Interviewing Samin Nosrat, even on the phone, is a lot like watching her Netflix show. You can feel her passion and enthusiasm – for life, for food, for cooking. She laughs easily and is as genial as can be. The only thing you miss out on is getting to see her eat something amazing.
Nosrat has owned the food world for the past two years. First came her 2017 James Beard Award-winning cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking.” It was an instant classic, conversational and accessible, and sophisticated and insightful. If you were the sort of person who already made mayonnaise from scratch or pre-salted a chicken 24 hours before roasting, there were still dozens of brand-new insights and ideas between its covers (as well as Wendy MacNaughton’s awesome and explanatory illustrations). If you weren’t and you read the book, you are that sort of person now.
Then came 2018 and the Netflix TV show of the same name, in which Nosrat journeyed around the world – from Italy to Japan to Mexico to California – to bring the book to life, exploring both cooking and artisan food production. On the most basic level, it was simply entertaining and ambitious food TV, in the tradition of Anthony Bourdain, Julia Child or even Martha Stewart. (Chris Colin wrote in The California Sunday Magazine that Nosrat told him “she intended to become the Iranian-American Martha Stewart.”)
It was also more than that. “Marxist Fantasy Porn,” read one Eater headline, with writer Malcolm Harris celebrating the show’s “vision of unalienated labor.” Another Eater writer, Jenny Zhang, noted how radical it was just to see Nosrat eat with gusto, and get all the TV foodie glory that is usually reserved for only men, thin white women or grandmotherly types. Watching the show, it is a joy simply to see her joy. You can almost taste it.
Nosrat will be at Revolution Hall on March 11 in conversation with Portland-based Eater editor Erin DeJesus.
Jason Cohen: As a home cook, I’ve always wanted someone to do what you did in the first chapter of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” which was to truly and completely answer the question, “How do you salt?”
Samin Nosrat: It’s not that it had never been done. I think what I do takes a little bit from a lot of different people: certainly Harold McGee, and Kenji (Lopez-Alt), and other people who came before me and my particular thread of the food world. I think I put a very specific and accessible language to something that an entire group of people knew, and a much bigger group of people didn’t know. My goal was to bridge that gap.
Cohen: My wife totally had the, “Oh my God, I can’t believe how much salt that is” moment when we watched the salt episode of the show.
Nosrat: I kind of do it on purpose. It was such a mind-blowing experience for me to see how much cooks really used in the kitchen, and that it was often like exponentially – more. So I think giving people that ‘oh my God’ moment is really important. But I also try my best explain that when you’re doing it in a pot of water, 99 percent of that salt’s going down the drain. So it allows me to sort of be melodramatic about it.
Cohen: Your website bio says: “I cook, I write, I teach.” Have the past two years changed your definition of yourself at all?
Nosrat: I’ve been filling out a bunch of paperwork for various things lately, and I added “television host.” A lot of my life does not resemble what I did a year ago. But honestly, I feel like everything intersects around stories. So if I had to just choose one, I would choose “writer.”
Cohen: Obviously, not every writer or cook can naturally be good on TV. Your secret weapon was how sincerely and enthusiastically you enjoyed everything you tried or cooked. It wasn’t a persona.
Nosrat: Oh my God, yeah. For sure. What I have gleaned is that people really enjoy the way I am with other humans. And I really enjoy the way I am with other humans.
Everyone always asks me, did you always love to cook since you were a little kid? No. It was a serendipitous accident where I ended up in this restaurant (Berkeley’s Chez Panisse) that changed my life. I was never in the kitchen helping my mom, except when I was trying to make cookies – and she was trying to not let me make cookies, because she didn’t want us to eat sugar!
But what is true is I’ve always loved to eat, and I think loving to eat is a really important prerequisite for being a good cook. And there’s no shame in loving to eat. It’s a really wonderful way to connect with people.
I honestly am surprised at how moving or impactful my love of eating has been for other people. Even today, I was signing these papers, and the woman there told me, “When I saw your name coming in, I was like, ‘Where do I know that name from? Oh yeah – that’s the woman who I watched on TV eat a bowl of pasta so gleefully that I decided to leave my husband. So I could have that joy in my life again.’”
I was like, wait, what?
Cohen: Another thing about your show – people are always asking, in the food industry and every industry, how do we do better? How do we hire more women? How do we hire more people of color? And to some extent you just did it, in terms of who you featured.
Nosrat: And we could have done better. Everything’s a learning curve. What I was sick of was people saying, “Oh, those stories don’t exist. Those people don’t exist. We can’t find them.”
