Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love

The author of the revolutionary Salt Fat Acid Heat returns with another boldly innovative, nearly subversive book, this time masquerading as a great collection of everyday recipes.

If Salt Fat was written to free cooks from recipes, Good Things, coming along eight years later, is more comfortable with the best aspects of what recipes can do: share amazing ideas for wonderful food. 

Nosrat shares those ideas in a variety of formats. Her chicken braised with apricots and harissa gets a familiar, standard recipe format, including notes on what might accompany it well and tips on varying the recipe with lamb. But long-cooked broccoli, which “encourages broccoli’s bitter and sulfurous aromatic compounds to dissipate, leaving only sweetness behind,” is simple enough to be rendered in a few paragraphs with the ingredients run into the text. A chart called “boiled spring vegetable matrix” provides manifold ideas for treating asparagus, snap peas, English peas and fava beans.

You can employ these recipes and have a joyous time cooking from this book without ever engaging with its more thoughtful aspects, which might be like having a blast driving a shiny sports car to and from work without ever taking it out on the open road to see how it really handles. 

But Nosrat is a cook’s cook, someone who’s interested in more than just a quick meal. Perhaps you’ll recognize a kinship when she writes, “I’ve always had an unbridled enthusiasm for for things others might consider useless–apricot pits, the liquid from a can of chickpeas, or the oil left behind after frying a pot of shallots.” 

Or, “The beauty of cooking is that it’s a vessel for both time and attention. Cooking for someone, or sitting down for a meal together, is about more than nourishment–it’s a way to share what’s most valuable to you with the people you care about.”

Engage with this book and you'lll find it transformative.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.