The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen

Well known and highly regarded for nimble, serious, and accessible cultural investigations such as Consider the Fork and The Way We Eat Now, Bee Wilson turns her attention here to practical kitchen work. There are abundant, appealing recipes but equally interesting is Wilson’s point of view. There’s no dogma here. Wilson’s first words to her readers are: You can drive yourself crazy with the complexity of deciding which cooking oil is the “right” one to use. But the answer is simple. Decide which one you like best and use it up while it's fresh. Elsewhere she notes: I sometimes think how crazy it is that we spend so long talking about cooking as a problem (it supposedly takes too much time, costs too much, is too difficult) and so little time talking about all the things to which it provides cures (soothing a busy mind, bringing friends together, helping us eat more vegetables). Consider cooking not as a problem but as a remedy, and it becomes easier to find the motivation to do