I'm so excited about it. It's actually a collection of material that we've run on Extra Crispy and some new things that we've written. Extra Crispy is your one-stop shopping for everything about breakfast: culture, news, essays, recipes. If it's breakfast, we're going to cover it. I know it sounds silly, so you have a site that's just about breakfast, but since we launched in June of 2016, we realized that, when you go narrow, you can go really, really deep, so we use breakfast as a Trojan horse to talk about a million different things.

Suzy Chase:                  In 1875, speaking of deep, cookbook author Marion Harland praises eggs as elegant and frugal, so here's the age-old question: Why do we eat eggs for breakfast? I've never understood that.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, my goodness. We actually have an essay. I don't know if it's in the book, but we have run an essay, I believe recently, about why that is. I mean think about it. They're so incredibly adaptable. They can store for a fairly long time. They are a fantastic and inexpensive source of nutrition, of protein. They keep you going for a while. Again, I think it got back to the adaptability of it, that there's so many different ways that you can eat them. They're really personal is what I've realized. It's something that, without a whole lot of effort, you can make for yourself in the morning, and you can make it exactly to your liking, or it's not too hard to guide somebody else to make them exactly the way you want them too. It's an easy way to give somebody pleasure, and sustenance, and a little bit of affirmation in the day, "I see you. I know how to make you happy. Here's eggs just the way you want them."

Suzy Chase:                  I didn't know that, in the early 1900s, breakfast cereal was invented in response to indigestion blamed on meat and egg consumption. That sounds like B.S. to me, right? It sounds like a marketing thing.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, absolutely was. The people at Battle Creek, the scientists there who came up with Raisin Bran, and flakes, and all that kind of stuff were doing it ... They were wellness freaks in a really early incarnation, and they were doing it to quash libido and-

Suzy Chase:                  What? Really?

Kat Kinsman:                  They were doing all sorts of ... Oh, it's just so nuts. It's in the early days of Kellogg's. They got some zealots in there to start to develop these foods that were supposed to be optimized for health but also sort of add moral fiber to your day. If you look at all the stuff that they were doing in Battle Creek and then at these sort of wellness resorts that they had, they were doing these things to control people's emotional impulses and set them on the path of the good and righteous. It was almost culty how all this stuff came about. I'm actually working on a piece right now about the moral intertwinings of the early days of flake cereal. It's really astounding stuff if you dig back just a little bit over a century.

Suzy Chase:                  I feel like fried eggs are a bit out of fashion at the moment, but I love a good fried egg, especially a diner fried egg. Talk about some ways to upgrade the good old fried egg.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, one very, very easy thing to do is use a ton of olive oil, get it just ripping hot, put the egg in there, and spoon the olive oil a little bit over the edges until they get good and lacy. It's a very ... Oh, I wish I could say the term. It's a Spanish term. Chef Katie Button really drove this home to me, and it's her favorite was to do it, but the way it translates is like lacy eggs. The center of it remains good and runny and beautiful, but if you can get the pan to the right temperature and use olive oil instead of butter, because butter can burn and it gets that sort of acrid taste to it, but olive oil can take a little bit more heat, and you get those brown, crispy, lacy edges and still have that runny yolk, and it's the simplest thing in the world to do.

                                                      Another really, really easy thing to do is just put a little bit of Aleppo pepper over top of it, just a little bit, and have that olive oil with it, and that is a little bit of heat, a little pop of ... just a little pop of joy and sensory pleasure to start the day with. The texture of the lacy edges of the egg with a little bit of crunch of good salt, the Aleppo pepper, if you have that with some bread, that just hits every single sensory button, and it's a great way to start the day.

Suzy Chase:                  There's an infamous op-ed in The New York Times that says, and I will quote, "Brunch is for jerks." What are your thoughts on brunch, especially brunch in New York City?

Kat Kinsman:                  Here is my thing. I've always ascribed to the notion that, if it tastes good, it is good. I'm laissez-faire about these sorts of things. I realize the older I get the less prescriptive I am about things that bring people pleasure. I mean we are living in times of turmoil right now where I really believe, if you can bring any sort of simple pleasure into your life and it's not harmful to anyone else, why not? The great thing about brunch is the community aspect of it. I mean sure, you can go have brunch by yourself. That's absolutely fine. You can have it with one other person but, ideally, it's a vehicle for community.

                                                      We ran this piece a few months ago by Nik Sharma who ... Oh, my gosh. I love this man. He has a book coming out. It's seriously one of the loveliest cookbooks I have ever seem. Everybody needs to buy Nik Sharma's book. He wrote a piece about why gay brunch is so important and especially in his early days ... so after coming out, and moving, and coming together in this safe space with friends where they could go through what happened that week and talk through their loves, and their heartbreaks, and everything in a safe, communal space before marriage was legalized. It was such a powerful, beautiful space. You talk now about the transition of now that marriage is legal and people are able to host brunch at home with their spouses and invite people over to their houses, but talking about the early importance of these sort of queer spaces to get together over brunch. I mean if mimosas and sort of crappy Eggs Benedict can be a vehicle for that sort of thing, I am all for it.

Suzy Chase:                  There's a whole section devoted to the Dutch Baby. What is that?

Kat Kinsman:                  Well, because it makes you look like a freaking genius. I hadn't really made them, and Dawn Perry, who has a few ... She's a goddess on Earth, and she's at Real Simple. Before she had really started up in this position at Real Simple, she was writing a bunch for us, and she ... I trust everything this woman does. Everyone needs to watch her show. She really drove home the fact that they're incredibly versatile. I think this thing was called A Dutch baby is the Little Black Dress at Your Party or something like that but, really, it's this thing where you just bring together a few ingredients. You put them in a cast iron pan. It puffs up. It's such an ooh-la-la kind of moment.

                                                      You can make it sweet. You can make it savory. You can adapt it to whatever your particular taste is. You can make them all a la minute at a party and have that great razzle-dazzle moment where it's brunch and, "Oh, no big deal. I just made this great big, explosive popover thing," and everyone you brought there sees your moment of ooh and ah and gets to watch it move and deflate, and it can be dressed however you want. It's a glorious bit of theater that is really easy to pull off.

