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Roasted broccoli is dressed up with a nutty, bright pesto of green olives and toasted almonds in this easy, all-season side dish, adapted from Montreal restaurant Elena’s cookbook, Salad Pizza Wine: And Many More Good Things From Elena. If you like, make a double batch of the versatile pesto, which freezes well and can be used to dress pasta, pizza, or any roasted vegetable, from cauliflower to carrots.

Adapted from Salad Pizza Wine: And Many More Good Things From Elena by Janice Tiefenbach, Stephanie Mercier Voyer, Ryan Gray and Marley Sniatowsky. Copyright © 2023 Janice Tiefenbach, Stephanie Mercier Voyer, Ryan Gray, and Marley Sniatowsky. Photographs by Dominique Lafond. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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There’s a moment during every cook’s first milk-braise when it becomes clear that life will never be the same. For me, it happened when the creamy liquid hit the hot skillet, gushing between two double-cut pork chops that had been seared to deep mahogany. My kitchen became thick with the scent of bloomed fennel seed and sweet dairy, and almost immediately, the milk began to simmer, creating a luxurious hot tub in which my pork would become so tender, the first bite would nearly make me lose my balance. 

For my newfound milk-braising bliss, I have Rita Sodi and Jody Williams—who recently released Via Carota, a tome of Italian recipes centered around dishes served at their eponymous West Village trattoria—to thank. Contained within are the secrets of their braciole al latte, pork chops braised in milk, which alerted me to the magic of this technique.

The recipe begins with pork fat—more specifically, with instructions for making strutto, an empyrean paste of pancetta, pork belly, garlic, rosemary, and fennel. You rub down the (previously brined) chops with this mixture, then sear them in a hot skillet on both sides, nestling in a few leaves of lacinato kale. Then in goes the milk, enough to partially drown the chops before you slide the pan into the oven to finish cooking.

Milk-braising relies on lactic acid, which tenderizes meat and inhibits dryness. In an acidic environment, meat pulls in more moisture and softens more quickly. Then there are the sugars present in dairy, which round out the flavors of whatever’s being braised. As the milk cooks, it curdles—a good thing, for once—and in Sodi and Williams’ braciole, it makes a creamy, aromatic gravy for the chops. 

Sodi, who grew up north of Florence, has known about milk-braising for as long as she’s been cooking. People have been braising with milk in Italy and elsewhere for centuries if not longer. “It sounds like something a dairy farmer would do. If you had money, you’d braise in wine with spices,” says Ken Albala, culinary historian and professor at University of the Pacific, who points to recipes for other slow-simmered dishes in early cookbooks. 

Of course, there are many early examples of meat simmered in dairy or dairy-like deputies, as with yogurt-based curries or the coconut-milk-based soups of Thailand. As Harold McGee notes in On Food and Cooking, intentionally curdling milk in cooked dishes dates back as early as the 17th century, when French writer Pierre de Lune described reduced milk being “marbled” by acidic currant juice.

Pork is a good starting point, but as I’ve learned, you can milk-braise just about anything. “You could do pumpkin with cinnamon sticks, or big turnips with juniper,” Williams says, adding that celery root and cabbage take wonderfully to the technique. 

Her only hard and fast rule? The braising liquid must be whole milk; forget cream (too oily) or skim (not enough fat). The meat or vegetable you choose should also be large enough that it won’t overcook before the milk separates, which takes time.

Williams recommends searing the main ingredient before braising it (at 400ºF); you’ll know it’s ready when it has fully surrendered its rigid structure. 

“You’ll want to wreck it,” says Williams.

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Recipe

Via Carota’s Famous Braciole al Latte (Milk-Braised Pork Chops)

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Rita Sodi and Jody Williams cook like Hemingway wrote. With a deft touch and as few straightforward ingredients as possible, the pair composes dishes that are equal parts familiar and revelatory. Cultured butter and salted anchovies. Tonnarelli cacio pepe. A delicate, creamy risotto flavored only with meyer lemon. It’s an approach that stands out in a city with more than a few high-end restaurants known for caviar “bumps,” three-figure cheeseburgers, and a more-is-more approach to dining. 

Take insalata verde, one of the only regular items on the hyper-seasonal menu at their beloved West Village trattoria Via Carota. It is simply a tall pile of greens tossed in tart, well-seasoned vinaigrette, but what’s essentially a jumble of leaves becomes transcendent in Sodi and Williams’ kitchen. Samin Nosrat dubbed the insalata “the best green salad in the world.” 

But Via Carota isn’t only about the food. The wood-accented trattoria manages to feel both intimate and celebratory. Sodi and Williams—married business partners—finish each other’s sentences in Italian and English. Sodi is terse; Williams is effusive. They’ve been at it since 2008, when Williams pulled up a barstool at Sodi’s first restaurant. Today, they run five successful businesses whose throughline is masterful plates of unembellished classics. 

Unfortunately for us New Yorkers who would just as soon eat at Via Carota daily (bank account be damned), wily diners have caught on. Since the restaurant opened in 2014, wait times have pushed three hours. Even on the coldest days, locals and out-of-towners alike happily settle for outdoor seats, where they feast on freshly grilled mushrooms topped with smoked scamorza cheese beneath the heat lamps, their blissful exhales visible in the freezing air. 

