Tomato Sauce Cooked 1,000 Times: One Woman's Culinary Odyssey

Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio

Milk Street Radio

Food, Arts

4.4 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Literary scholar Rebecca May Johnson earned her PhD studying Homer’s Odyssey, but now she’s analyzing a new kind of text: Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce recipe. Johnson reveals how studying a recipe isn’t all that different from studying Ancient Greek, and what you can learn from cooking the same recipe a thousand times. Plus, Hetty McKinnon celebrates vegetables and her father's legacy in her latest cookbook, Tenderheart; Kenji López-Alt and Chris close out their egg-peeling debate with help from our listeners; Dan Pashman cements tinned fish as much more than a passing fad; and we prepare Chicken Fatteh from Jordan.

Get the recipe for Chicken Fatteh here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Bill Street Radio from PRX, I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.
0:09.0	Many people have read Homer's Odyssey, and many people have memorized their favorite recipes.
0:14.3	Rebecca May Johnson has done both, but with an obsessively analytical approach.
0:19.8	The Odyssey is a text of someone going on a journey and having encounters with people
0:24.0	and learning things through those encounters.
0:26.3	And Odysseus only did his Odyssey for 10 years.
0:29.3	Well, how many people have spent, you know, 50 years cooking a recipe?
0:33.0	And what have they found out through that work, through the encounters that that recipe
0:37.2	has brought about?
0:39.2	A journey from ancient Greece to dinner time that's coming up later on the show.
0:44.2	But first it's my conversation with food writer, Hetty McKinnon, about her latest book,
0:48.7	Tender Heart, a book about vegetables and unbreakable family bonds.
0:53.9	Hetty, welcome back to Milk Street.
0:55.9	Hi Chris, it's so nice to be here again.
0:58.9	This book is dedicated, I think it's fair to say to your father.
1:05.2	And I want to ask a question about your father.
1:07.0	So you lost him at an early age.
1:10.0	Was there something about him in particular that made this bond so close?
1:15.5	Was it losing him at age 15?
1:19.0	It just sounds like there was a remarkable memory and relationship there.
1:23.7	So what really drove you to write this book and dedicated to him?
1:30.2	Hmm, that's a great question Chris.
	...

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