Salt & Spine

Hi there,

Apologies for the silence last week! The COVID fairy finally pulled my card, and it knocked me (and my family) down for a number of days. We’re all recovering over here, and I’m excited to share this week’s conversation with you now! I hope you’ll forgive the delay. Read on for more on my recent chat with Kwame Onwuachi—and make sure you’re subscribed to our Substack to access exclusive recipes from Kwame’s My America later this week.

–Brian

Episode 132: Kwame Onwuachi

It really does feel like we’re living in Kwame Onwuachi’s America.

Industry folks run into him around every turn—he’s fresh off the high-profile hosting gig at Monday’s James Beard Awards, for one—and his voice and influence are becoming undeniably one of the most impactful.

After opening five restaurants before turning 30, Kwame has earned accolades from nearly every major media outlet (James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef, Food & Wine Best New Chef, Esquire Chef of the Year, Forbes 30 Under 30, the “most important chef in America” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and so on).

Now, Kwame is an executive producer for Food & Wine magazine and is responsible for convening the upcoming 2nd Annual Family Reunion, a multi-day event that celebrates racial and ethnic diversity in hospitality.

In Kwame’s first book, 2019’s Notes From A Young Black Chef written with Joshua David Stein, he chronicles his life from growing up in New York City, with extended stints in Louisiana and Nigeria, to the path that led him to his first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou. (And that memoir is now being made into a feature film by A24!)

He’s followed it up with a new book—this time a cookbook, titled My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef, and also co-authored by Stein.

Part memoir, part cookbook, My America features recipes from Kwame’s culinary journey—from Suya (Nigerian BBQ) to Egusi Stew, a Nigerian recipe he grew up eating that’s thickened with egusi (melon seed).

Recipes This Week:

Paid subscribers will get access to two recipes from Kwame’s My America this week: Jamaican Beef Patties and Suya (“the grandfather of American BBQ”):

Salt + Spine is supported by listeners like you. To get full access to our exclusive content and featured recipes, and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We’ve got a great show for you today: Kwame joined us to discuss his culinary career, his books, and of course, to play our signature culinary game.

Thanks for joining us to #TalkCookbooks!

–Brian, Clea, and the Salt + Spine team

Hi there —

Happy June! This always feels like the best month to me (spoiler alert: it’s my birthday month! 🦀). It’s probably still a holdout, many many years later, of the school’s-out-and-summer-is-here bliss, but the days feel long, the dinners feel relaxed and homey, and I feel energized.

How are you feeling this June?

Whatever you’re feeling, we’ve got a great show for you this week:

Episode 131: Sheldon Simeon

This week, we’re joined by chef and author Sheldon Simeon to discuss his debut cookbook, Cook Real Hawai’i.

Sheldon is a native of Hilo, on the Big Island, and grew up with a love for food. He learned how to cook (and how to cook for others) from his family, parlaying his interest in the craft into an impressive restaurant career.

After graduating from the Maui Culinary Academy and an internship at World Disney World, he rose up the ranks of Hawaiian restaurants, serving as executive chef for the opening of Maui’s much anticipated Star Noodle. (He earned his first James Beard nod that year, with a 2011 Rising Star Chef of the Year nomination, and helped Star Noodle secure a Best New Restaurant nomination from the Beard Foundation.)

The accolades kept rolling in (Food & Wine People’s Choice Best New Chef of the Pacific & Northwest, for one), and before long, “Top Chef” producers had recruited him to join the show’s 10th season in Seattle. He quickly won audience support and was one of the final three finalists. (Sheldon returned for Season 14 of the Bravo show in Charleston; he won the Fan Favorite award in both seasons.) More restaurants followed, including the beloved Tin Roof, Sheldon’s first solo restaurant which opened in Maui in 2016.

And now, a cookbook: We're treated to Cook Real Hawai’i, Sheldon's collection of 100 recipes that he says “embody the beautiful cross-cultural exchange of islands.” From Hawaiian traditions to influences from around the globe—Asia, Portugal, the Philippines—Sheldon offers recipes for everything from wok-fried poke to crispy cauliflower katsu to chocolate birthday cake butter mochi.

Get Cooking Today: Buy Cook Real Hawai’i from Bookshop or Omnivore Books

Recipes This Week:

Paid subscribers will get access to these three featured recipes from Cook Real Hawai’i this week—Chicken Hekka, Chocolate Birthday Cake Butter Mochi, and Li Hing Mui Palomas. Subscribe today so you never miss a recipe!

Salt + Spine is supported by listeners like you. To get full access to our exclusive content and featured recipes, and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We've got a great show for you today: Sheldon joins us to talk about his career and his debut cookbook. Of course, we also put him to the test in our signature culinary game.