Those mushrooms are one of many memorable recipes in the new Via Carota cookbook containing 140 dishes, from carciofi fritti to sugo di carne to the restaurant’s cult-favorite hand-chopped svizzerina, a hybrid of steak tartare and an exceptionally tender filet mignon. 

I sat down with Williams and Sodi to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on their new cookbook and to hear what’s next for their growing restaurant empire.

Ella Quittner: You begin the cookbook with a dedication, the Italian phrase forza, which I know usually means something like, “you can do it!” or “you’ve got it!” Why? 

Rita Sodi: It’s a word my mother always told me. Anything, you can do it—forza, forza. When Jody joined the family she started to use the word too.  

Jody Williams: For me it’s encouragement. When you are struggling, when you are tired, when you are going uphill, forza. We got it. These last few years? Forza, everybody—keep going. We use it so much, it’s almost like a sigh. 

EQ: You joke in the book about how you opened Via Carota so you could actually see each other. What was that time in your lives like? 

JW: It’s true! With Rita at I Sodi, me at Buvette, and early days—placing orders in the middle of the night, getting up to clean and do it all—we joked we should see each other. And we looked down the block and thought, maybe we should do something there. Rita was like, forza, let’s do it, and we started figuring it out without a big plan. 

RS: We knew it would be a place near our other restaurants. We really didn’t know the name yet. Everything came together naturally without thinking too much.

JW: That’s the way we go about all of the restaurants. We need to get inside, see where the light comes in, and understand the space. The space will tell us where things go and what things should be. It reveals itself. We cook how we want to eat and the way we like to eat is to go out and eat mostly sides, which are usually relegated to this sad little corner. We want the kale, and the potatoes, and the turnips, and skip the mains. 

RS: People can choose how they eat. It’s not the straightforward “you need to have a pasta, then a main course.” It’s freedom from the classic Italian way to eat. 

EQ: Then you opened Via Carota. Your other two restaurants at the time, I Sodi and Buvette, were quite popular—but did you anticipate what a smash success you’d have? In 2018, The New Yorker food critic Hannah Goldfield called it “New York’s Most Perfect Restaurant.” 

JW: Never! We were totally surprised at the success, and appreciative.

RS: When we build something, we don’t think about the success—we think about making it somewhere we would go every day. And we’ve been lucky, very lucky. 

(Williams knocks on the wooden table.)

EQ: It’s regulars from the community, but it’s also everyone else! People travel from other states to visit. 

JW: There’s something soulful that happens at Via Carota, that [Goldfield] wrote about. It’s something we couldn’t buy or create. It’s just nurtured, grown. We don’t make it precious, we don’t make it about us. Deep down if you stripped away all the things and you looked into Rita or me, as people, there’s this desire to give, to share. This thing of, if we have something, you break it in half to give a piece to somebody else. 

EQ: The cookbook reflects that beautifully. And like the restaurant menu, it adheres to the seasons—a section for each one, more or less. As chefs, or as home cooks, is there ever a time you would break that rule and cook something out of season? 

RS: No. No way.

JW: Rita is like, “Tomato season starts in almost July.” Everyone has tomatoes around June 15, but she’s like, “We’re gonna wait.” You just listen and respect [the produce]. Seasonality just makes sense; it was never a gimmick or a trend. 

RS: There is a reason why seasons have different vegetables. The weather makes those vegetables. Your body needs something different depending on the weather. 

JW: Rita did want to try a wedge salad at home [out of season]. She picked up a head of iceberg lettuce. And she really wanted to try it. 

(Williams laughs so hard, she can’t continue.)

RS: Never again. I was like, “So what do we do now?” And Jody was like, “Oh no. You chose the worst one. We cannot do this.”

JW: She chose the one iceberg lettuce head that was empty in the middle. So instead, we broke it up by hand and threw it into pinzimonio. 

EQ: Many dishes in the cookbook have memories attached to them. Which is most meaningful to each of you? 

JW: I would say the coniglio fritto. There was this moment when I went to Rita’s home on Via Carota, just outside of Florence, when her mother died, and there was not a lot of conversation, but there were a lot of people. And the butcher came up the hill and dropped off meat. And everybody came and dropped stuff off; everybody just knew what to do, and what to cook. I was the prep cook and the sous chef. Out came this blue and white tablecloth that Rita was rolling out tortelli di patate on, cutting mountains of veg so small to make sugo di carne, and her sister fried up rabbit. And you, [Rita], told stories about your mother through all this, and it was beautiful. Her mother could have three people or 50 people at lunch depending on who was around, so sometimes one or two rabbits wouldn’t be enough, so she would grab a loaf of bread, chop it up, dredge it, season it, and fry it together with rabbit. So that’s what sits today under the rabbit leg. It’s so delicious and such a surprise. Moments like that are when you really learn to cook. 

RS: Mine is the ribollita. In wintertime, people gather more than in other seasons, lingering by the table. It’s this thick vegetable dish that’s with you, warming you, giving you this comfort. It’s one of my favorite memories, the ribollita.

EQ: The book is more than 400 pages. Did you have trouble deciding what to include? Did any recipes not make the cut?

