Sally Schneider's New Kind of Cookbook
Dave Weich, Powells.com
What if a cookbook didn't stop at great recipes? What if it made you a better, more confident cook?
The Improvisational Cook will show you how to make decadent Chocolate Wonders and a delicious Tuscan Island Shellfish Stew, but Sally Schneider also wants you to understand how those recipes work. Her highly anticipated follow-up to 2001's A New Way to Cook is a toolbox that empowers home cooks every step of the way from market to table.
What's in season? What looks good today? Make dinner from that instead of always walking in, shopping list in hand, just hoping for the best. Maximize flavor. Live healthier and feel better. Sound good so far?
Five years ago, the author published one of the most inspired cookbooks of its generation. Stuffed with mouth watering, wide ranging, health-minded concoctions, and a wealth of useful charts and creative ideas besides, A New Way to Cook was instantly received as "a sure classic" (Metropolitan Home), "an essential read" (Restaurant Digest), and "the cookbook for the early 21st century" (Publishers Weekly).
The Improvisational Cook does something just as impressive: It makes the other cookbooks on your shelf more valuable. Tweak tired old recipes to create delicious variations. Substitute for unavailable ingredients and tools, or just for the freedom of trying something new. Take control.
-
"Schneider offers an original, practical and well-executed plan for improvisational cooking � experimenting, cooking creatively, playing with ingredients and recipes, and 'relinquishing total control and allowing an idea to develop organically.'" Publishers Weekly (starred review)
-
"Buy this book. Start cooking from it and you won't want to stop." Corby Kummer, The Atlantic Monthly
"[Sally Schneider] intensifies the flavor or her ingredients so ingeniously that her recipes scream delicious before they whisper healthy.... Just her chapters on flavor catalysts — rubs, marinades, dressings, and so on — could keep me happy in the kitchen for the next five years." Food & Wine
Dave: Who do you see as your audience for The
Improvisational Cook?
Sally Schneider: I'd say it's mid-level home cooks, mid to even fairly
new, just not absolutely new. There are a lot of very simple recipes in
the book, and there's a huge amount of material to help people understand how
things work. There's quite a range. I've had many serious cooks take to it and
find themselves inspired by the ideas.
I was aiming for the cooks that I've talked to by teaching an online course
and by traveling, listening to people who are really busy and harried but want
to be cooking. A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified
of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising
but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients,
that sort of thing.
Dave: When I heard the title, what came to mind was, "You've got such
and such in the pantry, and here's how to make a great meal," but there's actually
quite a bit more. For example: what to do when you don't have the right tools.
Schneider: That's something very close to my heart. I love to cook
wherever I am, and I've found that if you open your mind a little, you can get
away with almost no equipment.
So many people think they need to have serious equipment. In the magazines
and the media, they see all this stylish stuff, especially on TV, and they think,
That's what I need to make it work. You don't. I'm attempting a little
bit of liberation here.
Dave: The day after
reading about flavored salts in The
Improvisational Cook, I found smoked salt at a farmers market in Astoria.
Schneider: You can buy some amazing salts now, and they're completely
easy to make. In fact you can smoke salt, yourself; there's a very easy way
to do it.
Salt is a preservative. It really holds flavor. For example, if you chop up
some fresh herbs, or even just garlic, the salt will extract the moisture and
preserve the flavor. There it is, ready to go, and it's stable for quite a while.
There are a wealth of flavorings you can put in a salt, and if you're in a hurry
that's your seasoning. That's all you have to do.
Of course it's an ancient technique, but who actually invents anything new?
Dave: Prior to writing articles about healthy eating in the eighties,
had that been your focus, or did a magazine assignment steer you toward that subject?
Schneider: My own need was driving me. I had all kinds of food issues,
including health concerns and weight concerns. I'm a serious eater and a seriously
hungry person, so I set out on that path to figure it out for myself, and of
course it really resonated with other people. But I come at it from the point
of view of being a pleasure-hungry person. I use cream and butter, and I've
always used salt in my cooking because it's a way to magnify flavor. Everything
I do is about flavor.
Dave: In A New Way
to Cook, you explain that you started working in restaurants to support
your photography career.
Schneider: I did.
Dave: And at some point you literally had a dream that made you consider cooking.
