The Obamasâ White House chef would have us all âEat a Little Betterâ
Many good books have great first lines, but theyâre mostly novels rather than cookbooks. So when you open the debut cookbook from Sam Kass, out from Clarkson Potter in April, and begin: âThe Secret Service hates it when you run in the White House,â you know a few things right up front. First, that youâll be getting a back story as well as recipes from the six years that Kass spent cooking for the Obamas in the White House, where he was not only their personal chef but senior advisor for nutrition policy, executive director for Michelle Obamaâs Letâs Move initiative and co-creator of the White Houseâs landmark vegetable garden. Second, that Kassâ "Eat a Little Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better Worldâ is a lot more than its casual, do-gooder title might suggest.
The book takes off from that first line â Kass, who was a Division III baseball player in college, was running to get the first familyâs dinner on the table, an event often complicated by his other tasks, not to mention the thousand tasks of his boss â and keeps going. The introduction frontloads the narrative, combining elements of memoir, mission statement and operating manual, so that weâre firmly embedded in the landscape before we get to the cooking. And itâs a pretty great landscape, not only of the White House, with its kitchen and dining room and garden of mustard greens and escarole and lavender, but of the simple yet profound approach that Kass has taken to both making and thinking about food.
âYou wonât get any lectures or shaming,â Kass writes in his smart, chatty prose. âJust my no-bull take, plus advice thatâll cut through the information clutter that has complicated our relatively simple task.â Because Kassâ project with this book is not really food policy (thatâs apparently his next book), but getting us to the dinner table much as he did the Obamas, to eat good, unintimidating, healthful food â with more vegetables and fruit, less sugar and preservatives and meat, and to make better choices. âBetterâ is the operative word here, as a recurrent descriptor (itâs a word that occurs almost as much as âawesomeâ), and itâs the key to Kassâ deeply accessible, slow-pitch approach.
âEat a Little Betterâ is a thoroughly disarming book, intentionally so. By the time Kass gets to the more than 90 recipes, heâs grounded us in his homey pragmatism even as heâs managed to slide bits about nutrition labels, GMOs, food additives and fiber (fiber!) over the plate. Kass has a history degree from the University of Chicago (he started cooking for the Obamas before they went to Washington, D.C.) and trained as a chef at the Michelin-starred restaurant MĂśrwald in Vienna. Kass also spent about five years traveling and cooking around the world, and becoming interested in global food systems, long before he found himself in the White House, so his prose and the recipes themselves have both context and the kind of earned simplicity that comes from classical training.
Which gets us to the recipes, which are as disarming and approachable as the rest of the book â and seemingly the chef himself. (Check out his 2015 TED talk, and his Instagram feed.) The first recipe is a primer on how to roast vegetables, and itâs both helpful and emblematic of Kassâ use of technique, utility and flavor. There are sections on meat and fish, and grains and beans, with lovely photographs by Aubrie Pick, and helpful sidebars about making smarter choices. The nearly 300 pages are threaded with personal anecdotes â Kass is married to Alex Wagner, a journalist and author, and the two have a young son â and more fun asides about his culinary life with Michelle and Barack Obama and their own kids.
Recipe: Mustard green salad Âť
So you can organize your pantry like Sasha and Malia did, and get Kassâ recipe for the âlucky pastaâ he made the president in the tiny kitchen of Air Force One. The recipes are often purposely simple, but theyâre not simplistic. The recipe for mustard green salad, for example, which Kass says came about because of an overabundance of some purple greens in the White House garden, seems ordinary at first but has a deceptive flavor that builds as you fork it up from the bowl until you realize that youâve eaten the whole thing. Kassâ recipe for roasted sweet potatoes (a favorite vegetable of his), which are similarly addictive, are paired with condiment bowls judiciously loaded with things (brown butter, bacon, sour cream) that remind you that he is hardly an ascetic.
One public service announcement is needed, for a cookbook that is actually loaded with them, albeit with humor and remarkable subtlety: There is not a single recipe for desserts in this book. But if you paid attention to the big bowl of fruit that Kass instituted very early in the Obama kitchen, and repeatedly points out (âwe eat what we seeâ), youâll know why.
Cookbook of the week: "Eat a Little Better: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World" by Sam Kass (Clarkson Potter, $32.50)
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