JW: Sure. Yes. And we wanted to do some new things too, but we left it to the heart and soul. I kept wanting to steal some I Sodi recipes, but I did not get the I Sodi steak tartare in the book. 

EQ: In the spotlight on truffles on p. 320, you write that your truffle connection is a special vendor who brings a basket of black truffles and a basket of white truffles, which Rita sorts through, sniffing, and touching. It’s such a beautiful image. What is Rita looking for? What qualities make an ideal truffle, for those of us picking them blind?

RS: The smell itself of the truffle—the truffles all smell, but I’m looking for the smell I like. And you want them to be firm, so you can slice them really nice and thin. You don’t want them to be wet inside, with soft spots [you can feel]. 

EQ: Water gets its own section in your book as an ingredient. Much has been written about the famous Via Carota insalata verde vinaigrette. You soak frutti di mare before deep frying. The potatoes in the patate fritti. What are some other ways water is important in the cookbook? 

JW: [For example], the lemon risotto is water-based. If we used chicken stock, that would be a chicken lemon risotto. With water, lemon juice, and a few leaves of basil, you have made its own little stock. 

RS: And for cooking the pasta, water is essential. Water is an ingredient!

JW: Water is an ingredient, but it’s also a purifier; by just allowing and being comfortable, you’re able to let other things in a dish stand out because you’re not crowding it or clouding it. It’s like what’s said about writing: take away until you can take no more.

EQ: If you were to curate a winter dinner menu for a home cook from the book, what dishes work well together? 

JW: The easiest thing [to start] is piles of pinzimonio and olive oil. Add watercress and salad leaves, then you have your celery, carrots, puntarelle, maybe artichokes, put in a boiled egg—elaborate on pinzimonio. And little bruschettas are nice, with gorgonzola and pear, or with ricotta and pear. 

RS: And truffles, if you can get them, will be a good addition to any dish. Besides pasta, they’re good on cheese, eggs, more or less a lot of vegetables too.

JW: And when entertaining, or even if it’s just Rita and I, we will spend all day at the table. At one end of the table is what awaits you next. And the other end is what you’re eating now. Over there might be nuts, dried fruit, cookies, and in front of us we’re having salami and cheeses. So I would crowd the table with things easily prepared. Have an artichoke dish come out. Have the carrot dish. Have a whole series of vegetables. 

RS: And chicory.

JW: And then go for a big bowl of pasta. Maybe a risotto, though you have to stand and stir, so that’s a little challenging. Or maybe you’re going to pull something out from the oven, like the rigatina con cipolline, or the braciole al latte with a bunch of kale ripped up underneath. And then have the next thing waiting! Like a dolce, or cheese. Give more reasons to hang out and drink. 

This interview was condensed and lightly edited.

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This story is brought to you by SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe celebrating our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every two months, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.

After making the decision to become vegan, Hannah Che nearly cried when she visited China’s vegetarian restaurants. Not only were establishments that served plant-based food plentiful in all the Chinese cities she visited, but the dishes she ate were also bursting with flavor. She knew she wanted to learn more about the country’s long and rich history of vegetarian cooking. So, in 2019, Che enrolled at a culinary school in Guangzhou, a city in southern China famed for its fresh and delicate Cantonese cuisine. The experience ended up being a pivotal stage of her plant-based journey, by unveiling the Buddhist ethos that underpins much of the country’s vegetarian cooking and teaching her simple techniques to make the flavors of vegetables shine. Now, she’s sharing her learnings with the world in her debut cookbook: The Vegan Chinese Kitchen: Recipes and Modern Stories from a Thousand-Year-Old Tradition.

We sat down with Che to chat about what she considers to be myths and misconceptions about Chinese cooking, why she embraces mock meats, and what her teachers in Guangzhou taught her about the art of plant-based cooking.

The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you make the decision to become vegan?

In sophomore year of college, I read the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I was living in a dorm, eating college cafeteria food, and was just really disconnected from anything to do with cooking. That book made me aware of the larger picture behind the way our food is produced, especially animal products. Foer does a really good job, I think, of not being judgmental or condemning the way we eat, but just explaining how our food systems wound up intertwined with factory farming—government-subsidized, profit-driven food production that has no concern for our health or for treating animals humanely. I was at home over summer break, and the moment I finished this book, I was like, “Mom, I think I need to become vegan.”

What drew you to cooking plant-based Chinese food specifically?

My perception of Chinese food when I was growing up was very confined to what my parents cooked. After I spent time traveling in China, I realized there were so many vegetarian restaurants in all the cities I visited. The dishes were so beautifully presented and so creative, and I wanted to find out more about the philosophy and history behind them. I learned that a lot of vegetarian dishes in China have ancient roots in temple cuisine—food that monks make and serve in monasteries, including for visitors. The dishes are free of animal products because not inflicting harm on any living creatures is an important Buddhist ethos. It’s very much a compassionate way of eating.

In your opinion, what is the biggest misconception many Americans have about vegan Chinese food?

I think it’s misrepresented in two ways. The first is that you can’t find vegan dishes when going out to eat in China. I think that perception comes from the fact that most popular Chinese takeout dishes in the West are meat-heavy. A lot of people aren’t aware of the fact that most Chinese families’ home cooking is very much vegetable-centered. The word for dishes is cài, which actually means vegetables. The second misconception is that vegan Chinese dishes are just “regular” dishes that you take the meat out of.

