Samin Nosrat鈥檚 2017 cookbook debut was a bestseller and James Beard Award winner. It taught cooks of all skill levels the building blocks of flavor and texture.
But after her massive success, Nosrat was diagnosed with clinical depression and said the joy she once found with cooking, stopped being attainable.
It was cooking for her found family that brought her back. is a collection of recipes, and essays, that explore cooking rituals, and building connection and community through great food.
She recently joined 黑料吃瓜网鈥檚 鈥淲here We Live鈥� to talk about dinner rituals, her complicated relationship with recipes and finding joy again.
Interview highlights
Navigating depression
I published the book, which was so successful, and then we turned it into a documentary series for Netflix. I was the typical child of immigrants, striving to achieve and be recognized for my achievements. Here I was achieving and being recognized for the very biggest things in my field beyond what I ever could have dreamt of. That felt really great, and also, it was really destabilizing and a little bit confusing.
I believed if I did reach those heights, I would feel OK. I would finally feel full and complete and happy, and this sort of sadness in my heart would be resolved and addressed. I always say loneliness is my oldest friend. I was really disappointed to realize, all of the work that I'd done hadn't resolved this issue.
I became an avatar of joy for people and I felt a pressure to perform that. Here I was with the job of writing another book, but I didn't feel any joy. I certainly didn't feel any joy around food, and so I had to find my way back to, if not joy, then at least a sense of meaning of why I was doing this. Because I didn't have a why. So the book, in a lot of ways, is a story and a documentation of how I got there.
Finding purpose in serving her immediate community
I had this false sense of grandiosity 鈥� like everything I say, so many people are going to listen to me 鈥� and so I realized that was not serving me.
I really narrowed the aperture of the lens. I can't think about the whole world. I can think about myself. I can think about my neighbors. I can think about my friends, my community. I literally gave myself a three block radius of my house; if I can just sort of make choices in my daily life that affect this three block radius positively 鈥� I don't need to have the ambition of making the best food in the world, and teaching everyone in the world the best techniques. When I get to hear that something I did is a positive force in somebody's life, that feels better than any award.
Recipes
My mom did not cook from recipes. She basically taught herself how to cook from taste and memory, and from calling her mom back in Iran.
When I started cooking in a restaurant at Chez Panisse, the chefs gave me a stack of cookbooks, and they told me to familiarize myself with them as the sort of foundational texts of our kitchen. But that was not what I saw reflected at work. At work, cooks sort of knew how to make everything.
Recipes in the book tend to look familiar, and they're a list of ingredients followed by a list of steps to follow. But there's also a visual matrix that we created, so I can connect a lot of those dots for you.
Rituals for dinner parties with her community
I definitely don't do everything. I don't determine the menu on my own. We all do it together. Sometimes I don't even make anything. I think that has given me a whole new understanding of hospitality. To be generous, how to accept generosity, how it is to be part of something.
I would not call what we do a potluck at all. It has always been in the same house on the same day at the same time. And because of that, there is so much less that we have to communicate about. You don't have to do a spreadsheet, you don't have to do a Doodle poll, you don't have to figure out when people are available.
We've been able to create a lot of things to look forward to. It has to feel like a gift. If it's an opportunity to look forward to, rather than something a chore you have to get through, I think that is really crucial.
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