Tamar Adler’s New Book ‘Feast on Your Life’ is an Ode to Cooking as a Habit, A Comfort and an Everyday Joy

I’m not sure there’s another cook currently writing who has the power to transform her readers’ relationships to their own kitchens quite like Tamar Adler. The Vogue contributing editor’s last book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, envisioned a world in which no leftover or spare ingredient goes to waste, and her latest effort, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, is no less ambitious. In a collection of food-related journal entries, Adler seeks to assure those of us who occasionally (or more than occasionally) feel wholly uninspired by cooking that—psst—she’s no different.

Somewhat ironically, for a book born out of its author’s depression, Feast on Your Life is one of the most invigorating and, yes, life-affirming tributes to an existence bookended by meals since Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. Vogue spoke to Adler about the healing power of cooking, the simple perfection of eggs on toast, her MVP recipes (including one reprinted here), and the one meal she’d choose if she had to eat the same thing from her book for a month.

Vogue: How did the spark for this book get lit for you?

Tamar Adler: I was really depressed, and it’s funny to be talking about it now, because I think I’m probably about to get really depressed again. When I look at the timing of it, it was not long after my last book was published. There’s a really sort of sad time after a book comes out, where you’ve been working on something and you have this whole team working on it, and people are talking about it, and then it’s just over. It was a combination of all of that happening, and then a sort of larger midlife reckoning of, Wow, I really thought that I was going to be more successful or happier, or something. Maybe not happier, but I thought I’d have more money and more success, and it just kind of came at me like a tidal wave, and I got really depressed.

I went the conventional route of upping my Prozac and talking to my therapist and stopping drinking, but then my husband Pete got me to start a gratitude journal. I was like, “I don’t want to do that. That’s cheesy.” And then, literally, as soon as I started, I was like, “Oh God, this really is pretty transformative.” Right after I wrote the first entry, it felt like when you’re using a chisel to open a wheel of Parmesan, and you’re like, Oh, wow, that’s cracking open along an interesting line. That’s kind of how it felt in my mind. I did that for a while, and then I was talking to my agent about it. We were talking about Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and the utility of recording those observations, and she suggested that I do it in the kitchen for a week and sort of see how it felt. I did, and I felt like it was the same practice, but with enough specificity and firm enough constraints to be creatively interesting and maybe helpful. I started it in the solipsistic vacuum that a depressed person exists in, but then I sort of realized, especially when it was done, that, like, Oh, my God, almost everybody is a semi-depressed person.