Most days my partner and I have something we call an egg lunch. The simplest version is egg and rice. Sometimes there’s soy sauce and American cheese, or crispy chili, or leftover wilted chives and some other topping, but sometimes it’s just egg and rice. Because did you know that meals are three times a day? That you can’t just eat one big meal and be sustained for the rest of the week like a snake? You just need food all the time. It’s ridiculous.
Margaret Eby’s New Cookbook You have to eatpublished November 19 by Quirk Books, begins with a mantra that might seem at odds with cookbooks: “You don’t have to cook.” Sometimes you’re depressed. Sometimes you’re too broke to buy fresh herbs. Sometimes you’re just so busy that suddenly it’s 7 p.m. and your stomach is growling and you’re too overwhelmed to even think about following a recipe. You have to eat was written for those moments. It’s divided not into appetizers and desserts, but into what you feel energized for. Can you open a can? Here’s how to make a bean salad. Can you microwave? Make a baked potato in it. There are a few recipes, but Eby mostly walks you through technique and flavor, whether it’s how to make rice in a cup or how to make a choose-your-own-adventure sandwich recipe (Triscuits with cream cheese and hot sauce would absolutely be dinner).
You have to eat is as much about giving permission as it is about showing you how to put together a meal from the leftovers in your kitchen. Eby sees the absolute mess that human society has made of food, from the diet-industrial complex to gendered household chores to the well-being of every employee who delivers canned beans to your pantry. But despite all of that, you can’t just give up eating. “When eating felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: The best food is the one you eat,” Eby writes. We spoke with her about rediscovering the joy of cooking, surprising flavor combinations, and why the microwave is your friend.
Eater: There’s a whole genre of cookbooks out there that claim to make cooking easier, but yours feels really different. What did you want to do differently?
Margaret Eby: One of the things I think about in the context of easy or simple recipes is: Easy for whom? Recipe development is a translation project that requires you to make a lot of assumptions about the person using the recipe: what their skills are in the kitchen, what equipment they’re working with, what they have in their pantry, and how comfortable they are with different techniques and recipes in general. “Easy” means radically different things to different people. I was hoping that in this book I could break it down into parts that aren’t intimidating. So before we get to the onion-chopping part, ask, OK, what are you settling for? Do you have the time and energy to turn on the oven, or is today a canned-meals day? Do you have the time and bandwidth to boil water, or do you just want to figure out how to make a cheese sandwich a little more exciting? What’s something that you find difficult in the kitchen, for whatever reason, and how do you deal with it when you can’t face it?
So many of these cookbooks are based on the idea that you just dig up fresh herbs that belong on your patio. I have wilted spinach, half a jar of peanut butter, and that’s my energy level. I need someone to convince me not to order food delivery anymore. I really admire a lot of these cookbooks and I get a lot out of them. I have nothing against them. But I really wanted them to be accessible and give people permission to use what they have and be gentle with themselves. Do what you can with what you have.
There’s this misconception in food media, which we both participate in, that every meal should be the best meal you’ve ever had. No, some meals are frozen burritos, and that’s fine. And I also know from experience that a lot of people who make beautiful, ambitious food and make the photos look great think, “I have 20 minutes for lunch, so I’ll eat some cheese rind and an orange.”
Reading your book made me realize how much expectation there is with other “easy” cookbooks. They all seem to assume I have fresh lemons around, but I simply don’t.
Another important thing was that I wanted to make sure that I didn’t introduce an element of shame. What people actually have in their pantries is so diverse, so dependent on their lives and how often they go to the supermarket, or how much time and money they have to spend on fresh versus frozen. A lot of those random assumptions end up limiting people instead of actually being helpful and instructive.
You mention a bit in the introduction about life and health things that can get in the way of cooking, like depression or just being overwhelmed by other things. Was there a moment where you realized this book had to be written for those moments?
During the pandemic, when I was working for Food and wineI was in this exact situation. There was a lasagna on the cover of a magazine and it was absolutely gorgeous. And it literally took two days to make the pasta from scratch. It was a really impressive recipe. In the meantime, I was so anxious and stressed and so tired of cooking. The only way I could survive was to eat like a child. I bought an economy pack of Bagel Bites because technically it’s food and it’s delicious.