Had cooking been at all in your plans previously?
Schneider: I was working in restaurants as a captain and as a waiter.
I was one of the first women working as a captain in New York, doing all this
tableside stuff, because one of the really fancy restaurants had been busted
by the Civil Liberties Union and forced to hire women. So I was making a lot
of money, and I was also doing my photography and studying.
I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked
that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen.
But not consciously. I wasn't thinking that I should cook until I woke up from
that dream. Then it was like, "Of course, that's it."
It was as though I found the language I'd wanted from photography; the expression
that I got partly from photography, I got completely from cooking.
Years down the line, I became a food stylist. I was doing the food for photography.
I had an eye for it. But I was always writing, and the writing took over.
Dave: In The Improvisational
Cook, you mention Anne Disrude. When I googled her, several references described
her as a food stylist. I'd never heard that term. The first thing that came
to mind was setting plates up for pictures, but does the job also include consulting
for restaurants, helping with presentation?
Schneider: That's possible to do. When I was a stylist, when we would
photograph restaurants I was often hired to clean up the chef's stuff if they
hadn't already done it.
I styled A New Way to Cook,
but I hired Anne Disrude to style The
Improvisational Cook. I thought, Who's the best cook I know? And the
most real? All the food I ever styled for my books, and all the food that
she styled, was all real food that we then ate.
Everybody thinks it's just setting things up, but it's cooking and it's also
finding the foods that best express that dish. Anne did things like go out with
farmers into their fields to pick out a great onion. There's an amazing picture
of an onion [in The Improvisational Cook]. She pulled watercress from
a stream for a soup. To remind people of that reality.
Dave: Do you think the fact that you weren't on the culinary school
path helps you relate to home cooks?
Schneider: I think it does. Having read a lot of chefs' recipes and
known a lot of chefs, and then being a home cook, I guess it does. There are
so many things that come into writing a recipe, and it's really important if
you're writing for home cooks to be cooking like you are at home.
The problem with chefs and culinary schools is that they're geared toward
professional kitchens, which are totally different. That being said, I often
write into recipes techniques I learned in the restaurant kitchen. There are
ways of organizing your prep and so on that are immensely useful. Those are
woven into all the recipes I do.
Dave: The improvisational approach isn't very common in cookbooks.
Often when a chef publishes a book, it's an expression of what they do in their
restaurants as opposed to a teaching tool.
Schneider: That's true, although more and more chefs have been trying
to deconstruct what they do.
Generally a chef's book is like a calling card or a portfolio to display their
personal work. To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction
in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment. This book is pointing
the way into it for people that see it as daunting or a mystery. Some people
just do it, but others need help with the mindset, permission almost to listen
to themselves. Understanding how things work is the key.
Also, it takes a lot more time to do a book where you're explaining everything.
That's a constraint I think a lot of authors aren't crazy about.
Dave: You provide a chart of taste affinities. It's empowering to have
those basic building blocks at your disposal. People might not be confident
enough to guess or to make assumptions.
Schneider: That's one of the things I heard most, even from pretty
good cooks. A lot of friends call me up and say, "I don't know what to do next,"
or "How do I flavor it?" It's because they're not familiar, or sometimes they
haven't brought it to consciousness, flavorings that go together.
I heard that so many times that I thought, Why don't I see if I can at
least give people an idea of some of the essential affinities, so they can use
the simple technique of inserting a different set of flavors to change a recipe?
It was based purely on the need that I'd heard.
Dave: A related principle touted in the book is very much in vogue these days:
"What grows together goes together." You hear Alice
Waters and Deborah
Madison and even Michael
Pollan saying the same thing, bringing people to their farmers' markets
and urging them to get in touch with the world of produce that exists before
everything gets muddled in a supermarket.
Schneider: And you know what? It will take care of you. That's what
so great.
Aside from being great for the environment and all that, that principle is
a really easy way to cook and to know what goes together. It's almost guaranteed
that things will be good if you follow it. It's a very good guideline. It's
the organizing principle behind the world's cuisines. I don't think that can
be stated too many times.
Dave: I'm dying to try the Chocolate Wonders. The Earl Grey Cookies
sound good, but not nearly as gluttonous.
