Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends

By Dorothy Kalins

From the publisher: A beautifully written tribute to the people who teach us to cook and guide our hands in the kitchen, by a founding editor of Saveur.

The cooking lessons that stick with us, returning to us every time we make a particular dish, are the ones we absorb as we spend time with good cooks in the kitchen. Dorothy Kalins, the founding editor-in-chief of Saveur magazine, calls them our Kitchen Whisperers, people who, consciously or not, pass on to us their cooking wisdom. Our kitchen whisperers help make us the cooks we become.

Dorothy’s prolific career in food media means many of her Kitchen Whisperers are some of the best chefs around (though the lessons she’s learned from fellow home cooks are just as important). For Dorothy, a lifetime of exposure to incredible cooks and chefs means that she can’t enter her kitchen without hearing the voices of mentors and friends with whom she cooked over the years as they reveal their favorite techniques. Marcella Hazan warns her against valuing look over flavor. Christopher Hirsheimer advises that sometimes water is the best liquid to add to a dish rather than stock or wine. Her onetime Southern mother-in-law wisely knows that not everyone who asks for a biscuit is food hungry. Woven through the text are dozens of narrative recipes, from her mother’s meat loaf to David Tanis’s Swiss Chard Gratin. The Kitchen Whisperers will inspire you to identify and cherish the food mentors in your own life, just as it will urge you to seek them out.

Favorite quote: “Gifts from my kitchen whisperers may not be homemade cookies in fancy tins, or jars of fruit preserves tricked out in gingham headscarves, but they are greater gifts by far. . . . Each time I roll a lemon, or make a biscuit, or throw together a salad, or stuff a chicken, or stir a risotto, or slice an apple, or sniff a carton of milk for freshness, I hear their voices, and they comfort me, warm as a hug.”

Dimensions: 8.25 x 5.5 / 290 pages

Softcover