Being in this space and having a lot of people who aren’t in the food industry come to me for advice, I’ve thought a lot about this aspirational branch of food media. Like the Martha Stewart image or this idea that people in the food industry have this secret knowledge that regular people don’t have that allows them to consistently make beautifully presented lunches. I can do it and I can tell you how to do it, but I’ve also been amazed at how much it’s helped people when I’m very honest with them about where I’m at. I can tell you how to make this lasagna if you have the energy, but I’m making cheese toasties.
When you talk about shame, you talk about all the ways we’re told our instincts are bad in the kitchen. How did you start to overcome that? Because even reading that, I had an immediate gut reaction when you said something about putting beans in tuna salad. I was like, You can’t do that! And then I thought, This sounds pretty good, but why do I think you can’t do it?
I think I had this idea in my head for a long time—and honestly, I still do—of a secret group of “real” food people who were constantly judging me. Maybe it’s just fear. I came into the food world as an entertainment journalist who was just interested in food, but I didn’t work in restaurants. But I went to a French culinary school, very duck l’orange and mother sauces, and that started to dismantle the group. They don’t exist, but even if they did, who cares? In real life, people are like that, You put Doritos in your sandwich? CoolPerhaps Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud would find it disgusting, but I don’t know them.
It made me realize how much I had internalized this Eurocentric, patriarchal idea of food. People have been preparing food for themselves for as long as we’ve been around. Why are they wrong? Why is it wrong to approach the problem differently than in the 19th century when he cooked for the French king? The more I realize this and the more I talk to real people who work in restaurants, who are mostly enthusiasts and weird nerds, the more I see that these rules are made up. What you really need to be able to do is take care of yourself in every way possible. I really hoped that I could make this more useful than something that seemed to stop people, to explain why you put butter in things or where you can add a lot of salt, instead of being something like, Oh my, you don’t know how to make béchamel sauce?
Is there a recipe or flavor combination that surprised you when it worked?
One sandwich that always makes people go crazy when they see me is the mayo and pineapple one. Everyone rides that ride and I say, Have you tried canned pineapple and mayo? And everyone gets off the train. But you try it and it’s pretty good! It looks like it was born out of the Great Depression, or maybe something for stoners, but it’s a flavor combination that really works,
How did your friends react when they helped you try these recipes?
One of my first readers is my great friend Jett Allen, he’s a comic book artist. I thought, you’re a regular person, read this book and tell me if this stuff about food is helpful to you or makes sense. And I was so happy with their response because they read it, gave me some notes, and then made nachos. Nachos are unlimited and you can do whatever you want with them. I wanted to be a pep talk from your friend about what you should make for dinner when you don’t feel like it but you want someone to convince you not to order takeout.
I know the point of this book is to allow yourself to do less when you need to do less. But I’m curious if there are any kitchen appliances that have been useful for this type of cooking.
I come across as a mid-century appliance evangelist for most of the book. Have you heard of the microwave? But it’s really amazing how much it helps to have a microwave or a blender or a food processor, and also how much it helps that they don’t feel like they’re less legitimate ways to cook something. My aunt is the queen of microwave eggs. You can just use that to make your life better. But also, in the book I had a recipe for crispy garlic that you can make in the microwave, but you can also buy crispy garlic. There’s often this idea that if you can’t do that with a cast iron skillet and a knife, you’re not good enough as a cook, and that’s stupid. It’s good to embrace newer technology. Mine are a little old-fashioned, maybe. I love my toaster. I love my blender. I love my microwave. And I use my rice cooker every day.
You mentioned crispy garlic. Are there other ingredients that, yes, technically you can make, but store-bought really are fine?
The whole book is a mantra, store-bought is fine. There’s a recipe for green sauce because I love making random science green sauces, but jarred pesto is totally fine. Likewise, you can make pasta from scratch, but you absolutely don’t have to because there are boxed pastas. I always have a stack of tortillas in the fridge. Can I make my own tortillas? Yes. Have I made my own tortillas? Yes. Are they as good as the ones I buy? They can, but they’re about 3,000 percent more effort. There’s a great Mexican market down the street from me that makes hot corn tortillas every day. If it’s worth making your own, don’t let anyone tell you not to. But also, if you’ve decided that the investment of time in this thing is less valuable to you than eating a tortilla right away, then it’s absolutely justified.
#eat #dont #cook