Article of the Week 16

Independent Reading Entry One

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace 

By: Tamar Adler

Tamar Adler has worked with various magazines, such as editing for Harpers Magazine. On and off she has worked in several restaurants, as a personal chef, and even helped open Farm 255, where she worked as head chef until moving to California. In 2009 she left the cooking business to write the Everlasting Meal, now she is a cooking teacher at the Edible Schoolyard NYC. The Everlasting Meal is intended to express how delicious meals can be found from simple origins. To begin, she goes over How to Boil Water. This process does not end at pouring water in a pot and placing it on a stove. The numbers of choices to be made are endless: adding oil or salt, using hot water or cold to begin, placing ingredients in before it boils or after. None of these choices are right or wrong; it just goes to show the millions of possibilities that lie in a simple pot of boiling water. The Audience Tamar directs this novel towards is the common person, and showing them how they are capable of easily having an affordable and delicious meal. The way Tamar approached writing this book was a narrative rather than listing ingredients. Her method is delivering and inspiring a way of thinking about how to approach cooking, rather than teaching how to cook a specific meal. She makes various appeals to common sense, and humor to gain the audience’s trust. Her diction is simply beautiful; she turns boiling water into poetry. The tone she creates flows in such a way that it seems like “thinking out loud” as Jack Hitt from the New York Times puts it. She weaves together topics in a way that makes it seem endless. There doesn’t seem to be pause to her thoughts. With her beautiful writing she entices readers to hear her voice. With that in mind, she was highly successful in twisting together what would have otherwise been a very dull instructional book into an inspirational epic about “the joy of cooking”.