Samin Nosrat's 'Good Things' is Here and it's Her Most Personal Work Yet

Samin Nosrat’s first book took a lifetime to create. The earliest inkling for Salt Fat Acid Heat—her 2017 hit that definitively distilled cooking down to four elements—came some time between the late ’90s and early aughts. At the time, the San Diego-native was just beginning her career as a cook at Chez Panisse, the West Coast institution helmed by farm-to-table icon Alice Waters.

Nearly two decades later, Nosrat ascended the culinary ranks and Salt Fat Acid Heat spawned one four-part Netflix series, one James Beard Award, and countless weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. Where other books focused on how many grams of flour to use, Salt Fat Acid Heat broke down how to make the most out of the ingredients you have.

When her second book was announced in 2019, Nosrat didn’t initially intend for it to become a book of recipes. But after pouring a lifetime of musings into Salt Fat Acid Heat what could possibly come next? Good Things, her long-awaited follow-up, takes a different approach. The pages are rich with recipes and rituals that Nosrat comes back to again and again.

Celebrity chefs have taken many forms over the years—there are steely taskmasters, domestic goddesses, and swaggering rock stars. Nosrat is none of the above. Instead, she’s like a friend who guides you through the kitchen, reminding you that pleasure is just as essential to your recipes as precision. The secret ingredient is her effervescence.

Before Good Things hit shelves, Nosrat spoke about her journey bringing Good Things to fruition, why she goes grocery shopping in every city she visits and how she found healing in a dessert recipe.

When you’re on the road, does food ground you?

“It depends. If I go somewhere where I know that that city has a specialty, it’s nice to have that to focus on. But anywhere I go, I love to go to the grocery store. Sometimes I’m in a place for less than 24 hours, so it’s not that I’m grocery shopping, I just feel like I understand something about people when I see their grocery store. Some of it is understanding the agricultural situation in a place, but also, it’s just interesting to see, like, what does yogurt come [packaged] in? What does your candy aisle look like? I’ve always loved that kind of stuff.”

I’ve heard a lot of people say that they do that in Canadian grocery stores, too. There can be such an international perspective in them.

“That’s been my experience of Canada always. Like, how incredibly international it is. The other thing I love seeing is—I don’t know what the new, better term for the ethnic food aisle is, let’s call it the international ingredients area or something—but that’s what I always love seeing in a place. It’s a shorthand to [learning which] immigrant communities are there.

Growing up, what were your family’s dinnertime rituals?

“My mom pretty much did all the food-related labour in our house. But once my brothers and I were eight, nine, and 10 years old, we were responsible for setting and clearing the table. It was something we were all able to participate in. Also, because we’re Iranian, we eat yogurt on everything. So, one of the things was, ‘Who’s going to get the yogurt out of the fridge for this meal?’ No matter what it was—pizza, spaghetti, Mexican food, Persian food—we always had to make sure that yogurt was on the table.”

In Good Things you say, “The beauty of cooking is that it’s a vessel for both time and attention.” The way you describe Persian food is that it’s very labour-intensive. Did seeing this growing up help you see cooking as an act of love?

“Things were often very chaotic in our household, but a very steadying factor was my mom cooking for us. She was very good at it, but I don’t know if it brought her pleasure to do that. I think taking care of us did, but I don’t know if the act of cooking was a slog for her or something she liked. I do think my mom’s a control freak and she liked that she had a part of the house that was hers.

“Looking back, while I process a lot of the sadness I have and the grief, I’m understanding some of the chaos and the instability and the trauma. Inside of that, it’s so beautiful that my mom did that for us. That was a way that we were able to feel steadiness in a family life that wasn’t always necessarily very steady.”

Early in Good Things, you write about how reaching such incredible success with Salt Fat Acid Heat didn’t pay off with happiness. How did that perspective shift inform this book?

“One of the things that happened in the wake of the show coming out and people becoming familiar with me is that I became a real avatar for joy. I’m not an actor. It’s not fake. When I’m laughing and being silly, it’s genuine, but there’s a lot more to me than only that. I started to feel stressed and almost resentful that that was the thing that everyone wanted from me. I felt like it trapped me inside this one persona that I don’t feel is completely true because I’m not always happy. I had to find a way for myself to be able to do the work and offer these bits of delight and joy and leave room for myself to be a whole person with a whole spectrum of emotions.”

“I had worked so hard, I had given so much up, I pushed and pushed, and I was still lonely and sad. If that was my reality, then what good was this thing that I’ve been doing with my life? What’s the meaning of cooking and what’s the point of writing another book? I basically told you how to make everything [in Salt Fat Acid Heat]. But I also really like making and sharing things that I like with people. That’s so inherent to who I am. I got to a point where I realized that I do want to write a book and want to talk about these things with [my audience], but I had to find a way to do it that didn’t feel disingenuous.

Was writing Good Things a practice in taking control or was it a practice in surrender and stillness?

“Definitely the [latter]. There’s not a lot in me that’s very calm. There were a lot of things that I had to accept in making this book. For example, I had to accept very quickly that I can only control the experience of making something. I cannot control anyone’s experience of consuming that thing. To a surprising degree, that experience with Salt Fat Acid Heat was more positive and bigger than anything I could have imagined.

In the dessert section of Good Things, you write about how yellow cake represented a sense of belonging that felt slightly out of reach. Did creating your own yellow cake recipe reclaim and heal that for you?

“For over 20 years, I’ve been trying to crack this cake. At some point, I had to ask myself, ‘Why am I so obsessed with yellow cake?’ The long journey offered me an opportunity to look at myself and what this cake represented and understand this childhood landmark.

“A lot of times, I’ll be talking about myself growing up in San Diego and I’ll say, ‘It was a sea of whiteness. It was so white.’ At some point, I thought, ‘Am I imagining this? Maybe I’m making it up. Maybe it wasn’t as white as I thought.’ I did have some Indian friends and East Asian friends, but it was a very, very white childhood. So, it was very satisfying for me when I unearthed some photos of my eighth birthday party and it was me and nine blond kids. Then I saw a picture of me in a pool in high school and it was me and a bunch of blond girls. I wasn’t making it up.

“Being able to contextualize this cake inside of that childhood and allowing it to represent something was very healing. I don’t think it’s incredibly subversive for me to have made a yellow cake, I hope it’s something people make and enjoy. But in a larger way, I did not realize until probably a year or two after Salt Fat Acid Heat was published, that I had earned the opportunity to be shelved on a shelf called General Cooking in the cooking section of a book store, and that no other brown women are authors on that section. It’s all white people.

“So maybe it is a bit healing to get a buttermilk yellow cake with chocolate frosting from a girl whose name you can’t pronounce.”

“Well, to be very frank, I think it absolutely can be if you’re sharing it with people who are being starved. We live in a world that’s trying to deprive us of our humanity constantly, so I do think that any act, no matter how small, that we do in our daily lives to preserve that humanity, is resistance.

“In a world that’s truly trying to replace humans with machines and taking away basic dignities from people, I don’t think it’s enough. The world is constantly trying to strip us of our sensory pleasure of humanity and sell us on a message that you can just buy your way to happiness, comfort, deliciousness, and I don’t think that’s true. In that way, I think it’s a form of resistance.”

Get your copy of Good Things today.

Feature image by Aya Brackett.