Suzy Chase:                  I went down the rabbit hole researching this recipe and, in 1966, Craig Claiborne was at Dave Eyre's home in Hawaii. Eyres was the editor of Honolulu Magazine at the time. David made a Dutch baby for Craig, and Claiborne came back, wrote about it in The New York Times, and it's such a beautiful thing. I know for a fact that Martha Stewart loves the lemon butter Dutch baby recipe that you have on page 47.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, my gosh, what a classic that is. Those particular flavors are ... they just work so beautifully, and it makes it feel like you're eating pie for breakfast, which I wholeheartedly endorse, by the way. Pie for breakfast is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Dutch babies, I feel like they're ... they have such a funny history. There is a town I'm totally blanking on on the West Coast, I feel like it's in California. It was like a Gold Rush thing. I should know about this because I wrote about it for the site recently, but can we talk for a second about Craig Claiborne and what an amazing taste maker he was?

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, my gosh. I think I'm probably one of the few sort of people who, right now, have read the memoir, the warts and all, of his memoir. People have forgotten about Craig, and it breaks my heart. He was such as taste maker. I remember him ... I don't remember when he did it, but the importance of him writing about the shrimp and grits at Crook's Corner with Bill Neal, this dish that ... it has some sort of murky origins and stuff, but he saw the beauty in this, wrote about it in the Times and, all of a sudden, people started really paying attention to this corner of North Carolina.

                                                      I've made his mother's spaghetti dish on more than one occasion. I've made his shrimp and grits. What a legacy. He really did the legwork to go around the country, see the things that people were doing regionally, and then ... Nobody should need justification or the imprimatur of a giant publication but, at the time, he used it as such an incredible platform to really sing the praises of these regional dishes and make them national favorites. Sorry, I love Craig Claiborne.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, he's one of those guys people say, "If you could have a dinner party and invite anyone living or dead, who would you invite?" He's one of those guys you want at your dinner table.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, my God, him and Clementine Paddleford. There would be no doubt that you-

Suzy Chase:                  Who's that?

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, God, she was spectacular.

Suzy Chase:                  That's a great name.

Kat Kinsman:                  Isn't it? She was incredible. There was a bio of her that came out a few years back, and she was an incredible woman who ... She was at one of the rival papers in New York. She flew her own plane, so she was a pilot and would fly her little plane around the country to sort of go in and see how people really were cooking in all of these regions like, really, the kind of cooking that would be in church cookbooks that was not highfalutin restaurant food because there really wasn't a whole lot of highfalutin restaurant food, but really talking about home cooking in regions all over the country. She would get in her little plane and fly there and come back and write in her paper.

                                                      She was an established newspaper editor, and then Craig Claiborne came in, few years younger than her, and he was young, he was cute, and he sort of ate her lunch, so people really don't know as much about her legacy, but oh, gosh, I wish I could remember the name. I'm so blanking this morning on the names of all the books, but look up the book about her. It's really, really just a fantastic thing.

Suzy Chase:                  Food that's weird to people you've never heard of isn't weird to those who grow up eating it, so I guess Livermush would fall into that category. I didn't grow up eating it.

Kat Kinsman:                  Oh, my God.

Suzy Chase:                  I have no idea what it is.

Kat Kinsman:                  I think it could use some rebranding just from the name because, if people actually had it, it would ... oh, it would blow their minds. That piece by Sheri Castle that is in the book ... First of all, Sheri is a tremendous advocate for North Carolina food. She's an extraordinary writer, and she really sings the praises of mountain food and North Carolina food and really sings to the dignity of these foods that ... A lot of these foods come from deprivation, so Livermush is liver and mixed in with grains, and it's essentially made into a loaf and fried, and you slice it, and it gets golden brown on the outside. It's a little bit sort of mushy, spongy on the inside. It's basically like a meatloaf, and it is the most glorious thing.

                                                      There are a few towns throughout North Carolina that throw festivals in honor of it. There's brand called Neese's that is one of the premier brands of it, and they have Livermush. They also have liver pudding, which is very like it with a slightly different spice blend to it, and they're just really preserving this heritage. There are a few different brands that make it. My husband's from North Carolina, so every time I go down there I try to seek out all the different regional brands and variations of it. Like what you said, the food that people didn't grow up eating might seem weird to them, but that's part of our core mission at Extra Crispy, is to really give the dignity to these foods that they deserve, because it really bothers me when people yuck other people's yum, just because they're unfamiliar with it. Food is so inextricably tied to identity, that to slam somebody else's food just because it seems weird or unfamiliar is unfortunately, since time immemorial, been a way to other people. It's done to first generation or immigrant kids, who bring their lunch to school and it smells different than what the other kids are eating.

                                                      It's something that is often used as a tool to alienate people who might not be from the dominant culture, when in fact it should be a tool to bring people together. Here is this little part of my culture, my heritage. Here's a way to understand a little bit more about me. It's an act of generosity to share your food and it's something that we really, really try to emphasize on Extra Crispy, that we approach all foods with an open mind and an open heart. And ideally let somebody from that culture tell the story of it and why it's so important, and hopefully open up some new doors to it.

Suzy Chase:                  Eleven fancy butters were sourced, to find the best one which is Bordier. Is it Bordi-a or bordi-er?

Kat Kinsman:                  That is a really good question.

Suzy Chase:                  Let's just go with Bordi-a.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yes. I believe that is how someone who actually knew how to pronounce it -

Suzy Chase:                  Yes. (laughs)

Kat Kinsman:                  ... did pronounce it, but we've been all over the place on that. I got to take part in this tasting.

Suzy Chase:                  I saw on a Mind of a Chef episode, where Chef Ludo goes to the factory. Have you seen that? Where they slap the butter with the paddles and they stamp it, and they put salt on it.

Kat Kinsman:                  I've seen it.

Suzy Chase:                  It's glorious.

