Working tirelessly to change the dinner game
Melissa Clark has spent years walking home cooks through recipes, introducing new flavors, playing with ingredients and cooking techniques. Whether in her weekly New York Times column, “A Good Appetite,” and the accompanying video series, or in the dozens of cookbooks she’s written with chefs, she’s always thinking about the next meal.
Addressing the daily drag of dinner, Clark leans heavily on worldly flavors in her latest cookbook, “Dinner: Changing the Game” (Clarkson Potter, $35), which arrives in stores this week. Detailing the small shifts that make a better meal, she starts by addressing the pantry and suggests that people add ingredients like sambal oelek, sumac, fish sauce and kimchi.
Clark’s strength lies in her ability to explain what makes her recipes work and the fact that she’s not fussy about getting there. You’ll learn why she uses both whole and ground spices in a recipe and her time-saving technique of splaying a chicken. All the while, she’s building a repertoire of fast, flavorful meals that you’ll want to make again and again.
Clark lives in New York with her husband, Daniel, and their 8-yearold daughter, Dahlia.
Q. How many cookbooks have you written?
A. It is 38 all told, and most of them were collaborations with chefs. For the cookbooks I’ve written on my own, this is the third big book.
Q. Is this new book about expanding dinner options or simplifying the meal process?
A. Both. Whenever I’m cooking, those are the two things that are always in the back of my mind. Can I use fewer dishes? Can you mix it in the same bowl and have less dirty dishes later? Then the next thing, how do I make it better or more interesting? It is thinking on two planes every single time I cook.
My husband gets annoyed about that. He’ll say, “Can’t you just make the same thing twice?” I made this dhal recently, I’m very into beans and grains right now. This was split peas with spices, he loved it, and I don’t know what I did. Q. Do you ever follow recipes? A. It is really hard. If I am testing a recipe, I will do it, but I have to constantly monitor myself. Q. Where did this book start? A. It grew out of my column for The New York Times. I would make these recipes for the Times, and I’d love them, but when I’d go back to make them I’d want to make them differently. The book grew out of “what would happen if,” and a lot of the recipes were inspired by my column. A lot weren’t.
Writing my column, I’m so in touch with what people do with my recipes, especially now that we have NYT Cooking (the newspaper’s recipe website).
It used to be (only) in the paper, and the only comments I’d get were from my mom. She has a lot to say. Now, all the recipes are on the database and you can read everyone else’s comments. That helped me expand my thinking about the food we’re making.
Most of the time it is really helpful, even the negative comments, which help me be a better recipe writer.
Q. This book is organized by main ingredients, but you start with a chapter on chicken. What does that say about cooking in America today?
A. It was funny, my editor kept coming back “Are you sure this is the structure you want?” Absolutely. What do we eat for dinner? Chicken. It is our No. 1 protein.
Q. How are you reframing the pantry and kitchen staples?
A. You should definitely have your good olive oil, your vinegars and mustards at all times. Most people probably have soy sauce, and if they’ve ever done Japanese cooking, they may have mirin. So they have things, but is there kimchi in your fridge? Can you find space in there for something fermented? Something spicy?
How about make your own or find a source for preserved lemons? You should already have lemons in your fridge, but preserved lemon is a whole other way to enjoy lemon.
Q. What’s a dish you’ve learned to love, perhaps despite first impressions?
A. Yeah, it took me a long time to get to tempeh. I don’t think I even have any in the book. I was an early adapter of seitan. I love seitan, but tempeh was an acquired taste.
Q. What is your current cookbook crush?
A. There are so many good cookbooks out there. In terms of flavor combinations, I love to learn about cuisines. I’m not fluent in Korean cooking, I’m just beginning to learn. I love the Maangchi cookbook. Morimoto has a new cookbook that I like, “The New Art of Japanese Cooking,” about gaining fluency and technique.
Along the same lines, I like the “Food52: A New Way to Dinner” book. It is a different take on dinner than mine. I am not a planner. I am very spur of the moment, and that book is all about planning. There are different ways to get to dinner. Q. Is there a question you hate? A. How do you do it all? We all do it all, all the time. Yes, I write a lot of books, but everybody does their thing. I hate getting a question like that.
We are all really busy, and people who work hard work hard. You just put your head down and do it. We all have something in our life where we do that. For me, it is writing cookbooks so I can live in New York City with my family. The fact is, I love sitting around and thinking about food. Melissa Clark shares this recipe from her newest cookbook, “Dinner: Changing the Game” (Clarkson Potter, 2017). She writes: “Ever since I discovered the golden-edged, caramelized joys of roasted cauliflower, I’ve hardly prepared it any other way. Roasting condenses its juices, browns the crevices, and renders the whole thing sweet and irresistible.
“In this recipe, the florets are roasted in the same oven as the sausages, which makes the whole dinner especially convenient to prepare since it all cooks at once.”