“So many of the women I wrote about in my book — even Marcella Hazan, who proudly stands on her own, Julie Sahni, Norma Shirley — all these people were called ‘the Julia Child’ of their respective home countries, and I just found that to be such a lazy and pervasive descriptor that so many women have been tagged with throughout American history.” — Mayukh Sen
“I’m really happy that veganism has taken such a dominant position in our culture — people eat better for that, and I think that it’s a great thing. But I really think that people need to respect that people take their own personal journeys when it comes to what they eat, and the best way to encourage people to take the vegetable route over the meat route is not to tell them ‘you must go vegan.’” — Yotam Ottolenghi
Mayukh Sen, who is one of my two guests on this week’s episode of Food with Mark Bittman, is someone I feel a great deal of affection for. He’s eloquent and wildly talented, one of the great new generation of food writers. Mayukh is perhaps best known for his loving profiles of women: He wrote about Grace Zia Chu and Sophia Loren for us, and he recently published Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. If you haven’t read anything Mayukh’s written, you should, because you’re really in for a treat — but he is also a terrific conversationalist, as you’ll see. Beware, though: He doesn’t like cooking.
Also on this week’s show is someone who does like cooking: Yotam Ottolenghi, who you probably know from his great cookbooks, Plenty, or Jerusalem, perhaps — there are several, they’re all beautiful, everyone I know has at least one of them. His work to shepherd complex and wonderful Middle Eastern flavors to kitchens around the world cannot be dismissed. He got people who’d never cooked before cooking with spices that they’d never heard of. I wrote about Yotam for the Times in 2011; we’ve become friendly since then, and I was as excited about his cooking then as I am now. His new book, Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love, is a bit of a departure, which we discuss.
The recipes featured in the episode are below. Please listen, subscribe, and review! Thank you, as always.
Savory Oat Porridge with Ginger-Garlic Crumbs
Breakfasts are a solo affair at the OTK, with each person left to their own devices. Tara with her big ol’ bowl of eggs and greens, Ixta and Noor with their “every green” green smoothies, and Gitai with his one-cup-of-coffee-in-silence, please. Verena will, more times than not, rustle up a bowl of porridge, sweet spices, and raisins stirred in, warm and inviting and easy on the tummy.
This porridge gets a savory twist, thanks to the addition of an umami-rich soy butter and crispy ginger-garlic yumbits. Feel free to quadruple the amount of said yumbits — they’re so good sprinkled onto eggs, rice and every other food group (we think). — The Ottolenghi test kitchen
Yellow Split Pea Purée with Buttered Onions and Caper Sauce
Yotam’s love affair with the Mediterranean means those signature staples—fatty olive oil, salty feta, briny capers!—permeate both his home kitchen and the OTK. This purée is a take on fava, a Greek mezze dish of yellow split peas with capers and red onion. It’s fantastic served as a dip, but also works alongside broiled fish or roasted meat.
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