It’s not that you’re making vegan versions of meat dishes—because many of the dishes in your book never had meat to begin with, right?

Yes. From the food of Sichuan to the food of Shanghai, there are so many inherently plant-based dishes in these regional cuisines. I really don’t like the word “veganize” because the connotation is that you’re like this outsider coming in and taking a traditional dish and altering it because the original way wasn’t good enough. I don’t think about vegan Chinese food as veganizing Chinese dishes. It’s more just discovering the abundance of vegetarian cooking that already exists.

Why did you decide to train at the Guangzhou Vegetarian Culinary Institute in China in 2019?

Cantonese cuisine, just by nature of the climate in Guangdong Province, has such an abundance of fresh produce and traditionally uses a lot of leafy greens. I’m not Cantonese—my parents are from northern China—so going to Guangzhou and learning from the chefs there was very humbling for me. They taught me a different way of cooking that is very, very simple. You’re cooking with just one wok, and the variables really are just the types of fresh vegetables that you’re using and the aromatics, whether it’s slices of ginger or dried chiles.

What kind of Chinese dishes are your go-tos when you eat out at restaurants?

My go-to is usually an eggplant dish, or a stir-fry, or something with tofu. A lot of the time, vegetable dishes are automatically vegan because, for the most part, Chinese cuisine doesn’t utilize a lot of dairy. Of course, be mindful that sometimes vegetable dishes are made with chicken broth or lard.

Mock meats appear in a lot of plant-based Chinese dishes. How do you feel about them?

There’s a kind of negative perception of imitation meat among a lot of vegans in the U.S. Many people feel, “I don’t want to eat animal products, so why would I go out and eat vegan meats?” But that kind of thinking isn’t a very generous way of thinking about the food that we eat. These products are mostly for non-vegetarians who are just trying to reduce their intake of animal products. You have these very familiar textures that allow people to cook what they cook usually, but with substitute products. If they get anyone to eat less meat, I’m all for that.

What are the cultural connotations of mock meats in China’s vegetarian tradition? 

Along the same lines as new imitation meats today, Chinese mock meats also evolved as a way to be more inclusive at the table. In Chinese culture, dishes can be highly symbolic—chicken or fish might represent prosperity or good luck. Monasteries want guests to feel welcome and honored, and so present them with elaborate and symbolic dishes that guests would be familiar with, just without the animal products. This tradition of mock meats is being continued in the contemporary restaurant world. Chefs are doing really creative things with plant proteins like tofu, too, which I think is influenced by the parallel growing market of, like, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The perception of meat substitutes is changing. There’s this interesting co-mingling of the old with the new.

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“Ai-ya, I didn’t think my daughter would become one of those hippie types,” I overheard my mother say to a friend over the phone. I had decided to go vegan my junior year of college, and determined to learn to cook for myself, I looked up meal plans and recipes on Pinterest, followed popular bloggers, bought cookbooks, and stocked my pantry with lentils and chickpea pasta. I packed overnight oats to school and invited friends over to my tiny Houston apartment to make vegan pizza and grain bowls on weekends. I even started a recipe blog, posting photos on Instagram of the meals I made.

But it was different back at home, sitting at our scratched walnut table as my mom busied about the kitchen, preparing food for the holidays. My parents cooked mostly Chinese meals—a spread of shared dishes to go with rice—and they couldn’t understand why I would forgo a special dish of expensive seafood, or a stir-fry that had ground meat or a few pork slivers. “Just pick around and eat the vegetables, at least you still get the flavor from the meat,” my mom offered.

Over the winter break, I was determined to convert my family to a plant-based diet. I talked about the horrors of factory farming and the environmental footprint of meat and dairy. I pulled out my arsenal of recipes: Thai curries, walnut-meat tacos, creamy cashew pastas, and quinoa burgers. My siblings liked them well enough, but my dad gingerly bit into one patty and refused to eat the rest. “I’m cooking duck for dinner,” he announced. For Lunar New Year, our family gathered to make pork dumplings, as we did every holiday. It was my favorite tradition, and I usually helped make the filling, but this time, my dad looked up as he kneaded dough and saw me watching from the side.

“Rongrong, you aren’t participating?” he asked. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that my decision to go vegan wasn’t just about food or even a personal choice. My parents were immigrants; food was the way they taught us about our roots; certain dishes were central not just to my family’s memories, but also connected us to a lifetime of people and occasions and places and times that went before and beyond me. I wondered if my commitment to eat more sustainably meant I was turning away from my culture. Talking to my peers, I realized I wasn’t alone in these fears. It’s impossible to separate who we are from what we eat, and animal products are deeply ingrained in the food traditions of most cultures. How do you remove yourself from these traditions without a fundamental sense of loss?

But as I tried re-creating my favorite childhood dishes, I began to realize how much of Chinese food was inherently plant-based. And I learned that vegetarian and vegan cooking is its own cuisine in China, a rich tradition that had existed for more than 2,000 years, motivated by the Buddhist tenets of compassionate eating. On my trip to visit relatives in China one summer, I ate at temple restaurants, plant-based lunch canteens, and buffets, astonished by the flavor and ingenuity of dishes like clay pot tofu skin and delicate layered soups made with mung beans and shiitake mushrooms. This cuisine was beautiful, alluringly delicious, and rich in history—I wanted to learn more.