Schneider: No, these are completely over the top. They stop people
in their tracks. People over and over say, "This is the best chocolate cookie
I've ever had."
Part of it is great chocolate, but with that, it's basically just globs of
a brownie mixture stuffed with whatever you want. That's where it can get really
fun, chopping up candy bars, or I love pistachios, that sort of thing.
But the other piece to that cookie that was so astonishing... I was fooling
around with them and I wondered what would happen if I didn't put any of that
chunky stuff in. You end up with this thin, chewy, utterly chocolate, elegant
cookie. It's the same batter. I love that change.
Dave: Of the recipes in A
New Way to Cook, the ones we end up making over and over again use your
brining and roasting techniques. It's how we make a Thanksgiving turkey now.
It's how our friends make a Thanksgiving turkey.
Are there recipes or techniques in the book that readers latch onto like that?
Schneider: The roasting is a big one. Even today it's a technique that
surprises people if they haven't understood how it can work globally in concentrating
flavors and caramelizing foods and, depending on the heat, making them utterly
tender.
The other technique in New
Way to Cook that I've found people are pretty astonished by is the one to
emulsify fats: making a really flavorful fat and then adding a little water
to it to coat something starchy, like beans or pasta.
A lot of people who want to cook with less fat are surprised by that. You
can cook vegetables in a little water in a covered pan and then throw the fat
into the residual liquid to coat them. People always are saying, "I always steamed
vegetables before," and they would put a ton of butter on them. They're astonished
to find this method that actually takes less equipment.
Dave: If you could give just a few guiding principles for constructing
a menu, pairing items, what would they be?
Schneider: "Foods that grow together go together" is a nice one for
a menu because it anchors you to the season and gives the table a feeling of
being in a moment. That's really great.
In the course of a menu, I like to modulate flavors. I tend not to repeat
them overtly. If I use a lot of herbs on the lamb, I won't repeat those herbs.
Although I love to throw thyme into cooking plumbs and berries, it would only
be a whisper because I don't want to overtly replay a flavor.
I also think it's very important to consider how the food will feel to the
person eating it. A lot of chefs in restaurants, when they create their tasting
menus, don't seem to consider that. They're trying to impress with too many
rich items. The modulation between something rich and something refreshing is
really effective.
Often for hors d'oeuvres, I serve room temperature vegetables, something like
that, so that the main course might be quite rich but the first course
has balanced it out. Using lots of fresh foods, fruits and vegetables, helps
to keep the menu buoyant — I don't know if that's the right word, but it
keeps a balance of freshness and health.
Dave: We had a party on Labor Day. People brought food to grill, and
my wife prepared the side dishes. She made your Herb Salad; Doctored Mesclun
Salad; Real Onion Dip; White Beans with Rosemary, Thyme, and Lavender; Rustic Bean Stew with Bacon and Caramelized Onions; and Roasted Potatoes with leftover caramelized onions.
Everything was great, but she wondered if you would say that she used caramelized
onions in too many dishes. Our guess was no because in every dish except
the onion dip, that flavor was in the background.
Schneider: Absolutely. Caramelized onions or garlic, these are things
you can repeat infinitely if you're not featuring them.
If you had done an onion dip and then onions piled onto a toast to make a
crostini, those would be repetitive. But all that being said about modulation,
if you're serving people delicious food, they won't complain.
I'm honored that you made so many of these dishes. I hope it went well.
Dave: It was great. Mindy is inclined toward improvisation anyway,
so she was excited to hear about the new book. Probably the most regularly
served dish in our house is a variation on the Provincial Onion Tart in A
New Way to Cook. She uses your Slow Roasted Tomatoes and combines the recipes.
Schneider: That's great!
You know, this is really a way of cooking. It's not my way. I'm deeply
influenced by the Mediterranean way of being. I've spent a lot of time there.
And I've sort of translated it; I've tried to make it available to people in
this country to whom it might not be familiar.
One of my greatest joys is when someone like your wife takes one idea or one
piece of a recipe and does it her way. That's what I'm encouraging. You don't
have to stick with these recipes. They're guides. As I say, they're a way in.
Have fun with them. It's an easier way to cook in a busy life, once you get
the hang of it.
Dave: What nation's food doesn't get the respect it deserves in the
U.S.?
