The Audacious Book Club: Start Here by Sohla El-Waylly
(Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook)
Chef Sohla El-Waylly is becoming well-known for her culinary wisdom, but one of her most enduring talents is the ability to offer not just the what of a dish, but the why. In a recent episode of Ancient Recipes with Sohla—her show in collaboration with the History Channel—she makes a Pièces Montée à la Carême, a dessert beloved by Napoleon and made famous by Marie-Antoine Carême, the first French celebrity chef and known for bringing what El-Waylly calls “architectural thinking” to French dessert cuisine. After giving viewers a rundown on Carême’s history and baking, she tackles the dessert, using some ingredients she’s never used before, such as gum tragacanth, deciphers Carême’s measurements, offers context for different components of the recipes, meticulously constructs the towering dessert while problem-solving on the fly, and even calls in other experts, such as historian Dr. Ken Albala to give viewers a more nuanced understanding of the dessert and the culinary artist who originated it.
El-Waylly’s reputation for problem-solving and reinvention and her methodological inquisitiveness have blossomed along with her career, which has taken her from early days in Outback Steakhouse and the Cheesecake Factory to the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera. She has also shepherded her own eatery, Hail Mary, written for Bon Appetit, and Food52, among many other publications and hosted her own web series, of which Ancient Recipes is the latest iteration. Her reputation and wisdom have been showcased yet again in El-Waylly’s newest project: Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, her first cookbook.
In the introduction to Start Here, El-Waylly gives us a bit of the origin story for her desire to seek out the why: she writes that she has always struggled with the way she was supposed to learn, whether it was memorizing state capitals or following another chef’s commands, because she’s always wanted to understand the reasoning behind the knowledge itself: “I needed to learn the whys, so I could confidently figure out the hows and whats,” she writes. What she calls her “stubborn way of thinking” has gifted us a cookbook that offers more than personal anecdotes and their associated recipes; instead, the author gives us a broad base of cooking knowledge, insight into the science that helps to construct our favorite dishes, and lessons intended to teach us culinary techniques not just so that we can replicate them, but so that we can understand them.
Start Here offers us a welcoming, inventive, and overall deeply human approach to cooking and to life. Just as she does in Ancient Recipes, El-Wayllah encourages us to make mistakes and even to fail, because, she notes, “confidence isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about moving forward after you’ve messed up and believing in yourself enough to try again.”
I’m looking forward to discussing this excellent cookbook with you over the next few weeks. I also hope you’ll join us for our Zoom this month on January 16, where I’ll have the pleasure of cooking with Sohla. If you want to cook along with us, we will be making the Chicken Soup with Masa Dumplings!
As we embark on this month’s discussion, what do you look for in a cookbook?
Thanks for this rec! How do we register for the Zoom? I didn't see an email in the newsletter email either.
So excited!