So, just a few months after I finished graduate school, I packed my bags and moved to China to go to culinary school. For the past few years, my journey to learn Chinese vegetarian cooking has taken me back to my parents’ hometown in Harbin, to Shanghai, to Chengdu, to Suzhou, and to Guangzhou,  where I trained as a chef at the only professional vegetarian cooking program in the country. It’s taken me to Taiwan, where I lived for a year, cooking and eating and learning from the vibrant Buddhist community who have preserved a microcosm of regional Chinese vegetarian traditions and developed new ones of their own. I’ve talked to old artisans who have been making tofu and soy milk skin for their entire lives, and have called up my parents to ask about our own family’s history, learning stories I was never interested in hearing before. Over the years, my dad has decided to cut most of the meat out of his diet for health reasons, and he’s always asking when I’m coming home so he can eat the food I cook. And unsurprisingly, my knowledge of Chinese culture has deepened. Becoming vegan didn’t alienate me from my heritage, as I’d feared, but actually motivated me to understand it even more.

In Chinese, 素 su translates literally to “vegan” or “vegetarian,” and you’ll see it on menus indicating dishes free of meat. But su also means simple, quiet and plainly unadorned, the elemental nature or essence of something larger. I began this book thinking I’d write about vegan recipes, but along the way I realized that this kind of cooking was actually at the heart of Chinese cuisine: the inventive transformation of frugal ingredients like vegetables, tofu, and grains into a breathtaking variety of simple and delicious dishes. China has eight major regional cuisines, each influenced by wildly different climates, agriculture, geography, and history, and each of the country’s twenty-three provinces has its own local vegetarian traditions and dishes. It’s impossible to cover them all, so instead I’ve drawn from my own experiences—this is a subjective compilation of my favorites.

Reprinted with permission from The Vegan Chinese Kitchen by Hannah Che © 2022. Photographs by Hannah Che. Published by Clarkson Potter, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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Featured on the cover of Jess Damuck’s buzzy new cookbook, Salad Freak, is a plate of satsuma mandarin segments topped with oozy burrata and yellow-green olive oil. To the ordinary cook, a jumble of fruit and cheese may not register as salad—but to Damuck, it epitomizes what salad should be.

Like Plato contemplating the chair or the table, Damuck has spent years asking herself what makes a salad a salad. Her conclusion? There are no hard-and-fast rules: Salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is fair game; so are salad-topped pizzas, egg salad sandwiches, and gazpacho. We sat down with Damuck to learn how she freed herself from salad orthodoxy—and how the rest of us might do the same. 

SAVEUR: You write, “It’s easy to get lost in making a salad if you let yourself.” Explain. 

Damuck: I experience cooking burnout as much as everybody else. But If i can throw something together from the fridge, it’s going to feel better than ordering takeout. When I follow my own advice and slow down for a minute, you know, to wash a head of lettuce and zone out, I notice how beautiful the vegetables are. I appreciate what I’m eating more. I’ve been searching forever for the right meditation or yoga practice, but if I prepare and eat my food mindfully, that can be soothing and relaxing enough. 

In the book, you share styling tips that make salads really pop on the plate. What are a few you keep coming back to? 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about food styling came from Jonathan Lovekin, who shot all of Ottolenghi’s books. He saw I was nervously fussing with the food trying to get it to look perfect, and he said, “Back away!” And he was right: However the food falls, that’s how it’s usually prettiest.

I also think a lot about shapes and colors in a salad. I choose these deliberately. But beyond visuals, there’s mouthfeel, there’s texture. Think about how you want to cut each ingredient. If a cucumber is sliced on the bias, it may look great, but maybe what you want is more of a crunch. 

Other details that only take a second but make a world of difference are having plenty of fresh herbs on hand to garnish and add freshness, and swooshing a bit of dressing around the side of the bowl. I can’t help it—it looks so much nicer than a blob. 

What salad ingredients are you stoked about right now?

I recently went to Gem restaurant in New York City. The chef, Flynn McGarry, is 23, and he made, like, four dishes with lovage. Lovage! No highly trained, 50-something chef would do something like that: Lovage has a super intense celery flavor and doesn’t go with everything. But it was great to rediscover, and I’ve been using the green, leafy herb a lot since that meal.

Chili crisp and salsa macha have also made their way onto everything I’m eating lately, and tomatoes have not escaped that. The heat and warmth and crunch take vegetables to the next level. 

Are there essential tools every cook should have on hand for salad making?

People always ask me, “Do I really need a salad spinner?” And the answer is yes. I find washing lettuce relaxing sometimes, but there’s only so much time in the day. Dressing won’t adhere to wet leaves. 

Another thing I’ve come to love is the OXO produce keeper. I try to wash lettuces and greens as soon as I’m home from the farmers market, and they last forever in that thing. It also keeps stuff from getting squished, which happens a lot in my packed fridge. 

