It’s hard to remember this now, in the era of professional Instagram influencers, but there was a time, not too long ago, when many ordinary people just . . . had blogs. From about 2002 through 2006, once the Internet had stopped being the exclusive province of people with real technical expertise, and right before the dawn of widespread social-media use, WordPress and Movable Type made it possible for civilians with only a tiny bit of HTML at their fingertips to launch their own small publications. They wrote about bands and books and their love lives, often with no real goal beyond recording their daily existences. Some of these people managed to garner real readerships. One of them was Deb Perelman, a New Jersey native living in New York City, who, in 2003, started a blog to write about her bad dates. After meeting the man who would become her husband, she pivoted to writing about her domestic life, especially cooking and eating. Eventually, she named the blog Smitten Kitchen.
Today, almost all of the personal blogs that began in the early aughts are gone, but Smitten Kitchen remains. Not only does it remain: it thrives; it grows. Simultaneously, it retains both editorial independence and Deb’s unmistakable funny earnestness. Her mission is the same as it’s been for many years: to make recipes as good as they possibly can be. Her tone has remained essentially unchanged since her first tentative post, about the glory of “the damp spot on top of a ripe tomato when you twist the vine off. It smells like summer to me, back when tomatoes came free from our backyard and not at surprising sums from Holland.” Smitten Kitchen, these days, is not just a food blog: it is the food blog, what many people think of when you say those words. And now, with the publication of Deb’s second cookbook—“Smitten Kitchen Every Day”—it is poised to take Deb into the realm of her lodestars, the Inas, Marthas, and Nigellas she jokingly writes about imagining herself to be.
I have, full disclosure, been a part of the same blog-generation as Deb long enough to have had many lovely e-mail and Twitter interactions with her, and also to have once met her in person (an occasion on which I was completely starstruck). But most of my disturbingly encyclopedic knowledge of everything S.K.—the way Deb’s recipe-making mind works, her family dynamics, her likes and dislikes—comes from being a longtime reader, and from having cooked and eaten probably hundreds of her recipes. She’ll write something like “The second I had these ingredients together—lemon, tahini, butternut squash, garlic, chickpeas—I couldn’t believe it was the first time,” and I’ll suddenly be convinced that I need to make a warm butternut-squash salad for dinner. I love the work of many other food writers, but there’s no other cook with whom I’ve achieved quite this level of one-sided intimacy. And I’m not some outlier weirdo here! To prove it, I asked a friend who has also been an S.K. reader since the beginning to quickly list five things she knows about Deb’s palate. She responded in seconds: “1. Doesn’t do fish. 2. Will fritter anything. 3. Thinks of crepes as an easy make-ahead food 4. Not hugely into spicy food 5. Isn’t afraid to rework a complicated recipe or dumb down ingredients from a traditional one.”
This is pretty much the same list I’d make, though I’d never noticed the crêpe detail, and I’m inclined to give Deb credit for trying to become more fish-curious. But I’d add another item, and probably list it first: the enduring backbone of the S.K. aesthetic is that Deb is a recovering vegetarian who sees meat as a form of seasoning. She definitely doesn’t think it’s a requisite part of a complete meal. This contributes to the over-all affordability of cooking the S.K. way, something that other cookbook authors seem not to take into account when devising their recipes, unless they’re specifically writing about cooking on a budget. Deb assumes, rightly, that almost everyone is on a budget, and builds frugality into her recipes in small but welcome ways. She will never ask you to use a tiny amount of a big-ticket item that only comes in large quantities, for example. She has genuine love for beans, grains, eggs, and tofu. In this sense, her cookbooks are a part of the legacy of Mollie Katzen, who popularized hearty, mushroomy vegetarian main dishes in her “Moosewood Cookbook” and its sequels.
Everyone I know who cooks has a favorite S.K. recipe. From the new book, I already have a few keepers, and many that I’ve bookmarked to try. I love it when Deb tries to replicate the humble, takeout-y foods of N.Y.C., which she somehow manages to do without being gimmicky. Her at-home halal-cart chicken, complete with copious “white sauce,” provides all the primal satisfaction of the original, and she has unlocked the secret of the carrot-ginger dressing that comes on sushi-bar salads, which I will always think of as Dojo dressing, after the wallet-friendly restaurant near N.Y.U. (The secret: white miso.) I also can’t wait to try a few of the weirder-sounding dishes, like “caramelized cabbage risotto.” Deb really, really loves cabbage. She explains that this is because she wasn’t served it growing up, and thus never developed an aversion: she loves it “with the open-hearted abandon of someone who chose it.”
Such is Deb’s power: I trust her when she tells me that something called “sesame-peanut pesto” is worth getting out the Cuisinart for, and that I should serve “loaded breakfast potato skins” at my next brunch. I know that Deb isn’t padding with filler to reach a page count or to churn out content; her commitment to the recipes she creates is evangelical and absolute. It sounds like a job-interview cliché, but if she has a flaw it is, truly, her perfectionism: she weighs ingredients and calibrates cooking times precisely, and this baker’s mind-set can sometimes irk when you’re just trying to make a salad. But if you do follow her thoroughly tested recipes to the letter—like, say, her reworking of classic canned-soup green-bean casserole, perfect for Thanksgiving—you are inevitably rewarded. Dinner is served, and you will likely be tempted to write about it online, or at least post a picture of it to Instagram.