Thanks for joining us to #TalkCookbooks!

–Brian & the Salt + Spine team

P.S. This week, I recommend reading the latest from Soleil Ho: The limits of comfort food in a time of national horror

Hi there,

Memorial Day is this weekend and if, like me, you’re just getting around to thinking about food, we can help. We dug into our Salt + Spine archives for some grill-tastic options:

* How about some Smoked Chicken or Pork T-Bones (two prime mains from pitmaster Rodney Scott)?

* Stacey Adimando’s got a side dish covered with her Blackened Summer Squash with Buttermilk Cream Sauce, Rosemary, and Chives.

* And wash it down with Grilled Margaritas from Maggie Hoffman!

And to ring in summer, we’re offering a special Memorial Day promotion! Become a paid subscriber before the end of the month and you’ll get 20% off your first year! Remember, paid subscribers get access to our full archive of 200+ recipes from featured cookbooks, as well as other exclusive content.

Happy grilling! And now, onto this week’s show:

Episode 130: Fanny Singer

We’ve got a fun episode for you today: Fanny Singer, the author of Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories, is here to #TalkCookbooks with us.

Fanny, of course, is the daughter of legendary restauranteur Alice Waters (who opened Berkeley’s Chez Panisse 50 years ago). Fanny is a writer, editor, art critic, and the founder of Permanent Collection, a clothing and household goods line.

As Fanny set out to write Always Home—part memoir, part cookbook, and partially neither of those things—she began negotiating an inheritance that her mother passed down: her relationship to and appreciation for food.

Unsurprisingly, food was a central theme in Fanny’s childhood home, though she tells us she mostly learned from her mother via “sort of a process of osmosis.” Always Home is, of course, filled with stories and memories from Fanny’s life, and it’s loaded with vivid descriptions of sensory experiences related to food: meals she’s enjoyed at home and around the world.

She writes about her mother’s practice of burning sage or rosemary when they returned home from a trip, and how as a child she once tried fish cooked in a fig leaf—despite first being opposed to the idea—because her mother was able to describe the flavor and scent of the coconut-y leaf.

Get Reading Today: Order via Bookshop or Omnivore Books (signed!)

This Week’s Recipe

Paid subscribers this week will get access to an excerpted recipe from Fanny’s Always Home for Coming Home Pasta. Subscribe today to get full access!

Salt + Spine is a reader-supported publication. To get full access, including featured recipes, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We’ve got a great chat with Fanny — plus our signature culinary game and a featured recipe later this week.

Thanks for joining us to #TalkCookbooks!

—Brian & the Salt + Spine Team

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Hi there,

Hope you are doing well — I am finally (I hope) recovering from a little non-COVID infection that took my voice fully away for a good 24 hours. Every podcast host’s nightmare! But it’s back-ish (bear with me) in time to tee up this week’s conversation, which I’m thrilled to share with all of you.

My long-overdue conversation with chef and author Renee Erickson is hitting the podcast waves today. We recorded our chat quite some time ago and, sadly, the world got in the way and it’s been sitting in our queue.

Episode 129: Renee Erickson

I think you’ll love hearing from Renee about her growing up near Seattle and how she took a job at the Boat Street restaurant that parlayed itself into ownership of the whole place.

At just 25, Renee took the helm and never looked back, growing her restaurant empire to include a good handful of establishments today. Along the way, her fame grew, and locals became enamored with her vision and values, while the culinary world flocked to the PNW to enjoy her French-inspired and Puget Sound-sourced menus.

Renee’s first cookbook, A Boat, A Whale, and a Walrus: Menus and Stories, quickly became a classic. (I’ll admit, it’s one of the few that I rotate regularly through my in-kitchen cookbook stand.)

And now, Renee’s second cookbook—Getaway: Food & Drink to Transport You—couldn’t come at a better time. As the world keeps reopening, Getaway is Renee’s culinary guide to the places she travels to again and again, and how to eat like you’re there. From Rome to Baja California to, of course, Seattle, Renee showcases her way of travel and dining for us to emulate.

Get Cooking Today: Order via Bookshop or Omnivore Books

This Week’s Recipes

Paid subscribers this week will get access to four excerpted recipes from Renee’s Getaway! Subscribe today to get full access!

See a peek here:

We’ve got a great chat with Renee — plus our signature culinary game and featured recipes.

Thanks for joining us to #TalkCookbooks!

—The Salt + Spine Team

For episode details: https://saltandspine.substack.com/p/renee-erickson

Getaway: Food & Drink to Transport You

Get Cooking Today: Order via Bookshop or Omnivore Books

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Hi there,

I’m excited to share today’s episode with you: We’re joined by chef Peter Hoffman—of the legendary New York City restaurant Savoy, and then of others—to discuss his career and first book.