Lastly, I use my Japanese mandolin often. It’s great for making cucumber matchsticks or carrot ribbons. It can be scary at first, but you don’t have to go fast. Build up confidence and familiarity first. You’ll probably slice your finger at some point, but don’t be afraid to go back and use it again. 

You cut your teeth in the food world working under Martha Stewart. What was that like?

As an intern, I was responsible for making Martha lunch. It was pretty stressful. I called it the three-hour salad because I’d spend half my day figuring out what to make. She wanted “clean,” fresh food, and something different every day. Everything became a salad. My brain became a filing cabinet of her preferences. I always enjoyed hyperlocal and seasonal food, but this idea of a one-bowl complete meal really developed during that time. I was eating her leftovers—and feeling great, feeling healthy. 

Are there aspects of Martha’s vision that you chose to reject or deviate from?

Perfection is Martha’s style. Specific china for every event. Cookies cut to precise dimensions. I had to let go of that level of attention to detail. It didn’t feel like home but rather like a wedding—beautiful, special, amazing—but not comfortable. People don’t feel cozy with three forks beside their plate. So instead of worrying about those things, I think about other details: the playlist, the lighting, the right mix of people. It’s not aspirational. It’s real. 

Last question. Imagine you’re flying economy and you’re faced with that dreaded plastic container filled with iceberg lettuce. The dressing is a squirt packet of ranch. What do you do? 

Oh jeez. First off, I guess I’d ask if they have any olive oil and vinegar. I don’t do it all the time, but I like to pack my own meals or at the very least keep some good sea salt in my bag. It makes anything taste better. I try not to be too much of a snob, but one thing I avoid at all costs is the orange-styrofoam tomato. I’d push that to the side, because it’s a crime against humanity, and eat the salad, I guess. Sometimes you’re just hungry!

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This excerpt is brought to you by SAVEUR Cookbook Club, our passionate community of food-loving readers from around the globe that celebrates our favorite authors and recipes. Join us as we cook through a new book every two months, and share your food pics and vids on social media with the hashtags #SAVEURCookbookClub and #EatTheWorld.  

It took me a long time to just lean into looking at what I love doing as a form of mindfulness. A quick glance at my bookshelf reveals an almost obsessive interest in self-improvement, spirituality, mindfulness, and meditation. In my intense search for finding the thing that was going to work for me, I found myself fixated on everything I wasn’t doing yet—I was trying too hard.

It’s easy to get lost in making a salad if you let yourself. The prep of washing and sorting lettuce leaves is about as meditative as it gets. Unfortunately, a lot of food media today doesn’t focus on the benefits of spending time preparing good food; it’s all about hacks, shortcuts, and how to get something onto the table with as little effort as possible.

My salads aren’t difficult or time-consuming, but they are designed to be made with intention. What I’m suggesting here isn’t exactly salads as self-care, but also, it is. I’m not saying you’ll have a spiritual experience, but I do hope you’ll be able to focus on each task and let the weight of the day and any other little things in your mind go.

Take a deep breath before you start chopping. Take another look at the spectacular colorful veins of that Swiss chard before you tear it apart. More than anything, acknowledge that you’re making an effort for yourself and maybe someone else and feel good about that.

Excerpted from Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession, by Jess Damuck, published by Abrams. Text © 2022 by Jess Damuck.

Recipes

Jess Damuck’s Caesar Salad Pizza

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Snoop’s BBQ Chicken Cobb Salad with All the Good Stuff

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The post How to Make a Salad—Mindfully appeared first on Saveur.

It was partly by using food to teach seventh-graders about the Shoah and trying to communicate the deeper ways to understand loss, memory, and a retained culture that I began to appreciate how much the cuisines of Black and Jewish Diasporas had in common. Civilizations without borders re-create themselves after tragedies and traumas, and they migrate and mutate in response. Just as important, and maybe more important, as what their canons dictate is how their constructs grow and push the culture and its cuisines forward. In particular, the legacies of African Atlantic/African American and Ashkenazi Jewish cultures in the West are important, given the rich dialogue generated by two hundred or so years of common concerns and evolving cooperation and conflict in the United States. Above all is the familiar guest, trauma, and its best friend, want.

Yiddish foodways are extremely beautiful because there are so many similar issues with their cultural interpretation of African American foodways. They even have the same kind of language transmission—the recipes were passed to the next generation in a terse vernacular that bridged ancient homelands and new realities. (Yiddish wasn’t “bad German,” and AAVE [African American Vernacular English, or Ebonics] wasn’t bad English; they were languages born in their place to facilitate specific communal transitions.) In my opinion, people ascribe way too much to ingenuity and poverty; “that’s all they had” gets said, and then a shrug, a look, a dismissal. No, that’s not enough. What does it mean to see these others and how they eat and know what you eat and what you have to have and translate everything in a vernacular born in exile, mixing ideas from all the places you’ve been?

What’s most galling is that we’ve generally missed the mood that looms over both Yiddish food and soul food traditions. They are exploited and extolled for their comfort but demeaned for their lack of health benefits or damned as irrelevant. There is a familiar feeling of shame among some: Yiddish food was pre-Shoah/ Holocaust food, the food of balobostehs (homemakers) and weakened, starving, pious yeshivah boys compared with Newish-Jewish (Israeli-Mediterranean food—the food of the sabra). Soul food was that of ignorant “slaves” fed a diet to match their bonds in other ways, something to keep them in physical chains that did not require shackles. One recent news story spoke of an employee at Ikea who was offended that his manager served watermelon because “the masters gave that to the slaves,” a complete fallacy.