Kat Kinsman:                  We brought in my friend John Winterman who is the managing partner at Batard, but he is also a butter freak. I believe we gave him the name Maitre D'Beurre to guide us through this. The whole Extra Crispy team, we are butter aficionados, freaks, obsessives, whatever you want to call it. We sourced all these butters. It was mostly my fantastic colleagues, Margaret Eby and Rebecca Firkser. I think at some point, Margaret is just going to go off on a butter sabbatical. This is her dream to go somewhere and really learn how to make butter. She and Rebecca went out and sourced all of these different high-end butters. They had already done this with grocery store butters. And in that one, Kerrygold came out top as it should. It's a fantastic butter. But I think we grabbed the corporate card to expense butter. They tried it on bread. I have a gut condition and I can't really eat bread. I'm trying to remember what I had it on. It was radishes. I had mine on radish slices.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, that's so smart.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yeah, it was a really great way to get to do it. Also I didn't fill up on bread. I was mad not be able to have it with the bread, but we work with what we are given. We just tasted them through. Came up with the top few and then put them all head to head. The Bordier was incredible.  I have to say, there was a slight followup later because Bordier does variations. With those, we were just doing salted butters, I believe. Otherwise, you can really extra fall down the rabbit hole. Bordier does one with this flint pepper in it. They do a few different variations -

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, no.

Kat Kinsman:                  Well Margaret found the raspberry one -

Suzy Chase:                  No.

Kat Kinsman:                  They only make a little bit. It is one of the best things I've ever had in my life. So it is butter. It is raspberries. It's raspberry juice. We all tried it and we all just stared at each other. 

Suzy Chase:                  (laughs)

Kat Kinsman:                  We could not speak. So Ryan Grim who is the editor of the site who is just a delightful human being. If you've ever seen the Instant Pot videos that I do, he is Mr. Grim -

Suzy Chase:                  Yes.

Kat Kinsman:                  -- in the videos. He's our boss. But he was just, you know, the 1,000 yard stare, like just eating this. It was the purest raspberries, the most beautiful butter. If you buy it where we bought it, we bought a quarter pound of it, it would be $72 a pound. But we sort of rationalized this because we got a quarter pound and said if you go into a party, you could bring a bottle of wine. That's great. It gets push on the shelf with the other wines. If you roll in with this butter and a baguette, you are the star of the party.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, my gosh. Where do you get this butter, do you know?  Can you get it in New York City?

Kat Kinsman:                  We got it ... Yes, you can. We got it at Le District, which conveniently is right below our office in Brookfield Place.

Suzy Chase:                  Look at that! (laughs) Okay, I'm going down there today.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yes. Actually if you want me to do it when I get into the office, I will look and see if they have it so you don't waste a trip.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay. (laughs) Thank you. How did you get the inspiration to turn a king cake into french toast?

Kat Kinsman:                  So Margaret Eby, who is our senior culture editor. She and I both are New Orleans obsessives. So she grew up in Mississippi and would go to New Orleans all the time. I've been going since ... Oh golly. So I used to work for CNN and I had the pleasure of my intro into New Orleans was we would have these secret suppers. I got to throw one at James Carville and Mary Matalin's house. They are such tremendous ambassadors for the city. They are food obsessives and they let us throw this party at our house. Sorry, at their house. I wish it was my house. So I had sort of a crash course in getting to go to New Orleans. My husband was supposed to meet me and our dog got sick and he couldn't come. So I was okay, well that means we'll have to go back and you'll have to come with me. He fell in love with it too, so we go three, four times a year because we love it so much. Margaret goes as often as she can. She actually rides in a Mardi Gras crew.

                                                      So a great act of love from both of us is to bring back king cake when we go. We were just thinking king cake is ... There's a lot of really bad king cake out there. The intention is great, but if we're being honest, a lot of it kind of sucks and it gets stale really, really quickly. So we were thinking, it would also feel like a sin to throw away king cake. So we decided to do it two different ways. We made french toast out of king cake. Then king cake out of french toast. To me, it's exemplified what we do at Extra Crispy where we really do try to tell stories about particular tradition and cultures.

                                                      Also we have a chance to get really weird. We sort of joke, the extra in Extra Crispy is that we have permission to take things to strange degrees and just have a whole lot of fun and find joy in this. I mean breakfast is a meal that it can be formal. It can just be for sustenance, but think about those weekend breakfasts when you just get to play and goof and eventually feed people. It's a really, really fun thing.  We take people seriously and we take people's culture seriously and their identities and stuff. We don't always necessarily take ourselves too seriously.

Suzy Chase:                  Speaking of extra, Chapter 6 Franken-foods and mashups.

Kat Kinsman:                  (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  Velveeta chex mix nacho dirt bag casserole. Say that fast five times. That's hard to say.

Kat Kinsman:                  (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  Is always a good thing, right?

Kat Kinsman:                  So Margaret and I ... I want to explain dirt bag a little bit if that's okay. (laughs)

Suzy Chase:                  Sure.

Kat Kinsman:                  So this all came about because I had never ... I had my notion of sort of the term dirt bag. Margaret and I were texting while she was at a lake house with a bunch of her friends. She was leading what she called her best dirt bag life. I was like unpack that for please. She said, you know, it is the self when you are around people who you deeply trust and love that you don't have to put in any sort of guard or errs. You can be wearing whatever you want. You're comfortable. Ideally you're in a lake house or just somewhere where nobody's faultin. Everybody is just their most chill out, lazy, maybe a teeny bit tipsy, kind of self. And you're really happy and free.

                                                      She texted me saying here's what we have in the house. We have oh golly, like some leftover bottoms of the bags of various chips. We have some eggs. We have some beer. We have some bread. She asked me okay, what can I make from this? I was like girl, you've got a casserole there. You have everything you need to make ...

                                                      I am a big fan of a casserole. You can put absolutely anything together so long as you have some sort of bread-like substance, a liquid, ideally an egg, though you don't necessarily have to have an egg to bind it. You put it in a dish. You stick it in the oven, then put it under the broiler to get the top crunchy.  Out of this came ... And I was like especially if you can pour beer into there as the liquid, you win. And Velveeta is its own magical substance. If you don't try to think of it as cheese, you're better off. You can use real cheese if you want to, but Velveeta, I think really gets the zeitgeist there. You can make it with absolutely anything so long as you follow the formula. It's cheesy and delicious and it's even better the next day.

Suzy Chase:                  In addition to being the senior food and drinks editor at Extra Crispy, you also write and talk about tough, real life stuff; anxiety and depression. You wrote a book called, "Hi Anxiety, Life with a Bad Case of Nerves." You started the conversation in the restaurant community about depression, anxiety addiction and eating disorders on chefs with issues. Talk a little bit about that.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yes, so I have been pretty open for a long time about my own struggles with anxiety and depression. Then recently a diagnosis of ADHD, which was contributing to the anxiety as I found out. It's something that I have dealt with as long as I can remember. My friends knew about a certain amount of it and definitely my family did. I've never been ashamed about talking about it, but it wasn't necessarily something I led with.