Today’s Guest: Peter Hoffman

Peter Hoffman was the chef-owner of Savoy, the farm-to-table eatery in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood he opened in 1990 and that upended ideas about fine dining at the time.

Savoy ran for two decades before Peter shut the doors in 2011. (His other restaurants closed in subsequent years, with the final one shuttering in 2016.) During its tenure, Savoy was one of the first U.S. restaurants to champion seasonal, local cuisine; dishes typically relied heavily on and were inspired by the produce Peter would find at the Union Square Greenmarket, where he became a fixture. (A typical greeting between farmer & chef at the greenmarket: “What’s good?”)

As a child growing up in New Jersey, Peter was introduced to an array of diverse foods. Both of his parents were home cooks—his mother more so than his father—and they inspired him to get comfortable in the kitchen. His mom taught him to read and follow recipes with the Joy of Cooking. And his housekeeper, Hortence, taught him the beauty of butter, an ingredient that gets a whole chapter in his new book. 

Peter got his start working in kitchens at a Vermont resort after his construction job there ended. As he got more and more excited about a path in food, he trained under several renowned cooks, including Richard Olney. He traveled to Japan to learn and, one summer, even ran a small fish market. Peter says that learning from these chefs and experiences taught him the beauty of local geographies and the ingredients they provide.

His first book, What’s Good: A Memoir in 14 Ingredients, is expressive of this type of thinking. It’s part memoir, part cookbook, and features 14 chapters each named after an ingredient that fueled the forward-thinking menus at Savoy. Filled with anecdotes and stories about running a restaurant and his slow-food philosophy, Peter says the book is not just a tribute to the many relationships he formed with farmers, cooks, and the broader community, but it is also a tribute to his journey to discover what seasonality means.

Get Cooking: Bookshop | Omnivore Books (signed)!

We’ve got a great episode for you today—Peter shares some stories like those that fill the pages of his book with us, stresses the importance of simplicity and sustainability, and reflects on what the past two years have meant for the restaurant industry. And, as always, we put him to the test in our signature culinary game!

Featured Recipes This Week

Paid subscribers get access to two featured recipes from What’s Good this week: Susan’s Peach Raspberry Pie (that’s Peter’s wife, Susan), and Peter’s Zhoug.

Each week, paid subscribers to Salt + Spine get exclusive recipes from our featured cookbooks. To get full access (including our archive of 200+ recipes) and support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

Of the zhoug, Peter writes:

I love it with fish either accompanying a piece of grilled fish or drizzled into a fish broth brimming with spring vegetables and gently poached fish but it is great just with bread or over tomatoes. Not bad on a steak too.

Here’s a peek at the zhoug atop a lovely piece of sea bass:

Thanks for joining us to #TalkCookbooks,

Brian

We’re joined today by chef Peter Hoffman—of the legendary New York City restaurant Savoy, and then of others—to discuss his career and first book.

To get featured recipes, subscribe to our Substack today.

Peter Hoffman was the chef-owner of Savoy, the farm-to-table eatery in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood he opened in 1990 and that upended ideas about fine dining at the time.

Savoy ran for two decades before Peter shut the doors in 2011. (His other restaurants closed in subsequent years, with the final one shuttering in 2016.) During its tenure, Savoy was one of the first U.S. restaurants to champion seasonal, local cuisine; dishes typically relied heavily on and were inspired by the produce Peter would find at the Union Square Greenmarket, where he became a fixture. (A typical greeting between farmer & chef at the greenmarket: “What’s good?”)

As a child growing up in New Jersey, Peter was introduced to an array of diverse foods. Both of his parents were home cooks—his mother more so than his father—and they inspired him to get comfortable in the kitchen. His mom taught him to read and follow recipes with the Joy of Cooking. And his housekeeper, Hortence, taught him the beauty of butter, an ingredient that gets a whole chapter in his new book. 

Peter got his start working in kitchens at a Vermont resort after his construction job there ended. As he got more and more excited about a path in food, he trained under several renowned cooks, including Richard Olney. He traveled to Japan to learn and, one summer, even ran a small fish market. Peter says that learning from these chefs and experiences taught him the beauty of local geographies and the ingredients they provide.

His first book, What’s Good: A Memoir in 14 Ingredients, is expressive of this type of thinking. It’s part memoir, part cookbook, and features 14 chapters each named after an ingredient that fueled the forward-thinking menus at Savoy. Filled with anecdotes and stories about running a restaurant and his slow-food philosophy, Peter says the book is not just a tribute to the many relationships he formed with farmers, cooks, and the broader community, but it is also a tribute to his journey to discover what seasonality means.

