"Ottolenghi?" I said to my husband over the holidays. "What makes you think I would be the type to cook Ottolenghi recipes?" What was he thinking, gifting a mother of a toddler -- a woman with her own book in the works, a magazine to publish, and a farm/winery to help run -- a collection of recipes that are known to be meticulous, multi-step, and time-consuming?
Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-born, London-based, world-famous chef of Jewish-Italian and German-Jewish heritage. He celebrates what you'd call "plant-forward" cooking that is primarily vegetarian and can easily be vegan. Ottolenghi himself is "flexitarian" but he has done a lot for the cause of vegetables through his various restaurants, delis, and cookbooks.
I am a cook who considers herself "anti-recipe," as in, I can't be bothered to follow a recipe correctly, especially if it involves using a scale (being American, we don't grow up doing this, although the LA Times might be changing that per their very pertinent, recent update on their approach to recipe writing). Typically, I think of cooking as throwing together ingredients with some seasoning that makes sense, i.e. eggplant with Mediterranean herbs; chickpeas with turmeric. I've been known to throw some garlic in a pan, slightly burn it, add vegetables, toss it with some store-bought pasta and call it a day. However, I do try to cook with seasonality, using things grown on our farm, and we buy organic whenever possible.
The moment I opened Flavour and read the first few pages, I began to see how I could change as a cook.
In Flavour, Ottolenghi and his co-authors introduce four processes, which the everyday home cook can implement in order to deliver more delicious vegetable dishes: Charring, Browning, Infusing, and Ageing. Then, there are four "Pairing" principles: Sweetness, Fat, Acitiy, and Chilli Heat. There's also a section devoted to certain ingredients that he feels are overlooked. Indeed, the recipes are multi-step and time-consuming, but Ottolenghi provides helpful explanations for why all those steps exist. He delves into the Scoville scale, used to measure chilli heat; goes into the science of browning (the Maillard reaction); and pontificates on the uses of nuts and seeds.
I first tried the Rainbow Chard with Tomatoes and Green Olives, probably the easiest recipe in the book. It was a perfect side dish alongside roast chicken and I loved it because I have a beautiful oregano bush in our herb garden, as well as fresh chard in our veggie patch. This one was in the Acidity section.
Then I moved onto the Hasselback Beetroot with Lime Leaf Butter. This was rather involved, and I was nervous as I set out roasting the beets, then slicing them, making a browned, infused butter, making a lime leaf salsa, and whipping a yogurt/cream mixture. The end result was tasty and more importantly to me, I learned something in the cooking process. Both the butter and yogurt/cream were excellent and very versatile leftovers (we spread the yogurt/cream over toast for breakfast). I will confess, I couldn't find our scale so I eyeballed some things, and I also subbed regular limes for kaffir, but it worked out.
There are really a lot of recipes to work through, and I hope that over time I'll actually develop new skills by making them.
My two main critiques of Flavour are that there is no recipe index, so it's actually very hard to find recipes if you aren't sure which section they fall into, and also that there's no discussion of quality produce and how to find it (or what season to look for certain items).
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante’s women and girls are desiring beings; they lust and hunger for knowledge, for men, for independence. Within them, though, is conflict surrounding their insatiable needs for these things and the constraints of Italian society — family, church, poverty, the mob.
Fans of Ferrante’s extravagant, page-turning quartet will absolutely not be disappointed in her latest, The Lying Life of Adults. Like her acclaimed series, this book takes place in Naples and the narrator is a young girl — in this case, one wanting to lose her virginity in the least disgraceful way possible, but at the same time, in love with a boy who is engaged to another.
If you’re *really* obsessive, you may want to find a copy of the 1906 novel “A Woman” by Sibilia Aleramo. Ah Italian classic, this racy novel written from a young girl’s perspective was an influence on Ferrante. I’ve just started it and... hooked.
I’ll say it here, a life dream is to interview Ferrante in person.
Luster A Novel
There are novels driven by plot or by prose; this one stands upon a single character. Her ineptitude at life, her grasping for affection anywhere she can find it (namely at work, which early on in the story gets her fired), her refusal to take herself seriously as an artist, believing her current situation in a roach-infested Bushwick apartment and interest-mounting student debt to be an honest indication of her worth (or lack thereof).
She meets a man, a married man. Their lives, improbably, intertwine. We see that not only is he lusting after her but also after her skin color.
Luster is a debut novel out recently from Raven Leilani. Maybe I was hooked because the book in ways resembles the world I knew while living as a freelance writer in Brooklyn for years (ie, there are various references to the G train). But it undoubtably has wide appeal. I highly recommend picking it up if you’re looking for an emotional read.
Girl, Woman, Other
I am smitten, I’m beholden, I’m terrified I will never write anything this stunning.
This 2019 novel by London based Bernardine Evaristo breaks the mold in numerous ways. Its heroines are women you haven’t seen much in literature, and yet they are people you encounter every day. They teach your children, they are your children, they clean your house, they dance in the nightclub beside you, they transform and defy who society wants them to be, every day.
Innovations in form are flawless here, besides the structure itself: the entire book is written without capital letters or periods framing its sentences.
(You may have heard of “Girl, Woman, Other” from Barack Obama. Apparently it’s one of his recent faves.)
So You Want To Talk About Race
I do want to talk about race. And as a privileged white woman, there are about one thousand ways in which I could be really fucking up whenever I do try to talk about race.
So I picked up Ijeoma Oluo’s 2019 groundbreaking book, which delves into defining racism; microaggressions; the topic of affirmative action; the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and so much more. While it’s written for a U.S. audience, it’s definitely relevant to people in other parts of the world, especially if you identify or pass as white.
In addition to being an authoritative writer and speaker on racism, Oluo is a Black woman, a mother, and someone who comes from a complicated, difficult, economically challenged upbringing. And she is someone who has suffered in numerous ways from insidious racism in American society. She weaves personal anecdotes about her childhood years and motherhood seamlessly into her chapters, backing them up with statistics and research along the way.
I've been involved in activism and I have lived and worked in culturally diverse situations since childhood. But for me, this book is a necessary starting point for having deeper conversations and taking more meaningful action toward dismantling white privilege and supremacy. If you posted a black square on your Instagram a few months back, and if you want to use your privilege and platforms to further the anti-racist cause, please read this book. It’s one hundred percent worth your time. A friend of mine is now reading Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-Racist,” and we are going to meet up and talk about our readings together. It's a conversation. It's a start.
I know this post is a bit different to most of my book and natural wine reviews. But if you look at the recent post by @thecollectress, which points out that the natural wine community can do much better in terms of acknowledging its complicitness in racial inequality, I think you’ll see why it matters so much that people get talking about race.