                                                      When I was at CNN, I was the food editor there and I also wrote for CNN Living. And I wrote an essay about my experience with depression throughout my life and then later I wrote about anxiety. It opened up a conversation there at work and then we were able to ... Both of them went viral and they were really kind and generous and thoughtful enough to let me really explore that further there with some conversations and community stuff that we did.

                                                      What happened was that I also was the food editor, so I would be interviewing a chef there or at my next job when we would be doing some video or whatever it happened to be and I'd be recording it. There would be a moment where we would stop and turn off the recorder to change batteries or change tapes. A couple of times it happened that the chef would be like hey, actually can I talk to you about something? Then they would tell me about their own particular struggles with depression or anxiety or addiction or whatever it happened to be. Or someone who they worked with in their kitchen. That happened once and I felt like okay, this is somebody who just needed to get it off their chest. I'm so grateful that they were willing to trust me with it. Then it happened again. Then it started to happen more than half the time. I started to think there's really something going on here.

                                                      So after a few months of this, I threw up a website on January 1st, 2016 and I put up a poll asking people are you dealing with any of these issues? If so, do you feel open talking about it? Do you get treatment? All this stuff. I figured I'd maybe get a few dozen responses. I've gotten well over 2,000 responses at this point. I started getting letters and calls, emails, Facebook messages, Twitter messages from people saying, "Oh, my god. I thought I was the only one."

                                                      I realized it was really a huge crisis. The month after I started this site, three different chef owners took their own lives that I knew about. It's constant. I cannot stress this enough. Chefs and hospitality workers and bartenders die all the time and people don't talk about it. Whether it is by suicide or whether it is by as they call it, "slow suicide" of rough choices or addiction or whatever it happens to be. That was three in one month. One that was very, very high profile and two that were less so, but people happened to tell me. I did the math on this and realized just the toll this takes on the industry. So I started this website. I got the opportunity to speak about it at a few conferences.

                                                      I realized this was way, way, way bigger than me. I couldn't field all of this stuff by myself. It takes a toll. I'm happy to do it and it adds so much to me, but it's a lot. So I started a Facebook group last summer while I was recovering from surgery where people could just come any hour of the day or night, and have open conversations about what they were dealing with. And three months ago, there were 828 people in it. Now, as of last night, there were 2300 people in it-

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my God.

Kat Kinsman:                  The thing that happened was Anthony Bourdain killed himself, and yeah, which so many people are still reeling from ... The thing that's been going on also over the course of this last year, two and a half years that I've been doing this is, I've gotten a community of people who are starting this conversation in their own community. There are groups all over the country operating independently where they're gathering together people in the industry in their particular towns to talk about it, to offer the solidarity.

                                                      Denver is incredible for that. There was a thing...Recently changed the name from Mile-High Hospitality Hazards...Not sure what the new name of it is, but they're doing great work to get people together. There's Ben's Friends throughout the south. That is specifically for people in recovery in the hospitality industry, and people are really getting together and taking care of one another in a way that they haven't before. And for the first time in awhile, I have hope that people don't feel like they're alone, they don't feel like it's taboo, they don't feel like they are weak for dealing with these things. I'm gutted, still, as so many of us are by the loss of Tony and if there's anything halfway okay that came out of this, it is that people are talking and hopefully more lives aren't going to be lost, even though I know that they have been since him. But hopefully the trend will change.

Suzy Chase:                  I just got back from our beach house. All I brought were Anthony Bourdain books-

Kat Kinsman:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  And I was just trying to find an answer. Is there an answer in this sentence? What happened? Because everything he ever said was, "That was my old life." He got beyond it and had a child and lived for her, it seemed like. And it's just like, "Wow." If he can fall to pieces, we all can.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yeah. No one's immune to this. And this is why it's really important to me to never say "cure" about mental health issues. We'll never know exactly why, with him, and we have all wracked our brains and our hearts in thinking, "Is there something I could've said, done?" Any of these things that you didn't know, looking back at the last DM that he sent me, and is there something I should've said? But no, that's the thing, is like, it can come and get you at unsuspecting times. I don't say cure. I only ever say manage, and I'm pretty open about the fact that even for me, I've been dealing with this for a long time. I'm incredibly lucky. I am a straight, white, cisgendered married woman with health insurance and employment. I have every single advantage that a person could have, except for the only way there could be sort of more privilege present is if I were a man.

                                                      Yeah, but that doesn't make me immune to this. It just means that I have more resources to deal with this. I have an incredibly supportive and fantastic spouse. I have friends and a community for whom I am so grateful. My Extra Crispy colleagues are so fundamental to my heart. It sounds maybe silly to some people to say this about a work situation, but it's so an emotionally great place to work, because we all have genuine affection and respect and care for one another.

                                                      And I realize that is a tremendous thing, but at the same time, this summer, I had a very, very dark month where I went down...I have a panic disorder, as well, and I had...It was especially post-Tony. I ended up going around the country speaking with groups of chefs. I do a lot of closed-door meetings with chefs where I just get people together and talk about it, talk about what they're feeling about getting resources. The day it happened, we all found out about it the week before. I had been at the Atlanta Food and Wine Festival, where Kim Severson and I got people together and talked about things. I was talking in Charleston over the next couple of days. I was already scheduled for that.

                                                      I went to the Aspen Food and Wine Festival the next weekend and talked to the other chefs there. I was on the road. I was ragged. I was revisiting my own trauma. I was sad about the loss of my friend and worried about other friends of his. And I was just in a susceptible place, and I got really, really dark. And I had a panic attack that lasted for an entire month. And I am someone who has all the therapy, has all of the resources, has all of this stuff, and it still happened, which is why you'll see me on Twitter having check-ins with people. It's incredibly important to check in on people who seem like they're doing okay, people who don't seem like they're doing okay, to ask you friends how they're doing and let them know it's okay if they don't say, like, "Oh, I'm fine." They can give you the real answer.

