Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat not your usual cooking show
New Netflix doc Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is unlike any other travel food show
There’s a perfect word that sums up everything about Netflix’s new cooking show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and it emerges over a meal that the star, Samin Nosrat, is enjoying with her hosts in Japan, where she has just learned the traditional way of making soy sauce.
As they tuck into some chicken and rice balls, the elderly woman who has helped prepare the meal laments that the rice balls are not the perfect shape. “The thing I love is wabi-sabi, that handmade quality that makes it human,” Nosrat told her host, using the Japanese term for finding beauty in imperfection.
Wabi-sabi is one of the things that makes Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, named for the four factors of successful cooking and her cookbook of the same name, remarkable. The show and its star exude it.
It is also Netflix’s first instructional cooking show, and it doesn’t look anything like the rest of that genre, which is too often the domain of cheerful domestic goddesses in glossy, polished kitchens. It’s also a travel show — Nosrat takes her viewers to a different country that exemplifies each component in the show’s title — and it doesn’t look anything like those shows, which are usually full of brash men eating organ meats and throwing back beers, either.
Instead, it looks like Nosrat’s life, beautiful in its imperfections.
“It’s funny — when I first started getting cuts of the show and I would show my friends ... everyone’s reaction was, ‘It’s really you!’” Nosrat said. “I kept asking them, like, ‘What did you expect me to be?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we thought maybe they would glam you up, or you would be acting differently, but you’re just acting exactly like you act.’”
While Nosrat does not cook the way normal people cook — she’s much, much better — she does some of the same things we do. She winces and cries her way through dicing a pile of onions. She makes mistakes, as she does when making a loaf of focaccia, and owns up to them. She throws a party in her Berkeley, Calif., home, and serves her guests roast chicken, and no one drinks out of fancy stemware.
“I’m a total ham, and I have no problem being portrayed as a person who doesn’t know everything,” Nosrat, 39, said. “I think it’s kind of a teaching tool.”
And she eats the way real people eat, even while she’s on camera: Sometimes taking too big of a bite, so she has to pause and chew before she can speak again. She slurps her pasta. When she eats something she really likes, you can see pleasure spread across her face — her eyebrows arch and her mouth might pucker.
What sets Nosrat’s show apart from others in the genre is who she is. She’s a Persian-american woman hosting a show in a genre where, usually, the people who look like her show up to make food for the white host to learn about — if they appear in the show at all.
To put it bluntly: Most travel food shows are about white male discovery. And most home cooking shows are about white female domesticity.
Nosrat gently rejects all of that. “There is a really fine line between being the discoverer and being a curious traveller,” she said. Watching depictions of Persian food on TV, “I am very aware of the feeling of having something taken from you, repackaged, and not being given credit for your own tradition. And that’s something that I never want to do to somebody else.”
That means giving more credit to women, too. One of the extraordinary things about Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is how many women appear in the show. They are there as friends and cultural guides for Nosrat, or they ’re the faces of successful artisanal food businesses. Or, they ’re elderly home cooks, eager for the chance to reveal their secrets. When men do appear, they are often in the background.
“The bulk of all cooking has been done by women,” Nosrat said. “And yet, in popular culture and in media, it’s very rarely that women are given credit for that — are honoured in any way.”
Grandmothers were an obvious choice: Not only was it a chance to show a demographic that has historically been ignored on TV, it was away to get a true expert to show Nosrat what to do.
Each of the four episodes — all shot documentary-style — focuses on one element of cooking, paired with a location: Fat in Italy, where she makes pasta and eats prosciutto and cheese; salt in Japan, where she collects seaweed and makes miso eggs; acid in Mexico, where she eats fiery salsa and harvests honey; and heat in Berkeley, where she returns to the restaurant where she got her start (Chez Panisse) to cook over a wood fire.