If You Love To Eat, You Can Learn To Cook

If you ate in the downstairs dining room at Chez Panisse on a recent Saturday, you would have been served seared sea scallops with wild fennel, prosciutto and preserved lemon; morel mushroom ravioli in broth with sweet peas and sage; Elliot Ranch lamb roasted in the fireplace with artichokes and potatoes; spinach with béarnaise sauce; and for dessert, a strawberry and rhubarb tartlet. 

The meal would set you back $125, which is why, at age 19, Samin Nosrat and a friend — even with lower prices a decade or so ago — saved for months to eat at Alice Waters’ revered restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. 

It was a grand experience, she told a crowd at The White Hart in Salisbury on Friday, April 28.

When a wait person asked Nosrat if she would like anything with her chocolate soufflé, she asked for a glass of cold milk. Chocolate and milk go together, she told the audience. While not everyone would have ordered milk at a restaurant of international renown and remarkable influence, everyone in the room was with her.

This woman is an enthusiastic eater, inspiring writer and, well, an appealing person. She was there to talk about her book: “Salt Fat Acid Heat” — mastering the elements of good cooking. I bought a copy, of course, and after signing it she ran to my spot in the audience and made a correction on page 29 (a matter of confusing osmosis with diffusion). No waiting on the next edition here. 

Nosrat, born in Iran, came to the United States in 1976 with her family. She is zaftig, open, jolly, smart, and she knows a lot about food and how cooking works, from keeping onion rings from slithering out of their crispy coating (lower the heat, she says) to the chemistry behind salting properly and the intricacies of butter and flour at the molecular level.

After that meal at Chez Panisse, she asked Waters for a job, which is how she obtained work busing tables there. In no time she volunteered for scutwork in the kitchen, and not long after she was hired to dice cucumbers and other ordinary tasks vital to grand eating. In time she was cooking there with some of the most accomplished cooks in the country. 

She tells us all about that in “Salt Fat Acid Heat.” And if you love to eat, she says, you can learn to cook. No need to go to culinary school, she says. It’s cheaper and more rewarding to travel the world and to cook every day, and, as she urges repeatedly, “taste as you go.”

While the first half of “Salt Fat Acid Heat” delves into the fascinating chemistry and science of cooking, the last half gets down to recipes. I decided to make a simple French-based chicken with vinegar, quartering the bird as instructed with part of the wing attached to the breast. As with many of her dishes, this bird gets salted one day, to develop flavor, and cooked the next with wine, onions, vinegar, fresh tarragon and finished with heavy cream. I tasted throughout, added Maldon salt and pepper, and Tony and I sat down to the best breakfast we’ve had in a long time. (I could not wait the 24 hours to make this dish. I got up while it was still dark and got to work.) And yes, it was delicious. 

“Salt Fat Acid Heat” is available locally at Oblong Books and Music in Millerton. If you are interested in food, you will read it from cover to cover. And it is beautifully and wittily illustrated by Wendy McNaughton.