                                                      I can't say this enough. It's so important to check in. I also-

Suzy Chase:                  Especially in this age of social media, where everyone's Kim Kardashian. Everything's amazing. And it might not be.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yeah. So I also got trained as a crisis counselor with Crisis Text Line, which everyone needs to have this number in their phone to share it with everybody. Text 741741 in the states. You can contact them by direct messenger on Facebook, and there is somebody there 24/7 to talk you, as they call it, from a hot moment to a cool call. And it's an incredible thing, so I trained as a counselor there, so I learned how to really deescalate situations. And a very important thing I learned there was the importance of asking people point-blank if they're thinking about killing themselves. And that is a harsh thing to have to say. I know people think that if you bring up suicide that it makes people more likely or puts the notion in their head. What they told us is that it's actually the opposite, because it bring it out into the open, it makes it not just this taboo thing. It actually shocks some people into reality, like, "Oh my God, yeah, actually now that you say the word"-

Suzy Chase:                  And verbalizing it.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yeah. And it's an awkward conversation to have, to ask somebody, but several times recently, I have asked friends that, and sometimes you get a very, very scary answer. But the thing I always say to chefs is yes, it's awkward if your line cook cries in front of you. That's a hell of a lot better than crying at their funeral. And I'm sorry to make it so stark, but those actually are the stakes of it, too.

                                                      So during this really rotten time that I was having that was sort of spurred by being away from my support systems, being tired, revisiting trauma, a couple of stressful situations. My sleep was bad, my therapist was out of the country for three weeks and stuff. And I was lucky enough to have people around me who I could say, "I'm not okay" to, and I ended up, my therapist came back in town, I went and saw my physician who put me on an ADHD medication that, honestly, within 45 minutes, my brain felt calmer than it had in a month or longer, and it was an amazing thing. I was lucky to be able to ask for help and to have people around me saying like, "Hey, what are you doing for yourself?" But I'm somebody who talks about this pretty openly, and I think of myself as a solid, stable person who has...I've been lucky enough to have some incredible career opportunities, and it can still happen to me.

                                                      So we really, really, really have to keep checking in on our people, no matter what beautiful things they're putting on Instagram-

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Kat Kinsman:                  Whatever they're saying, look for the messages between the lines, or even just send them a text saying, "Just thinking about you." It really matters to do that.

Suzy Chase:                  For season 4 of Cookery By the Book podcast, I am kicking off a new segment called The Last Meal. On a lighter note.

Kat Kinsman:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  If you had to place an order for your last meal on earth, what would it be?

Kat Kinsman:                  I'd honestly be happy going out with an egg and cheese or a bacon, egg and cheese on a roll from a deli. Cup of coffee. Maybe a glass of champagne. I mean, that egg and cheese sandwich...which I can't eat because my gut thing, but if I knew it was my last meal, it really wouldn't matter. I love that perfect...As my friend Eric Diesel calls it, the deli egg bomb. It satisfies all my texture needs. It never fails to put a smile on my face, so I think it would have to be that.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Kat Kinsman:                  Ah. On the web, well, ExtraCrispy.com. That is home base. On Twitter, I am @KittenWithAWhip. On Instagram, I'm @katkinsman, and if you go to Tarts.org, which is the domain that I've had since 1997, I think you can also get there from katkinsman.com...That has all the links to all of the social...And it links to buy this fantastic Extra Crispy book by the editors of Extra Crispy. I just want to give a shoutout to Ryan Grimm, Margaret Eby, Rebecca Firkser, and then Kate Welsh, she recently moved on from the team to a fantastic opportunity, but they all put their heart and soul and everything into this book. Our former designer, Lauren Kolm, did some of the illustrations. The team in Birmingham shot the heck out of this. It's incredibly beautiful. Hugh Atchison wrote an incredible foreword, so we'd be remiss not to mention all those fantastic people.

Suzy Chase:                  That's like an awards show. I'm playing you off with the music.

                                                      Thank you for all of your great work that's changing lives. And thanks so much for coming on Cookery By the Book podcast.

Kat Kinsman:                  Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review Cookery By the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram @cookerybythebook. Twitter is @IAmSuzyChase. And download your kitchen mixtapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery By the Book.

                                                      Thanks for listening.

Secrets of the Southern Table
A Food Lover's Tour of the Global South

By Virginia Willis

INTRO:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book Podcast with Suzy Chase! She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.

Virginia Willis:                  My name is Virginia Willis, and my most recent cookbook is Secret of the Southern Table: A Food Lover's Tour of the Global South.

Suzy Chase:                  This cookbook was a real education for me. In the forward, Sean Brock wrote, "There is a misconception around the world that southern food is a singular cuisine." Explain that statement.

Virginia Willis:                  Well, I think to what Sean does, he sort of expounds on the fact that the south is roughly one million square miles, and so I really ... What he wrote in terms of we don't say, "I love European food," I think that that application applies to the south, that same sort of philosophy would apply to the south. The coastal cuisine of Louisiana is tremendously different from the coastal cuisine of Florida or the low country or Texas. So this southern food, when people say southern food or southern cuisine, there's actually many sort of pockets and micro-pockets throughout the south.

Suzy Chase:                  In terms of the pockets and micro-pockets, describe the differences between, let's say the food in Appalachia to coastal Carolina to the gulf.

Virginia Willis:                  So the food of Appalachia would be more of mountain cuisine, so corn grows there. It's not a great area for grains, so there'd be less wheat production. The soil is rocky, and it's mountainous. It's a poor party of the country. It always has been.

                                                      The cuisine of the deep south, of course, that's traditionally a long time ago would've been the plantations and cotton, but it's just huge expanses of land for crops. And then of course the coastal cuisines, the various different types of coastal cuisines would've heavily relied upon seafood. So each sort of geographic area by what grows in the region sort of dictates what the food of that region is.

Suzy Chase:                  You wrote, "Memory shapes the story of our lives and allows us to interact with the world." I adore the visual of your grandmother Louise sitting you in one compartment of her double-sided steel sink while she shelled peas or snapped beans in her kitchen with blue and white gingham curtains!

Virginia Willis:                  You can't paint a better picture, right? I mean, it's just ...

Suzy Chase:                  I know! So how did this memory shape your life?

Virginia Willis:                  Well, my earliest memories are being in the kitchen with my grandmother and with my mother ... my grandfather. I mean, really, truly I was three years old when my family moved from Georgia to Louisiana, which also had tremendous influence. The best times of my life have sort of been in the kitchen. That's always been what grounded me, what intrigued me, what excited me, and so that kitchen, my grandmother and grandfather's kitchen, those heart pine walls and the linoleum floor and the gingham checkered curtains ... That really distilled it for me about like where my love of food and cooking started.