In both cases, the foods of Ashkenazi Jews and Black Americans have been maligned and marginalized right along with the people. If the food was corrupt, so was the beleaguered, antiquated way of life we no longer have a taste for because it embarrasses us. However, these were survivors; they were hyperaware of the seasons, frugal and attentive, and most of all, they used their food to show transgenerational love. The idea that something somehow lacked in their gastronomy or worldview came from without, not from within. When people feel that connection between Jews and Blacks in America, it’s not just in struggle, or in satire or survival; it’s in the very soul of the cooking itself.

When people ask me about my favorite “Jewish” food, I say kasha varnishkes. I understand it. It’s the best of the earth in one bowl. The barley that people saw in fields, the pasta it took G-d and miller and mother to partner in making, and onions—the soul of any soul cuisine, brown and sweet and savory and present—are all in one dish with butter or schmaltz and salt. What more do you need? I see all the people and the feelings they had about their food and their position in life, their pride despite their degradation, and the sense of relief when they got to enjoy just one more thing in life.

As I write this bricolage narrative, it becomes clear that a linear account of Jews and Blacks eating and cooking together or for each other is thorny because we are so often oppressed and marginalized and pushed to the edges. So much is missing, but worse yet, the generations descended from the survivors sometimes do not know how to feel about or comprehend their Ancestors. And yet, our job is to bridge the chasms and feel our way back to a place where we can see beyond imposed lenses that regard us as earth-shatteringly oppositional and then to seek out history. Those accounts, where we find common ground in spirit and purpose, do exist. Food was where these common Ancestors of mine tucked away secrets, hopes, and tactics for overcoming being forgotten and telling a story in which all humans could see themselves reflected.

Excerpted from KOSHERSOUL by Michael Twitty. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, AMISTAD, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2022 by Michael Twitty.

Recipe

Kosher Cachopa

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Kwame Onwuachi has been busy. In June he was on Late Night With Seth Meyers cooking an admirably legit crawfish boil—corn on the cob, newspapered tables, wriggly critters, and all. A month prior, he published his first cookbook, My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef (our current Saveur Cookbook Club pick), which came on the heels of his award-winning novel, Notes From a Young Black Chef, out just a year before that. 

Between books, Onwuachi has managed to release a nail polish line with ORLY, host the James Beard Awards in Chicago, and seal the deal on a biopic portraying his life. So when a rare window opened up in Onwuachi’s agenda, we pounced at the opportunity to take stock of his trajectory. Here’s our interview.

What inspired you to write this book?

It’s every chef’s dream to have their own cookbook. I wanted to document the dishes that make me who I am, that tell my version of America. Everyone who grew up here has their own version, and this is mine. 

What surprised you most in your research?

The pantry. I guess I hadn’t realized that to do these recipes right, you need an arsenal of sauces and spices and marinades. That’s why there’s a section on them in the front of the book. 

What sauce or spice blend do you reach for the most?

My magic bullet is ginger-garlic purée. It goes good in everything. I use it to bump up a lot of dishes. You can rub it on a steak and sear it and have yourself a good time. The other thing is house spice, my blend that’s a match made in heaven. It’s my mom’s recipe. We grew up using it in lieu of salt. 

How did you choose what recipes to include?

I just listed everything I grew up eating and then wrote the recipes the way I would make them.  My father is Nigerian and Jamaican and my mother Trinidadian and Creole, so there was a lot to work with. 

What dishes in the book do you cook over and over?

Jerk chicken. It’s in-depth but it’s the most flavorful thing ever. When you make really good jerk, you understand why it’s a worldwide phenomenon. My recipe is all about attention to detail: the brine, the homemade marinade, pimento wood—these are the things that can make jerk extremely special. 

What ingredient are you most excited about right now?

Honestly? Rice [laughing]. I want it with every meal. White or joloff or fried or Mexican—rice is just it for me.

Beyond your family, what influences your cooking? 

I’m still figuring that out. I recently got into acting. I used to act when i was a kid, but I forgot about it. I’m taking acting classes to see what’ll happen. Acting—why not? We are humans on this earth for a short time. Traveling has also been important.

Tell me more about that. 

Food can be a love language. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You can connect with someone and learn about their culture and who they are by sitting down and breaking bread. I remember this lady in Thailand. I was walking past, and she was eating these clams with some type of sauce and I wanted to ask what was in them. She didn’t speak English but just offered her food to me. Sometimes you don’t need language.

Your book illustrates the extraordinary range and richness of Black food. Do you feel that anything is missing from the current conversation?

You can’t talk about American cuisine without talking about West African food. When enslaved people came here, their food came with them. American food is West African food. Jollof rice became jambalaya. Suya became barbecue. Watermelon, rice, bene seeds, okra—all of these ingredients came straight from West Africa and are the fabric of America’s culinary DNA.

Why are so many Americans unaware of those roots?

A lot of erasure of Black identity was intentional. But this book is helping to bring these things back to life.

What’s next for you, chef?