Well, it’s a little more work. It means, like: Go to page three of the Google results, not just page one. But it’s not impossible.
I’m a person who historically would not have been given this opportunity – maybe not even five years ago. And I was given a chance, and I showed up, and I did a good job. So what I think about almost every day, is, who else is out there that’s not being asked? What other brown or black or queer people – or anybody non-traditional from some community that has always been overlooked – are out there who would be so good at this?
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Cohen: Your local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, recently hired Soleil Ho, a former Portlander best known for the “Racist Sandwich” podcast. Are you excited about that?
Nosrat: Yes, I’m really excited about it. Soleil is crazy good. To the Chronicle’s credit, when that position opened up, they did the good hard work of calling everyone in the community and asking us our thoughts about who we thought could do that job or what we thought that job could become. And I was really clear in saying that I think that job should be more along the lines of a cultural critic who looks through the lens of food and restaurants. Because restaurants play such a big role in our culture that they need to be held accountable.
When I started cooking, it was like a joke to be a cook. It was not something cool. There were no “rock star chefs.” And now chefs have an outsized influence. Friggin’ José Andrés was on the Oscars! So I’m really stoked about Soleil doing that job because she does have insights that are bigger than “What does this plate of pasta taste like?”
Cohen: You’ve worked with author Michael Pollan, who I know has also had to think about this: How do you find that balance between emphasizing good food and good producers and good ingredients and keeping things accessible and affordable?
Nosrat: Yeah. As you know, I’m a student of both Alice (Waters of Chez Panisse) and Michael’s. They’ve been very instrumental in both teaching me and helping me along in my career. And I would say that the way that I cook in my own life, and eat in my own life, absolutely adheres to so many of the things that I learned from them.
But as much as I believe in eating locally and seasonally and organic when going to the farmer’s market – I mean, it’s expensive for me. So I had to decide that those things would inform my message, but that my message would be “just cook anything.” If I can remove any sense of shame or any sense of elitism, I’m going to do that because I believe that if I can get you excited, to cook anything – literally anything – by yourself, or with family or friends to share a meal, then over time that will become a habit and an important routine and ritual in your life that you will want to dedicate more time or resources to.
Like, maybe you will make your way to the farmer’s market because you’ll say, “Oh wow, one time I had this amazing salad somewhere, but my carrots are never as sweet. I wonder where I can get a sweeter carrot?” Taste is a big thing that will draw us to those sort of fancier, more expensive (ingredients). But there are so many forces in our daily lives that are discouraging us from cooking that I think it’s a victory just to make anything.
Cohen: So much great cuisine, including much of what you featured on the show, originally came out of necessity and poverty.
Nosrat: Exactly. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? To me, the things that I have eaten and been most surprised and delighted by in my life are not the fanciest, most expensive things. They’re the things where I’m like, “I can’t believe you can make bread crumbs taste that good.” Or, “I can’t believe you can turn a cow’s tail into something so delicious in these perfect ravioli.” And I think that directly relates to the fact that these women and these grandmas, over the course of human history, have been forced to make the most out of what’s available. Which is often not a lot.
If I can be a conduit to help translate that kind of thinking and ingenuity for the home cook in their daily life, then that’s what I want to do. Even just right now – I’m in the middle of all the things I’m doing today, I haven’t had time to cook myself anything, and I was like, “Oh, I should just go to Whole Foods salad bar and get something. And then I remembered I had a can of beans at home. And I had a tortilla. And I had some spinach. So I just came home and spent five minutes making this thing. And it felt really nice to be able to take care of myself in that way.
And that’s where I want to go next with people, is to teach them how to look at what’s around and see that there’s actually a lot more there than you think. It’s really nice when we get to have the big short rib dinner with our friends, or whatever. But that’s not most people’s daily reality. And so, how do we turn that 20 minutes after we get home from work into enough time to make something nutritious and delicious?
Cohen: Any other answers to the “what’s next?” question that you can share yet?
Nosrat: The one thing is that I’m going to write this book; it’s called “What to Cook.” It’s going to help you decide what to cook, based on whatever limitations and resources you have.
And there’s no official deal. There’s no official anything. But I do love my team at Netflix so much, and we are in constant conversation trying to figure out what the next show can look like. So there is going to be a next show.
It was really funny because I was pretty ambivalent about being on TV. I get that I got good at it, and I do like it fine, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of my life. And so (after “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”), I was like, “Cool, see you in three years, guys. I’m going to write another book, and then we’ll do another show!” And they were like, “No, that’s not how it works. We need more now. People want more now.”
So, there’s gonna be some juggling. Some show-making and some book-writing.
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