Suzy Chase:                  I love that. I want to go there right now! The kitchen sounds so cute!

Virginia Willis:                  It was. She had it packed full. It was this tidy little kitchen with this little eat-in table for the two of them. And when I was a little girl, my sister and I both had stools that sort of were kept underneath the table that we would pull out so the two adults and the two children could sit and eat there. And of course we had a dining room, but I just remember grits for breakfast. And in the summertime, my grandfather would bring in tomatoes, and my grandmother would chop up fresh tomatoes for the top of the grits. So it really just truly ... I think my mouth is watering right now!

Suzy Chase:                  I know! ... So talk about the questions of ownership of southern cooking. We often hear about the nameless black women who helped mold southern cuisine, but talk about the nameless faceless poor white women that we don't really hear about.

Virginia Willis:                  Yeah ... It's so complicated, and it's so heavy. It is still ... It's only been a couple hundred years since the Civil War, right? In the scope of things, it just hasn't been that long, and of course the Jim Crow ... African-Americans have been kept sort of subjugated for the few hundred years since then.

                                                      But in terms of the ownership and the faceless white women, one thing to consider is that there really has always been a 1%. I mean, we've sort of reflected upon that more recently with the crash a couple years ago and such, but there really has sort of been always this 1%. And so in the south, there's this perception of great plantations and people owning multiple slaves, and this was true, and this was also part of the 1%.

                                                      So there was undoubtedly a system that kept different classes and cultures in place, and I'm actually reading this really sort of academic book called Masterless Men, and it's about poor whites in the antebellum south. And because slavery existed, there really wasn't a working white class because of course there was slavery, and so that was technically free, if that makes any sense. I mean, other than the cost of the person.

                                                      So it's truly complicated, but one thing that does come back is that there has always been poverty in the south for a great many of the people, both black and white included. And so one of the things that I like to take into consideration or I want us to start taking into consideration with our dialogue is addressing and understanding the implications of slavery but also understanding the implications that there were poor whites as well that didn't have slaves. And so there always has been this sort of faceless women cooking food for people.

Suzy Chase:                  Why have we never heard that story? I'm sitting here thinking, "Well yes, there were white people who were out of work because of slavery."

Virginia Willis:                  It's really ... The thing is, is that I don't think that we've actually come to grips as a country with the fact that we were proponents of slavery for centuries, and it did live and exist in the south for far longer than it did in the north, but let's not kid ourselves. There was slavery in the northeast when the colonies were founded, and there was a tremendous slave trade between the Caribbean and salt cod in New England and Europe.

                                                      So I feel like that's part of the complication. We really ... In this day and age, it's hard for us to sort of grasp the fact that the United States is so deeply involved with slavery for so long, for centuries, truly for centuries ... And it did last longer in the south, and it did become ... It was the primary instigation for the Civil War.

                                                      But you, I have an expression like, "The truth is always in the middle." It's easily not one side or the other. The truth is always somewhere in between, and I feel like that's just part of it. We're still trying to figure it out. I feel it's just part of my organic desire as a southerner and a food person and a cook to try to figure out some of these questions, and then also just my place as a person, right? This is a person. How does this happen? How does this play out? How does this affect people's lives? You know, it's a tumultuous time.

Suzy Chase:                  The largest population of Vietnamese in the United States outside of California is Houston. Talk a little bit about the Vietnamese shrimpers in Texas.

Virginia Willis:                  So that is such a fascinating story because when I tell people that there are more Vietnamese in Houston than anywhere outside of California in the United States, people, their eyes just pop up. People think, Houston, Texas and cowboys or oil, right? There are some people who are little bit more geographically aware might realize that it's on actually pretty close the coast, and there's this seafooding industry.

                                                      But essentially, after the Vietnam War, when the Vietnamese were displaced and there was this humanitarian crisis, the UN placed these Vietnamese refugees, they were unceremoniously called the boat people ... The UN placed them in different places throughout the world, and Texas was one of them.

                                                      And so one of the things that's so fascinating there is that the Vietnamese came in. Of course, Vietnam has two coasts. It's a seafaring country, and so the Vietnamese entered the fishing and shrimping industry. And in my research, I learned that of course sort of history repeats itself time and time again. When a new population moves into an area and they start taking the jobs, then the dominant population reacts, and the dominant population, being white shrimpers in Houston and Galveston and in the area, it became sort of like the battle zone. And the KKK protested and became involved. It was fraught. Ships were burned, and shots were fired, and all these things.

                                                      So how does that play into my cookbook? I felt like it's important to tell those stories too. I mean, southern food isn't solely dewy-eyed women with gingham aprons, right? So there's the good, the bad, and the ugly, and if you love something or if you love a place or you love someone, you love it all or have to acknowledge it all.

                                                      So I wanted to tell that story, but what has also happened ... There's this sort of twofold realization that I had. The Vietnamese culture is still fairly closed. I mean, it was only like 40 years ago, so in time, that's not much time. So my goal in visiting Galveston and the Houston area was to try to talk to Vietnamese shrimpers and to talk to them about their experience. I gave it my best journalistic shot, and I couldn't get anyone to talk to me.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

Virginia Willis:                  I couldn't get anyone ... Yeah. I contacted the Texas seafood marketing association and part of the department of agriculture and asked for assistance getting me in touch with the Vietnamese shrimpermen. They had nobody.

                                                      It was eye-opening. It was really ... It was a lesson, right? It's like only 40 years later, and this community is still pretty closed. I literally found myself like wandering the docks, walking into a clearly Vietnamese-owned seafood company, and they're like, "Oh, we're busy." And I'm like, "Oh, that's fine. I'll wait." "No, we're busy, and we're gonna be busy." I just met a gentleman mending nets and asked him if we could take his photograph, and he said no. He didn't mind his back being shown, but he didn't want to be a part of the story.

                                                      So it was sort of disheartening on that end, and then we did meet some young, early 20-something Vietnamese kids that are probably third-generation now, maybe second, and they're like, "Hey, yeah. You can take our picture." So they were brothers, and one was sort of like a version of like a Vietnamese Ken, right? Ken doll? You know Ken?

