An Everlasting Meal
Cooking with Economy and Grace
An Everlasting Meal is a modern-day How To Cook A Wolf—a practical, no-nonsense, and economical approach to cooking that eschews recipes for methods that can be remixed and adapted to whatever is on hand. As with her predecessor, M.F.K. Fisher, Adler approaches cooking as if money were tight (or rations were short): cores of cauliflower and stems of parsley are boiled then blended with garlic, oil, and salt into a pesto; leftover roasted vegetables are tucked into a frittata, tossed with pasta, or added to minestrone; cheese rinds get their turn in a pot of beans, and vegetables past their prime become potages or stocks. I’ve come to believe that recipe culture is responsible for making cooking more labor-intensive, expensive, and wasteful; what we need aren’t recipes but models, ways of thinking about cooking that don’t begin or end with a single meal or dish, but which improvise and adapt over the seasons. Adler shows the way.