San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Stressed out? ‘Steamed’ brings a muchneeded physical element to cooking
In “Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings on the Table” (Running Press; $20), authors Rachel Levin and Tara Duggan look at all the ways the act of cooking can be therapeutic. Everyone needs to eat, but there are other reasons to turn to the kitchen: You can release some aggression pounding meat for the Pummeled Pork Tonkatsu; have a good cry while slicing onions for the Feeling Sad Onion Soup; or sneak in some downtime with a handsoff recipe like Peace Out Pot o’ Pintos as the beans simmer on the stove.
Levin, a Chronicle contributor, deploys the same wit and humor that’s on display in her previous cookbook, “Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews” (Chronicle Books). Chronicle reporter Duggan, the former assistant editor of the Food + Wine section who now covers climate, brings the recipe chops demonstrated in her other cookbooks, which include “Root to Stalk Cooking: The Art of Using the Whole Vegetable” (Ten Speed Press).
Organized into three sections — Anger Management, It’s All Right to Cry, and Chilling the
F Out — the book intersperses psychological research about why these techniques are cathartic with recipes for main courses, sides and desserts. Tweets, quotes from pop culture and playful illustrations in place of styled food photography enhance the irreverent tone. We caught up with the authors to learn a little bit more about what went in to making this extremely ofthemoment book. (This Q&A was edited for clarity and length.)
Q: Can you tell me a bit about how and when you came up with this idea?
Levin: It was actually before the pandemic, before we were sequestered in our kitchens, before the world fell apart, we came up with the idea. The world was in a terrible state because of systemic racism, climate change, wildfire. We realized that cooking has always been thought of as kind of therapeutic. But a cookbook had really rarely gotten into why is it therapeutic? And in what ways?
We turned in our first draft and then COVID hit, and it felt kind of prescient. It could not be more on point in that moment.
Q: And you’ve got categories — pounding meat, cutting up ingredients that are going to make you cry, etc. Did you start with those categories, or was it more thinking about dishes that feel therapeutic to make and figuring out why?
Levin: For me it was pounding chicken and chicken Parm, because I do that every year for my husband’s birthday. Then Tara kind of took it from there.
Duggan: I want to give you credit for the crying idea because we always try to fight crying. We have a sidebar on the silly ways people try to avoid crying, (but) it kind of feels good sometimes.
Q: Where did these dishes came from? Are these all things that you could cook fairly often?
Duggan: Some of them are things that I cook a lot like the green sauces, chermoula or pesto that you make in mortar and pestle. I don’t always make them that way. I would often do it in a food processor — puree them. But doing it in a mortar and pestle, it’s super satisfying as you’re smashing, and you get better flavor because you’re not just cutting up the herbs and the garlic, you’re mashing them and that releases more volatile compounds. So, it’s fun to reinvent a few things that I already cook a lot. And then some of them were things that I hadn’t really made before like the biang biang noodles, the handpulled noodles. There are some theories that they’re named for the sounds that you make with the noodle on the counter.
Q: So what do you do for catharsis if you get stressed out working on a catharsis cookbook?
Duggan: Cannabis cookies.
Levin: That’s true. That recipe makes a lot of cookies. It was peak COVID. I hadn’t really seen anyone out at my house for a while, and Tara comes over … with homebaked cookies. It was the sweetest thing. I’m like, Oh my god, this is what I need. It was just a fun coauthor/cookbook moment.
The most stressful part, I think, was getting groceries (to test the recipes), as it was during a time that was stressful itself, and then trying to get things you might not have in your pantry and having to go find it in a special place.
Duggan: I was doing the book on top of my job at The Chronicle. And it was hard during the pandemic to have extra work. I think we were all so wiped out. But, for me, doing a cookbook project where I’m developing recipes, the planning part stresses me out — like, how am I going to get through all this on deadline? But the nice thing is you get dinner out of the deal. And I always had my kids’ help.
Levin: This is kind of a separate thing, but I feel like kind of the last thing we want to be doing right now is cooking when we can go to restaurants again. But at the same time, the kitchen will always have been there and will always be a refuge and a place where we need to retreat, to make dinner and to cry and feel better.