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Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio

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

Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio

Milk Street Radio

Food, Arts

4.42.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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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