We’ve got a great episode for you today—Peter shares some stories like those that fill the pages of his book with us, stresses the importance of simplicity and sustainability, and reflects on what the past two years have meant for the restaurant industry. And, as always, we put him to the test in our signature culinary game!

Paid subscribers to the Salt + Spine Substack get access to two featured recipes from What’s Good this week: Susan’s Peach Raspberry Pie (that’s Peter’s wife, Susan), and Peter’s Zhoug. Subscribe today.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"People ask me, 'What's something that's changed a lot in publishing, or what's the most important or hopeful part about publishing?' And my answer is that authors have more control now than they ever have had, but that also means they also have more work to do than they've ever had before." —Monika Woods, literary agent

This is the final episode in our four-part series, Behind the Spine. Over the last four weeks, we've shifted our focus away from the authors to learn more about some of the other talented folks who work behind the scenes on the cookbooks we all love.

You’ve already heard from the recipe testers, the photographers, and the designers—in today’s episode, we’ll talk to the people who make cookbooks possible: the agents and the experts. 

Today, you’ll hear from food writing coach Dianne Jacob, author of Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Restaurant Reviews, Articles, Memoir, Fiction and More, and two literary agents, Rica Allannic and Monika Woods. 

Each of our guests sat down with our producer, Clea Wurster, for a one-on-one interview to get to the bottom of our question: How exactly does a cookbook get published? From proposal to negotiations over the cover design, these experts break it down for us. We’ll learn about the process of actually writing the book and pitching it to an agent or publisher, and our experts will share with us what they think makes for a successful proposal.

Dianne Jacob shared with us the ins and outs of actually sitting down and writing, from breaking up the workload to making the initial decision to writing the cookbook. She says it isn’t for the faint of heart: it’s a lot of work. But, like us, she’s a cookbook lover and has devoted her professional career to helping cookbooks get agents and publishers. Dianne will break down the process of getting published, give advice to authors, and share insights into how the publishing industry has been shifting over the last few years.

Monika Woods is a food writing lover and the founder of Triangle House literary magazine who also works as a literary agent. She shared with us how she views herself in relation to the projects she’s working on, how the agent’s role has shifted with the rise of social media, and the role it’s played in diversifying the publishing landscape. 

Rica Allannic, who has also spent time in professional kitchens, worked as an editor at Clarkson Potter until five years ago when she made the decision to become a literary agent. As an agent, Rica says she has more of an influence on the types of cookbooks that get published. Rica talks with us about the three things a good cookbook pitch needs, advocating for her clients, and the financial realities of publishing deals.

We’ve got a wonderful episode for you today packed with information all about publishing a cookbook, so whether you’re a passionate reader and home cook like us or you’d someday like to publish your own cookbook, this episode has something for you. 

Let’s #TalkCookbooks.

This is the third episode in our 4-part series, Behind the Spine. In this series, we've shifted focus away from the authors to hear from some of the talented folks who work behind the scenes to create the beautiful cookbooks that we all love.  

You’ve already heard from the recipe testers and photographers, and today we’ll hear from the folks who bring that content together into one book: the graphic designers. 

We’ll start with a peek into the mind of Frances Baca – she’ll teach us about typographic details that can set a book apart from the rest, how she begins a new design project, and the characteristics that make cookbook design special. Frances designed her first cookbook at 7-years-old. “Snacks” the homemade cookbook, featured a green construction paper cover with a yarn binding. Suffice it to say, Frances has always known that she wanted to design books, and not just cookbooks, though that’s what we’ll focus on today. She studied design at Rhode Island School of Design, where she learned to pay close attention to the minuscule details that can make books so special. She talks about sticking up for her readers and the unique challenge of designing a cookbook, which she says ought to be a multi-sensory experience. Because cookbooks are also practical books that we use in our day-to-day lives, Frances stresses the importance of accessibility in her work: everything from making the font large enough to read to ensuring the spine lays flat on the countertop – Frances tries to account for it all.

You’ll also hear from the San Francisco-based artist and graphic designer, George McCalman – his work spans different industries, but he focuses mostly on clients in food media and the art world. He opened the doors to his own design studio, McCalman Co. in 2011, where he works on branding for clients and does projects like cookbook design. Prior to starting his own business, he worked for award-winning magazines including ReadyMade, Mother Jones, and Entertainment Weekly. Today, we zoom in on his design process for Black Food, the first publication for Bryant Terry’s imprint, 4 Color Books. George talks to us about flipping the traditional design model upside down, facilitating collaboration between all the folks on the creative team, and how he sees himself as a graphic designer: as a steward of information.

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