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Virginia Willis:                  Super clean cut and t-shirt and buff and clearly works out ... this really clean cut. And his brother was sort of the Johnny Depp of Vietnamese culture! He was great! I mean, seriously, it's like somewhere between Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean kind of Keith Richards look. And they were very open and would talk to us and had no problem. So I feel like the tides will turn, right, eventually. Assimilation does happen. It just takes awhile.

                                                      And then the only thing I'd say lastly to that is that open or closed, the presence of so many Vietnamese in the Houston area has definitely affected the local food and culture. It's just present. We went to a place to eat, and they had ... They called them Vietnamese fajitas because everyone of course knows fajitas, but they were Vietnamese fajitas. But it wasn't a fajita at all. It was a Vietnamese rice paper wrap, right? And lots of restaurants have Vietnamese influence throughout. It's taken awhile, but the presence the Vietnamese in Texas is definitely affecting the local food wave there.

Suzy Chase:                  And I think I read in the book that they call it Viet-Tex?

Virginia Willis:                  Yeah! There's a Viet-Tex, and then of course there're Vietnamese all along the gulf because they didn't just sort of stay in Texas. They moved to Louisiana, and there's Vietnamese in Mississippi and Alabama as well. And so in Louisiana, there's a Viet-Cajun-

Suzy Chase:                  Oh my gosh!

Virginia Willis:                  Sort of this incredible mashup of like the creole spices and the southeast-Asian spices with like ginger and lemongrass and garlic. And it's this incredible mashups or fusions or just this natural evolution of what southern food really is.

Suzy Chase:                  In addition to the recipes in each chapter, you have two essays about a farmer, catcher, harvester, or maker. One that caught my eye was Many Fold Farm. Talk a bit about Ross and Rebecca William, the new face of farming and their hurdles with a small farm.

Virginia Willis:                  Oh, it's just sort of amazing. My goal of this book was to present this rich and diverse south, and so my goal was also to present the unexpected. So for example, in Georgia the average farmer is a 57 year old white male. I don't have any problems with 57 year old white men, and neither one did, but what I wanted to do is to not feature that, not to feature that man, to feature someone else.

                                                      So Ross and Rebecca are this young couple. They've been high school sweethearts, stayed together through college, have purposefully chosen this region in Palmetto, which is 30, 45 minutes tops from Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, the world's busiest airport. But it's completely rural, tranquil, quiet, countryside only 30 minutes away from Atlanta. And they have chosen this region because there are some pretty strict zoning laws that have been put into place by local governance to restrict sprawl. Atlanta has a ton of sprawl, like in all directions, and big buck stores and malls and traffic, traffic, traffic. We've got terrible traffic in Atlanta.

                                                      So Ross and Rebecca started with chickens and have moved to goat cheese and different sheep milk cheeses ... winning award fast, but when I went and interviewed them, shortly thereafter, they had to put pause on the farm because the challenges that farmers face, right? They wanted to continue making this beautiful award-winning cheese, but to scale up, they would've had to have imported sheep's milk from the Midwest. And it sort of flew in the face of their values.

                                                      So there's so many different considerations in farming, and the first one of course, you can be sustainable, but if it's not economically sustainable, it's not sustainable at all. And so that's sort of where it was left. They're hitting pause for a bit, so they can sort of regroup and figure out what they're doing.

Suzy Chase:                  Then I read about the gospel of ham, Nancy Newsom. Newsom's country hams! Describe the country hams that she makes.

Virginia Willis:                  Oh my god. I love Ms. Nancy. She is just amazing! So she's this sort of powerhouse of a woman and the ham is like nothing you've ever tasted before. It's just amazing ... So it would be ... For folks who aren't familiar with country ham, country ham is a traditional means of preservation that's hundreds and hundreds of years old. It's been long practiced in Europe, and then those traditions came to the south. And primarily hams are salted, and in the United States, in specifically sort of like in Appalachia, in the mountains, they were salted and smoked. So there's like a twofold process. Because it's so hot in the south, we have to have like extra layer of preservation.

                                                      But Nancy's hams are this amazing salty and sweet and intensely savory ... absolutely incredible. It would be similar to one of the finest prosciutto hams from Parma. When sliced really thinly, it's exactly the same sort of quality of prosciutto.

Suzy Chase:                  How did ham become a secret of the southern table?

Virginia Willis:                  So pig is the meat of the south. If you kind of think about it, how did that happen? There's these large expanses, and in Texas, definitely beef is king. And there are cattle raised in the south, but for much of the south, these wide expanses would not have been used for pastureland. They would've been used from crops, for growing soybeans or cotton or corn or whatever it is.

                                                      So pigs have long been sort of the meat that sustained the south, and then of course cured ham would be a natural extension of that. The pigs would be raised throughout the year, and then there would be a hog killing the fall. Of course when it got cooler, so that would be the perfect time to sort of cure the hams and put them in the smokehouse so that there would be meat for the wintertime.

                                                      So ham is a very integral part of southern food throughout the south. So I say that southern food is different cuisines. Southern food throughout the south involves ham.

Suzy Chase:                  What is one southern dish that you make that immediately brings you back to growing up in the south?

Virginia Willis:                  There's so many, right? Like okra ... I literally have an okra pendant around my neck. I think okra is a sort of aggressively southern vegetable. It primarily grows in the south. But if I were to be really truthfully honest, even though I'm trying to present all these different recipes from the south, from different cultures, I think that biscuits are probably the food that takes me back ... going back to that gingham curtain and the kitchen of my grandmother's. I've been making biscuits since I was three years old in the kitchen, so that is firmly burned into my memory.

Suzy Chase:                  You've wrote in the back of the cookbook, "As we drove across 11 states, the radio sat silent for hours upon hours as we examined our thoughts and beliefs regarding our homeland, perused its difficult past, contemplated its complicated current situation, and voiced our hopes for its future." Was there one person you met traveling while researching your cookbook along the way that made a huge impression on you?

Virginia Willis:                  I can't truly weigh like one experience more than the other because it really was just a sort of journey of a lifetime, and pulling out one person, I think, would be too problematic because I met so many different voices.