Schneider: For a while I thought Spanish food didn't, but at least
in New York all hell is breaking loose.
Dave: The same thing is happening here.
Schneider: It's finally happening. The restaurant chefs in Spain are
breaking ground, but in terms of the everyday cooking in Spain I still hear
people coming back and saying they were disappointed. I think it's because they're
expecting the chef stuff.
I've been to Spain many times, and I'm always knocked out by the markets and
the restaurants I've stumbled upon. I can't tell you how many times I've walked
into a little place somewhere in Spain and said, "I'm hungry. Do you have anything
to eat?" And they'll cook for me. You know, in the middle of the night. You
don't even know where you are.
They really respect hunger. That's why they have tapas bars. It's why you
can stop in anywhere and eat at any time of day. Somehow people here make tapas
into a cocktail thing. I don't see it as that. I see the Spanish way of cooking
being about sustaining people throughout their day.
And Spain — their hams are finally getting acclaim.
Dave: I went to a wedding two weeks ago. The bride was from Spain.
Her family snuck hams onto the plane to bring to the reception.
Schneider: Wow! I once wanted to write about smuggling a ham with
a hoof still on, and the editor said, "We can't encourage people to smuggle."
These are miraculous products. In their real state, they're fabulous. I say
"real" because I don't know what's going to happen when they have to pass all
of our laws. Was it a great wedding?
Dave: The food was incredible. It was here in Portland, outdoors by
the water. The first wedding I've ever ridden my bike to. It was very casual.
Schneider: That sounds great.
Dave: I know that you've written about the saffron harvest in Spain.
What about?
Schneider: The saffron harvest is one of the astonishing miracles of
life, I think. Saffron comes from crocuses that come up at the end of October,
when it's quite cold. There are three stamens in each flower. It's very
difficult to get those out intact and then handle them, and you need thousands
and thousands of them to build up even a small pile of saffron.
What's so incredible is that it's all done by hand. It can't be mechanized.
It's generally done by small farmers with little plots dedicated to saffron.
Every aspect of it is of the earth. You're out before dawn because you have
to pick the flowers before it's sunny; otherwise the flowers will wilt. Whole
families work on removing the stamens because it has to be done by a certain
time. Then there is the tenuous, difficult process of toasting the stamens.
They have to be dried out. One misstep and thousands of dollars go up in smoke.
There's a huge culture around it that has to do so much with the life of Spanish
farmers, where saffron was used like money. In some places it still is because
it keeps a long time. There are stories of farmers going to church smelling
like saffron because they hid the saffron with their good clothes.
It's astonishing, and to know that this unbelievable flavor comes from a delicate
crocus growing in these chilly fields, all picked by hand, continues to knock
me out. Every October I feel it; it's like a clock in me. I've been many times
to witness it.
Dave: I read that you were a contributor to the Encyclopedia
of Appalachia. What did you write?
Schneider: For about thirty-five years I've been going to a tiny town
deep in the Appalachian Mountains called Helvetia that I stumbled on when I
was in college. I first went because I heard there was a ramp supper there —
ramps are wild leeks that grow throughout the mountains. And in fact there was
a ramp supper put on by the Farm Women's Association, with a big square dance
afterwards.
What I discovered in this town you can drive through in five minutes was a
Swiss community that had settled in the Appalachians around 1860. The culture
was still alive. I started to document it. I went back year after year. I've
photographed it and written about it. They're like my family. I'm one of the
few people that has documented enough to write about the Swiss food culture
there. That's why I ended up writing that; I'm very proud of it because I'm
a New York kid from Greenwich Village.
It's really something, fabulous food. Now it's disappearing, but it was a
mix of Swiss and the culture that the immigrants brought over, mixed with all
the raw materials they found. And of course the mighty pig, because that was
the staple meat. So pork and ham figure heavily, and cornbread. It's a real
amalgam.
Dave: What will you work on next?
Schneider: Actually, I am working on it. It's not a cookbook. It's
a book of writing about food. That town in Appalachia figures in it,
and some of the wild restaurant stuff. It's about ways of being fed that I've
witnessed.
Dave: Sounds great.
Schneider: Well, I'm going to try.
Sally Schneider spoke from her home in New York
on September 11, 2006.
| 
Don't Miss
