Recipes: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly by The Splendid Table | Free Audiobook

**Francis Lam** (0:06)
It's The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media, the show for curious cooks and eaters. I'm Francis Lam.
So we've been thinking a lot about recipes lately, like what they are and what they do. Because recipes seem like simple things, right? They're instructions. But they're also promises and aren't promises always a little bit complicated. You know, they can be kept, they can be broken, they can have consequences no one ever intended. Today, we'll hear about a legendary cookbook writer with Alzheimer's, finding her memories through cooking. We'll ask why some recipe writers lie and lie and lie to us about onions, and right now, we'll talk to a cookbook author who wanted to write her book without any recipes at all. Samin Nosrat is that author. She's taught cooking for years. In fact, Michael Pollan credits her for teaching him how to cook. And her teaching revolves around a ridiculously simple idea, that to be a great cook, all you need to know is how to control four things, salt, fat, acid, and heat. Understand those, and you will always be able to make delicious food, no recipes required. And when I learned about her method, I had that moment, when someone shows you how to see something that's been sitting right in front of you, and you're like, how did I not know that before? Well, Samin, so good to have you here.

**Samin Nosrat** (1:34)
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Francis.

**Francis Lam** (1:37)
So I am so excited to talk to you today because the show, actually the theme of the show is we want to talk about the pleasures and pains of recipes. And you have a new cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. And it's amazing for listeners at home. I actually, in my double life, I am an editor at a publishing house. And early in my time there, the proposal for this book came in to one of my colleagues. And she right away, like literally two hours later, she sent it to the whole team and said, oh, my God, this book is amazing. It's going to be incredible. We need to buy this book. And so I was like, oh, let me take a look at this proposal. And reading Samin's proposal actually taught me.
In so many ways, what a great cookbook proposal looks like. And sadly, we didn't win the auction. But the book is out now. And what's amazing is that it's a cookbook that only kind of reluctantly has recipes. So Samin, why did you want to write the book this way?

**Samin Nosrat** (2:32)
Well, to be perfectly honest, I only included recipes because I knew there was just no way a publisher would publish the book without them. So, but, but another-

**Francis Lam** (2:43)
We would have made you do that too.

**Samin Nosrat** (2:44)
Yeah. But, and I did have a lot of, what's the word, like, just philosophical sort of feeling like a hypocrite throughout the making of the book, which was, I was like, well, I'm writing a whole book teaching you how to cook without recipes only to be-