                                                      I might point towards Glenn Roberts at Anson Mills because I think that what he is doing is really incredible. Many people may have heard of Anson Mills. It's become sort of the darling of chefs in the past decade or so. But Glenn is a seed saver, and so what he's doing sort of extends past just the food of the south. He's sort of saving the world, which is obviously tremendous.

                                                      But there have been so many seeds lost. There's been such an impediment to seed diversity. And Glenn is famous for grits and Carolina gold rice, but he's actually bringing back all these heirloom breeds and heritage breeds that have sort of almost fallen off the face of the earth. And he's working with Indian tribes and Rhode Island and Massachusetts like bringing heirloom corn from colonial times there. So he's, I think, indicative of this really sort of life changing things that are happening around southern food that extend past southern food.

Suzy Chase:                  Last night for dinner, I made your recipe for catfish mulldown on page 203.

Virginia Willis:                  Yum!

Suzy Chase:                  Nothing knocks my socks off more than a simple delicious dish, and this blew me away! Describe this old-fashioned dish and give us a little background on your uncle Marshal, the fishing guide.

Virginia Willis:                  Yeah, okay, so uncle Marshal was a river guide ... I don't know. Working on the river has always been sort of a roughneck, a rough position. I mean, if you think about the bars were on the river, and the gambling houses were on the river and all that. And I don't know anything about uncle Marshal doing that, but I do know that he was sort of perceived as this sort of character, right? And would take people fishing.

                                                      So I'm not certain that he had it, but a mulldown was sort of a catfish stew, catfish and potatoes, more of like a stew, and it would've been put into a dutch oven and sort of layered and cooked in potatoes and catfish and salt pork or something like that, maybe a little bit of ketchup or something. And I've sort of turned it, sort of chefed it up a bit, for a lack of a better word, with cream and potatoes and catfish, and it just sort of becomes this sort of really rich but undeniably simple and satisfying supper.

                                                      And of course catfish are native to the south. There are lots of catfish that live in our rivers, and Mississippi now is a big state for raising farm raised catfish. So catfish is a very southern fish for the inland, not the coast, not the ocean, but catfish is super southern fish.

Suzy Chase:                  I love catfish. This dish was so darn good, and it only has four ingredients!

Virginia Willis:                  My philosophy with food in general is to just use really good ingredients and do as little to it as possible to mess with it. Just trust the ingredient and honor the ingredient, and that comes from not sort of some recent chef driven revelation. My grandfather had a garden ... We had a garden my whole entire life. We ate summer squash in season. We ate eggplant in season. We ate okra in season. We ate collard greens in season. We ate sweet potatoes. I mean, everything was in season, and it wasn't some sort of highfalutin thing. It was just what it was.

                                                      And so when you're dealing with something that's fresh out of the garden, not for a week in a produce department, or a week and a half in the produce department, it just tastes so much better.

Suzy Chase:                  So before we wrap up, one last little story I have to tell you. In the 90s, I was a cookbook publicist in Kansas City. You'll see where this is going. And desperately wanted to move out of Kansas City to work with cookbooks on a larger scale, and it was a no-brainer to contact the absolute pinnacle of cookbook publicity at that time, which as Lisa Ekus. So she said she would talk to me if I wanted to come to Massachusetts, but I really wanted to move to New York City. So I was bummed that I never got the chance to meet her, and I never got the chance to learn from her.

                                                      So fast forward, I was pleasantly surprised to see her name mentioned in the back of your cookbook. Talk a little bit about Lisa Ekus for the cookbook lovers who may not know her name.

Virginia Willis:                  Well, I first have to divulge that Lisa is my partner, so she and I-

Suzy Chase:                  Yes!

Virginia Willis:                  She was first my agent, and then we became friends, and then it was like, "Oh wow, hey!"

Suzy Chase:                  I love that!

Virginia Willis:                  And so we fell in love! ... Gosh, I have such a smile on my face right now! I'm so glad. Lisa has been in the business of cookbooks and publishing and all things culinary for roughly 35 years. When I chose to send her the book proposal for Bon Appetit, Y'all, which was my first book that out ten years ago. I knew her to be the best in the business. I mean, that was just sort of, for me, being in food for roughly 25 years now, I at the time, 10 years ago, was like, "Well, if I'm gonna get an agent, I want it to be Lisa Ekus."

                                                      So I sent her my proposal with an exclusive and said, "You're the only agent I'm sending it to. I'll give you six to eight weeks before I take it out anywhere else." She has worked with Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, Marcella Hazan and Amanda Hesser from Food 52 and on and on. It's just sort of comical when we go to a bookstore and she's like, "Oh, I worked on that book. Oh wait, I worked on that book."

                                                      And so she is sort of a behind the scenes person that has had a tremendous amount to do with food and cookbook publishing for the past three decades, and I love her!

Suzy Chase:                  I love that!

Virginia Willis:                  Yeah!

Suzy Chase:                  So for season four of Cookery by the Book Podcast, I'm kicking off a new segment called: my last meal. If you had to place an order for your last meal on earth, what would it be?

Virginia Willis:                  I've been able to enjoy and taste and have so many crazy different things from food that the bazaar in Turkey to handmade Italian pasta to foie grois in France. I mean, I feel very fortunate about my life and my travels. I guess at the end of the day, if I were to say what I would want for my last meal, it would probably involve fried chicken and biscuits and butter beans because that's my comfort food. That's the food of my people, and that's what I grew up with. And hopefully I won't be putting in that order anytime soon.

Suzy Chase:                  Definitely not! Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Virginia Willis:                  Oh awesome! Well thank you Suzy! So people can find out probably more than they ever wanted to know by going to virginiawillis.com, and at the top of that page, at the home page, there are links to all of my social, but essentially it's @VirginiaWillis for Twitter and Instagram and all that. But if they go to virginiawillis.com, they'll be able to find my books and find my blog and social media and all that kind of good stuff and events that I'll be doing throughout the year.

Suzy Chase:                  It was such a pleasure chatting with you! Thanks Virginia for taking us on a food lover's tour of the global south, and thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast!

Virginia Willis:                  Thank you so much, and I'd say, Suzy, Bon Appetit, y'all!

Suzy Chase:                  Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, and while you're there, please take a moment to rate and review Cookery by the Book. You can also follow me on Instagram @CookeryByTheBook. Twitter is @IamSuzyChase, and download your kitchen mixtapes, Music to Cook By, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. Thanks for listening!