How Samin Nosrat Learned to Love the Recipe

“I was losing my mind,” the chef and writer Samin Nosrat said. We were sitting in the living room of her small house in Oakland, and she was describing a period in her life, just after the arrival of COVID vaccines, when she was sunk in a depression and floundering in her attempts to write the follow-up to her 2017 cooking guide, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” That book was a phenomenon whose promise to teach readers the four “elements of good cooking”—thus liberating them from the tyranny of recipes—proved irresistible. It earned Nosrat a James Beard Award, spawned a Netflix series, and sold 1.4 million copies. In 2019, Nosrat sold a proposal for an ambitious sequel called “What to Cook,” which would help readers decide on a dish based on four constraints: time, resources, preferences, and ingredients. But the concept refused to cohere. After two years, she said, “I was, like, ‘Take the money back.’ ”

One of her agents suggested that she just write, you know, a cookbook, with recipes. At first, Nosrat resisted. Though “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” includes recipes, it also sniffs at them. For beginning cooks, Nosrat writes, “recipes can be necessary and comforting, like training wheels.” She stresses that their ultimate goal should be to remove those training wheels: to “improvise, and judge what good food looks like on your own terms.”

Nosrat distrusts recipes, but she’s very good at devising them. She might be responsible for more canonical dishes than any other writer in the past decade. The list of her hits reads like the Billboard Top Ten: her buttermilk roast chicken, her garlicky green beans, her tahdig, her focaccia. Just the other day, a friend was trying to figure out how to cook some chicken thighs, and I advised her to try Nosrat’s conveyor-belt chicken. As has been the case every one of the dozens of times I’ve cooked it, it worked perfectly.

Nosrat tried to follow her agent’s advice, but she felt like a fraud. “There was nothing that made me excited to cook,” she recalled. “I was just trying to figure out, like, What is the point? Who cares?”

One morning, Nosrat was in the middle of a misbegotten experiment—attempting to prepare meat al pastor in her kitchen, inspired by a documentary about tacos—when a friend texted and asked if she and her kids could stop over. “Sure,” Nosrat told her. “I’m just over here ruining some pork.”

At this time, Nosrat said, she was searching for a way to handle the fame that “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” had brought, and the concomitant feelings of guilt and self-doubt. Perhaps more important, she had tapered off the antidepressants she’d taken for years, in order to try psychedelic therapy—which didn’t work. The six pounds of pork she had ruined seemed like a synecdoche for her whole life, which, apparently, she had also ruined. When her friend arrived and saw her predicament, she suggested that Nosrat bring the pork to her house a few nights later; they’d figure out what to do with it together. Nosrat grasped at the invitation like a lifeline. That get-together evolved, over time, into Monday dinner, a now weekly ritual with a group of ten or so that, Nosrat told me, has become “the heart of everything for me.”

It’s also at the heart of the book Nosrat has finally produced: “Good Things,” part cookbook, part self-portrait, which does indeed contain recipes, along with advice, confessions, and stories about her dog. It begins with an acknowledgment that Nosrat worries she’s betrayed her readers and herself by assembling “a book of recipes after writing ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,’ which is a veritable manifesto designed to free cooks from relying on them.” But, as the introduction suggests, “Good Things” represents a dramatic rethinking of what Nosrat wants out of life in general. She’s still not quite sure where that leads. It might take her away from food entirely.

Nosrat was born in San Diego, the child of Iranian immigrants who’d arrived in the U.S. just a few years prior. When she was eighteen months old, her three-year-old sister, Sammar, died of brain cancer; the tragedy, Nosrat told me, contributed to her spending her own life as “a crazy achievement machine,” in an attempt to please her mother and make up for the absence. She struggled to fit in socially—a consequence, she’s said, of growing up “as a brown kid in a super-white world”—but excelled academically. She was studying at U.C. Berkeley when, bewitched by a meal at Alice Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, she got a job there bussing tables and eventually talked her way into a culinary internship. Or, as Nosrat jokes, “I went from my incredibly demanding, impossible-to-please mother’s house into another incredibly demanding, impossible-to-please mother’s house.” She learned in Waters’s kitchen, then left the nest, serving stints as a sous-chef elsewhere, taking catering gigs, and beginning to teach others. Her first thirty-odd years, she said, trained her to be a perfectionist. “There’s a lot I appreciate in that,” she said. “I also constantly use it as a cudgel to, like, hate myself and be mean to myself.”

Now forty-five, Nosrat sees in her life “a funny arc, of becoming a cook in this world-class kitchen, and then having to unlearn that in order to survive as a human in the world.” The tension is detectable in her work. “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” is a welcoming cookbook in many ways—Nosrat is an engaging, funny writer, her lessons for the amateur chef peppered with jokey asides and whimsical illustrations—but it is rigorous, even stern. For all its flexibility, it still insists upon a version of the high standards that its author learned at the feet of those demanding mothers. Do not be satisfied with what some recipe might lead you to prepare for dinner on a Tuesday night, the book says. Taste! Experiment! Demand better! Nosrat even gently chides the dabbler who hasn’t plowed through the whole text: “This book is really about the journey, not the destination. So maybe stop trying to skip ahead in life, and head back to the beginning. XO.”