Traveling with Cookbooks

In this time when Covid-19 is keeping us at home and political stress abounds, I find myself traveling through the pages of cookbooks.  I’m a huge fan of Sam Sifton’s NYTimes.com Cooking column.  While reading his suggestions for what to cook while coping with the 2020 elections, I learned about an article by Samin Nosrat—author of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and star of a four-part Netflix documentary inspired by her brilliant cookbook of the same name.

Cathy Salter

In Nosrat’s article “Cookbooks help me escape these days,” she writes: “Years before I ever set foot in Rome or the Chianti Valley, I traveled there by reading cookbooks….From a handful of single-subject books I still treasure, I spent hours learning about the regional difference in pasta sauces and the individual histories of dozens, if not hundreds of pasta shapes I hoped to one day taste.  I grew to love the hot-blooded tradition-protecting Italian culinary sensibility I got to know through these books—so much so that I learned the language and eventually moved to the country.”

~ Read the rest in today’s Journal ~