I’ve got a movie coming out. A movie about my life that starts filming soon. And you can find me in August at The Family Reunion, a Black food festival in Middleburg, Virginia.

The post The Ingredient Kwame Onwuachi Can’t Stop Cooking With Is in Your Pantry Right Now appeared first on Saveur.

At 86, Jacques Pépin still speaks with an unmistakable French accent that makes the chef immediately recognizable.

“But I am the most quintessential American chef,” he asserts, citing his long tenure in the U.S., his focus on a wide range of culinary influences beyond traditional French culinary training, and his stint at Howard Johnson’s, a beacon of mid-century American dining. For Pépin, his journey has cemented his place in American culture: a culinary icon who has remained accessible through the intimacy of his role as chef instructor and master of technique. 

Throughout his career, Pépin has shared his vast culinary knowledge through multiple mediums. He has released more than 30 books, starred in various instructional television shows through a longstanding partnership with PBS, and even filmed a series of videos in his Connecticut kitchen for Facebook and Instagram. But Jacques Pépin’s most comprehensive cooking primer is perhaps the 685-page Essential Pépin: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food. First published in 2011, the volume compiles many recipes from across his wide-ranging source material.

Although Pépin started working in professional kitchens at 14, his interests have always been diverse. At one point, he thought he might teach a literary subject at Columbia University, where he earned a graduate degree in French literature, but he “went back to cooking, what I know the best, and what I’m the best at,” he says. Through the connections he made while working at New York’s Le Pavillon (one of the top French restaurants in the world during its time), he later went upstate and taught private cooking classes in the Catskills. To reconnect with his love of writing, he also penned a food column for Helen McCollough, food editor of House Beautiful, who had become a good friend and introduced him to James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne. 

In 1974, Pépin suffered a bad car accident. After recovering, he found that teaching was more palatable than spending hours behind a restaurant stove. By the mid-70s, cookware shops equipped with kitchens were popping up all over the U.S., so Pépin began touring and teaching, all the while hosting a lecture series at Boston University. Then PBS came calling, and his career reached a new stratosphere; suddenly, Pépin graced TV screens across America on a weekly basis, cheerfully deboning a fish alongside Julia Child or showing his daughter Claudine how to make rice paper rolls with avocado and sun-dried tomatoes. His skill is undeniable on camera; his knife moves deftly as if an extension of his fingers, while he calmly chats with a co-host or instructs viewers.

Pépin stresses that, as a teacher, he is not so much patient as he is pragmatic. His practical approach to technique shines brightly across his canon of work—from his television series Jacques Pépin: Fast Food My Way, to the cookbook The Art of Cooking which includes 1500 images, to Facebook videos he shared during the pandemic demonstrating how to make eggs en cocotte and butter roses in step-by-step fashion. His explanations are easy to follow, and his careful guidance helps readers and viewers believe that they, too, can master the recipe or technique.

Pépin himself learned to cook by visual instruction, repetition, and a hefty dose of osmosis during his formative years. He grew up in the family’s restaurant and began his career with a formal apprenticeship at Le Grand Hôtel de l’Europe in Bourg-en-Bresse. He later joined the military, where his cooking skills were lauded and he even cooked for heads of state. At every step of his journey, Pépin gleaned culinary techniques and practiced different preparation styles. The education was immersive, and his resulting understanding of different ways to learn has made him not only a beloved teacher, but also an innovator in a culture hungry for…well, culture. 

When Essential Pépin debuted in 2011, Bonnie Benwick of The Washington Post wrote: “This cookbook is not all dacquoise and cocottes and foie gras in aspic. The [then] almost-76-year-old master was an early adapter of good food prepared fast. His inventiveness outshines any fix-it-quick, Food Network fodder I’ve seen.”

Dishes such as shrimp-cilantro pizza, cucumbers in cream, and eggs with brown butter are all “fast and easy” recipes—ready to eat in the time it takes to bake a frozen pizza—yet they’re still real food, with a dash of panache. 

In Pépin’s eyes, he still has work to do. There is always more to teach and more people with whom to share his knowledge. He has always been willing to try something new, and that impulse remains. 

Most recently, Pépin shared subscription-based videos on the new platform Rouxbe, which offers—among other expert-led courses—exclusive content from Pépin, grading from industry experts, and certification. Pépin’s proceeds will go toward The Jacques Pépin Foundation, a non-profit he launched in 2016 to support community kitchens that offer free skills and culinary training to adults with high barriers to employment, including previous incarceration, homelessness, and lack of work history. 

Pépin’s work with both Rouxbe and the Foundation are simply two more ways for the chef to continue teaching essential skills that can bring his students a lifetime of joy in the kitchen. And yet, as much as he cooks in his day-to-day work, he still loves preparing food as much as ever.

“I basically am a glutton, and I am hungry every day, and that’s why I cook,” Pépin says with a twinkle in his eye. “But there is something soothing, also, in the cooking process—of cooking with friends, eventually sitting down and sharing the food. You know, that is an extraordinary thing.” And with Essential Pépin, there are more than 700 recipes to inspire that daily practice—a lifetime of apprenticeship under the simple guise of putting dinner on the table, one recipe at a time. Extraordinary indeed.

Braised Green Peas with Egg Yolks

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