Every week, Tamar Adler answers a reader’s letter on her Substack newsletter, The Kitchen Shrink. Tamar, a cook and food writer from New York, operates as both culinary agony aunt, responding to questions which run the gamut from the practical – how to use a bag of young salad leaves ‘on the turn,’ what to do with frozen fish fillets of questionable quality – to the philosophical, where cooking becomes a portal to some of life’s biggest questions.
“People get very poetic,” says Tamar, scrolling through her archive beside me; she shares the response she is currently working on, to someone whose anxiety precludes them from finding their usual joy in food. “When I’m hopeless,” they write, “my cooking becomes grey and flat. How can I learn to cook correctively?”
Tamar is well-placed to answer questions like this. Not just because she’s a chef and the James Beard award-winning writer of four books about food, but because hopelessness – and how it pertains to cooking – has become something of a special subject for her. Her latest book, Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, is the upshot of Tamar’s year-long effort to journal her way out of depression, its 365 entries recording “daily delights from the kitchen and just outside it.” Journaling had been her husband Pete’s idea, hoping it might be an exit route from the all-consuming solipsism of thoughts like, “I’ve wasted my precious time on Earth.”
She started the journal on 1 January 2024, not expecting to relish anything, but simply to notice – waking up to the waft of cooking bacon on 22 February, say, or the “wild” and “sour” strawberry flavour of good rosé on a midsummer’s evening, or the “cognitive stickiness” of bay leaves in a pot of farro in October. “I was chasing presence,” she tells me, moments with food which might reignite her interest but, more pressingly, punctuate the days into some kind of shape. Over time, it started to work. “We read for transformation, hoping that a book will leave us changed in some way,” Tamar reflects, but in this case, her transformation came from writing one.
Feast reads like a sensory reawakening. We bear witness to Tamar’s child-like pleasure in culinary tasks; making grilled cheese sandwiches, she becomes “entirely occupied” by a sharp knife and feels “lucky to have been so absorbed in a necessity”. In the autumn, she voices the truth universally acknowledged that “it is impossible to feel entirely bad amid fumes of tomato sauce, sweet, summer hot, fragrant and promising.” She notices and savours scents and flavours but also the textures and contours and language of the kitchen. How a chanted “om” at the end of a yoga class invariably plants the seed of an omelette, or the beauty of the word for “soup” in almost any language – and indeed, the beauty of any soup itself. Tamar describes the book as an exercise in “tricking [her]self – both into cooking and being exposed to pleasure” and admits that the necessity of food – not least of cooking for her nine-year-old son, Louis – kept her going. “You don’t have to observe the sunrise or sunset or whatever beautiful thing is happening out there, but you do really have to cook and eat,” she says, adding, “and there is so much pleasure to be had in the kitchen.”
Arguably, Tamar had already been woken up to the pleasure of food, long before the book came to be. She admits to “hating” food as a kid – partly, perhaps, because of what meals meant for a 1980s American childhood – Rice-a-roni, fish sticks, plastic cheese in many guises. “I just felt like I was being assaulted all the time,” she says, “but looking back, I probably just had sensitive taste buds.” I wonder if there was something, too, about discovering food on her own terms, which is precisely what she has spent her career doing. How did she overcome her food revulsions? “I trained myself,” she reflects, and by the time she was in her early twenties and working as an editor on a literary magazine in New York City, cooking was all she could think about. She took a weekend job at Prune, chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s now-closed institution in the East Village, working the notoriously difficult Saturday brunch shift. She never slept the night before service, she says, her eyes glistening, jewel-like, “but I loved it.”
She spent the majority of the ‘noughties’ at different junctions around a crossroads between writing and cooking (at some iconic restaurants, no less, such as Chez Panisse in northern California). She also had a place waiting for her at law school, which she deferred several times, and never took. “In truth, I always wanted to be a writer but never admitted it,” she writes to me, later. “I am very introverted, but I love cooking for people. I think the only way I'm comfortable interacting with humanity is via the rituals of the kitchen and table.”
I discovered Tamar’s food writing when her first book, The Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, found its way to my desk at The Guardian’s Cook magazine. It was 2013 and the book wasn’t yet published in the UK, but I found myself spellbound by both its style – its lyricism and gentle cadence; by all accounts, the opposite of a restaurant kitchen – and its thrifty, practical approach to home-cooking. I realised Tamar cooked the way I liked to cook, but which I had never articulated, or certainly, not so elegantly. Vegetables reigned supreme; scraps were priceless and always put to work; stocks, pickle juice and the water leftover from boiling vegetables had a singular magic – “potions,” she called them – and the oil from a tin of anchovies was veritable manna. One meal flowed into another elastically and was conveyed in prose that was never prescriptive, but which shimmered with the possibilities of ingredients. The size of a novel, which I would take to bed with me, The Everlasting Meal was the antithesis of commercial cookbooks (100 recipes, each with a sumptuous photo), and I clung to it fervently, cultishly, a culinary manifesto that seemed to speak directly to me.
Fast forward to 2026, and we all need our cooking to have some of Tamar’s economy and grace. Price rises. Food waste. The climate emergency. “I wrote The Everlasting Meal during the financial crisis of 2008,” she says, “but it keeps becoming relevant again. The funny thing about writing a book about living well in the face of catastrophe is the inevitability of catastrophe further down the line.” 
The green rice – a “risotto as green as spring grass” – which falls on 31 March in Feast on Your Life, is emblematic of Tamar’s style, a nimble non-recipe recipe that can shapeshift with what you have available, and whatever potions you have lurking in your kitchen. For Tamar, cooking in early spring in Madrid, where she currently lives with Pete and Louis, this meant parsley and spinach leaves and steps, a few spring onion tops and the stock leftover from making a dish with rabbit the day before: a spring dish “vibrating with more life than it could ever possess in a dream”.
Descriptions like this are so vivid that Tamar’s books hardly need photographs (although one of the four does feature them). It struck me, while reading Feast, that the nature of journaling like this – of “noticing” exercise – sits in stark opposition to the culture of scrolling, of smart phones. It required her to look up, not down; to see outside of herself.
“I don't naturally take pictures of things, images are not a natural medium for me,” she says, “and so it was wonderful to have a mandate to record bits of my life in a way that required a pen and paper.” She takes a notepad with her everywhere and has just resolved to buy a mini watercolour set, to paint instead of taking pictures. The project of journaling, then, is not finished. “I still rely very much on the practice of noticing small things,” she says, “and it’s given me a resilience I didn’t have before. It’s not always culinary now, but it’s a proven way of seeing goodness. I have realised that finding joy takes some focus.”
Tamar wears the TOAST Cotton Oxford Oversized Long Shirt, Railroad Stripe Pleated Cotton Skirt and Orchard Check Cross Back Linen Cotton Apron. The Osteria Stonewashed Cutlery Set, Charvet Linen Tea Towel, Skye Corewijn Wave Pasta Plate and Fluted Moroccan Glasses Set also feature.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Mikel Bastida Aldeiturriaga.
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