Lately, I have had a small problem with radishes.
I buy a couple of bunches of the most adorable, tiny-headed pink
radishes with bright, shaggy greens, but before I can get around to eating them
all, they are suddenly unrecognizable — withered, droopy old things — the
radishes faintly wrinkled, the greens faded and limp, as if time had slipped by
more quickly inside the swirl of my fridge.
اضافة اعلان
While puckered radishes are not ideal for snacking on raw and
chilled, they are not quite ready for my compost bin either — not yet. I have
my own go-to dishes for cleaning out the scraps in my fridge, but for new
inspiration, I recently turned to “The Everlasting Meal Cookbook,” Tamar
Adler’s new encyclopedia of recipes that breathe life into all kinds of scraps
and leftovers.
Her radish frittata was a very persuasive argument for roasting
some past-their-prime vegetables in olive oil until they turned golden brown,
and tossing them, along with the chopped, wilted greens, right in with the egg
mixture. Honestly, it made me wish I had more old radishes to roast, but as
Adler points out, that is not how this odds-and-ends kind of cooking works. The
amount you have turns out to be the amount you need — that is the beauty of it.
No-waste cookbooks, mostly written by women chefs and home cooks, have proliferated in the past few years, starting just before the early days of the pandemic shifted many of us toward more intentional and frugal food habits.
I love cooking with my kitchen’s constant supply of weird little
leftovers. I was raised by a father who rinses out bottles of honey with a
splash of hot water to get to the very last bit, and who mixes salad dressings
in almost-empty jars of mustard. And my mother is an expert at organizing and
meal planning, always turning leftovers into new meals.
I'm more impulsive in the kitchen, although I have inherited
some of their habits. The most satisfying part of Thanksgiving for me is not
the meal itself, but that moment when I pull the turkey meat, toss the bones
into a stockpot to simmer, and begin plotting the arguably more interesting and
certainly less intensive Day 2 and Day 3 meals from this one’s ruins.
If you were trying to convince someone about the merits of
cooking with scraps and leftovers, you’d likely talk about how it’s a more
organized and efficient way to approach the food you buy, how it saves both
time and money, and how it’s better for the environment than automatically
dumping food into the garbage, where it will go on to sit in a landfill and
produce vast amounts of methane while it slowly decomposes.
No-waste cookbooks, mostly written by women chefs and home
cooks, have proliferated in the past few years, starting just before the early
days of the pandemic shifted many of us toward more intentional and frugal food
habits.
Lindsay-Jean Hard’s “Cooking With Scraps” came out in 2018;
Linda Ly’s “The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook” was published in 2020; and
Anne-Marie Bonneau’s “The Zero-Waste Chef” followed in 2021, to name just a
few. I particularly liked the organization of the 2021 Australian cookbook “Use
It All: The Cornersmith Guide to a More Sustainable Kitchen,” which clustered
together recipes with a loose shopping list of main ingredients.
It might seem a bit odd to delight in the creativity of frugal cooking, because not wasting food, and passing down that value, often comes from a place of struggle — wartime, poverty, trauma and food scarcity, environmental anxiety, and other necessities. But trying to waste as little as possible is a creative act, undervalued only because it happens in the realm of the home kitchen.
But even cookbooks that do not focus entirely on no-waste
cooking seem to be pushing its principles forward, with more recipes for using
the entirety of fruits and vegetables — corn cobs, apple cores, spent lemons —
and more detailed instructions for storing, reheating and reimagining
leftovers. I enjoy the practicality and realism of these cookbooks, which tend
to acknowledge the messier ways that food shopping and cooking work in real
life.
The most well-known archetype of no-waste American food writing
is M.F.K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf,” published in 1942 during wartime food
shortages. Although after the war, when the country was no longer using ration
cards and relying on stamps and tokens, Fisher rewrote the introduction and
admitted she already found something about the book quaint. It’s found new life
over and over again since, including in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
Although Adler has her own style of writing, there’s something
about her confidence as both cook and writer that is reminiscent of Fisher,
whom she has cited before as an influence. Chapters are even named in Fisher’s
style: “How to Grow Old” or “How to Stand on Your Feet.”
The one I could not wait to tell my father about was “How to
Give Thanks,” which offers clever little recipes that start with almost-empty
jars of things. Add lime juice and a sprinkle of sugar to fish sauce to make a
quick dressing for a rice bowl or salad, Adler suggests. She also provides a
more thorough recipe for the last of the cashew butter, or any nut butter,
turning it into a noodle dish with carrots, cucumbers and herbs. (Technically,
you do not have to wait for an almost-empty jar to make this.)
It might seem a bit odd to delight in the creativity of frugal
cooking, because not wasting food, and passing down that value, often comes
from a place of struggle — wartime, poverty, trauma and food scarcity,
environmental anxiety, and other necessities. But trying to waste as little as
possible is a creative act, undervalued only because it happens in the realm of
the home kitchen.
No-waste cooking is just another way of maximizing the pleasures
of your food, of making the most out of the least. It’s not a trend — it is
what cooking is, most of the time, without requiring any kind of special name.
I would specifically wanted chilled, juicy, crunchy raw radishes
with bread, butter and a tin of sardines in olive oil. That’s why I bought so
many radishes. When that was no longer possible, so many others things were, I
just had to be open to wanting them.
The satisfaction was there, in the dish: It was simple to make
and a perfect work-from-home lunch with a piece of buttered bread and some
pickles on the side. But there was another reward, the one I’m always chasing
when I peer into the fridge and wonder what’s for dinner. It was in finding a
beginning in what had appeared, at first, to be the end.
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