Finding Joy and Sorrow: A Journey with Samin Nosrat

A Conversation on Life and Cooking

"How do you spend your days at the moment?"

"Well, right now, I spend most of my days crying."

Thus began the two-hour interview in lower Manhattan between two young women, both seemingly haunted at times by memories (or tastes) of their parents' and grandparents' homelands: for Nosrat, Persia; for the interviewer, Anatolia.

Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis

Samin Nosrat's long-awaited sequel to "Salt, Fat, Acid" is due out in a few weeks. She sounds consumed with her publisher's punishing book tour. "Three events per day" is her self-described "emotional limit."

Maybe it's her obvious intellect, her apparent introversion, turning 45, or the death of her father. Perhaps it’s also the theme of her new book, "an ode to attention and time." The interview quickly grows philosophical.

Recalibrating Values

"The last few years, including the pandemic, led me (slowly, slowly) to recalibrate my values," she has written in the book's introduction. "It was either that or perish. I began to ask myself, 'What is a good life?'"

And then, lucky for us, she answers her own question:

"A good life is one where time—and its fast companion, attention—are the most precious gifts I can give or receive."

Apparently, there's an entire chapter about how to create rituals with friends. And she goes on, again lucky for us.

"I'm realizing that everything in the world is trying to strip away our need to make things. So I try to make something every day—not to show or perform or sell—but for no planned purpose at all."

The Art of Presence

She shares her best, non-willpower-based way she's found so far to stay offline and present: "Anything where my hands are physically otherwise occupied." For her, that means gardening and, of course, cooking. Recently, she reports losing herself for hours at a time making jam.

Reflecting on her SoCal childhood shortly after her parents left Iran in 1976, she describes herself as "a brown kid in California who never really fit in: not Iranian enough for the Iranians, not American enough for the Americans." Her first trip to Iran, at age 14, was a disappointment; she found she didn't fit in there either.

"This is where we begin to talk about life being suffering," the interviewer riffs. "This is when she tells me about the Persian mulberry tree (berries last for exactly 10 days) she eats from on her Berkeley, CA street."

Persian mulberry tree

The Pursuit of Meaning

In the book's introduction, she confesses that for years she built a life around work, believing that "if only I can make something extraordinary, then I'll finally be happy and my life will have meaning."

But, as others who flew to fast fame before her have learned, that happiness proved elusive. She began to grieve. Then, the pandemic hit.

Her father's death, full of complicated and conflicting emotions, has affected her greatly. "I realize now that there's not some invisible finish line that you'll hit and then be [whole]. I have to figure out how to do that now."

Embracing Duality

The interviewer shares with her a Greek poem by Odysseas Elytis, with a line that translates to, "An evening in the Aegean includes sorrow and joy in such equal measures, that nothing is left but the truth."

Nosrat replies with a memory of how a fan once spoke of seeing within her "a deep core of sadness." In her telling, as she "let that depression in," she realized that the emotions were entwined: "All that joy that everyone loves? It's the grief that powers it. You can't have one without the other."

In a final, for now, uncommon openness, a communal bearing of souls between two somewhat strangers (although perhaps not so uncommon for someone like Samin?), she produces an Estonian poem, "Kalevipoeg," with the lines:

"Joy and sorrow are twin brothers. Children in the house of nature, where they walk, they're hand in hand, where they go, they walk in step."

The Wisdom of Cooking

I don't really have any room on my bookshelves for another cookbook, but I will most certainly find a way to absorb all the apparent wisdom (and sorrow-forged joy) in "Good Things." Maybe I'll listen to her read it!

In the end, isn't that what we all seek? A deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world? Through cooking, through sharing, and through the simple act of being present, we can find our way to a more meaningful life.

So, what will you create today? How will you embrace both joy and sorrow in your own life?

---wix---