Susie Essman Reheat: An Oldie but a Goodie

Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Ed Levine sits down with comedian and actress Susie Essman to explore her decades-long career in stand-up, television, and improvisational comedy. They trace

Key takeaways

• Susie Essman maintained a vegetarian diet for 35 years before quitting after the smell of bacon cooking for her husband Jimmy triggered an immediate craving.
• She compares improvisational cooking to stand-up comedy, noting that both rely heavily on timing, spontaneity, and reading your ingredients or audience.

Main topics

• Stand-up comedy career and NYC club scene
• Vegetarianism to omnivore diet shift

Notable quotes

"Bacon was really your gateway food. It was."

Conclusion

The episode provides a candid, humorous look at how spontaneity and relentless

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:06) Welcome to Special Sauce, Sirius Eats podcast. Every week, we'll find out just what the special sauce is of some of the leading lights of our cultural fabric, both food folks and non-food folks alike. Speaker 1 (0:18) You're a fat fuck, Ed Levine. Speaker 2 (0:21) Today, we're going to talk to comedian and actress Susie Essman, who we just figured out you and I have known each other almost 20 years. Speaker 1 (0:29) Almost 20 years. That's crazy. It means we're really old, Ed. It means you're really old. Speaker 2 (0:41) So tell us something surprising about yourself. Like what's something that no one would possibly believe about Susie Espin? Speaker 1 (0:51) That I'm really nice. You mean that you don't curse at anyone you walk by on the street? I see, you know, people come up to me in the street and I see that they're visibly disappointed. When I'm kind and generous and gracious and I'm not yelling and screaming, their jaw drops and I see tremendous disappointment on their face. That's Speaker 2 (1:16) hilarious. They want you to curse at them. Speaker 1 (1:19) Yes, Speaker 2 (1:20) yes. Or they want to be walking by you while you're cursing at whoever you're walking with. Speaker 1 (1:26) Exactly. That's hilarious. But seriously, something surprising, I love to cook. You do? Yes. Speaker 2 (1:35) And was that something that was always true or was it true when you met Jimmy? Speaker 1 (1:40) Well, it was true when I redid my kitchen, which was recent. You know, we moved to this great house upstate New York and we redid the kitchen. We had electric because we have no natural gas. And we finally put in propane and, you know, got a gas stove, which is a completely different world, as you know. And I started cooking. And started really getting creative with it and enjoying it. And I have people over and I love feeding them. And it was, you know, I was single for years in Manhattan. I live, as you know, on the Upper West Side. So I was always equidistant between Zabar's, Citarella, and Fairway. Some of the best prepared food you could possibly get. And I was single. So I wasn't cooking. Right. Speaker 2 (2:22) You were getting something on the way to something else. Speaker 1 (2:25) Exactly. Why would I cook? You know. And then. When I first met Jimmy, my husband, which was almost 12 years ago, and he had these four children, and he would cook, you know, like chicken fingers, just macaroni and cheese and just crap that he cooked. And I never ate that way. I was always, you know, a really healthy eater. And as you know, I was a vegetarian for 35 years. No longer. But then I started, you know, cooking a little bit more for the kids. Speaker 1 (2:57) Cooking a lot of vegetables, which I love. And now I'm just like nonstop cooking. That's fascinating. Yeah. And do you feel like Speaker 2 (3:05) there's a relationship between the craft of cooking and the craft of comedy? Speaker 1 (3:11) Well, timing. They both require timing. They both require a lot of—I cook. I'm an improvised cook. I'm not a recipe follower. You know, I'll look at a recipe and just get an idea, but then it's completely improvised. So they're both, the way I work, they're both a lot of improvisation. They both bring people pleasure. Speaker 1 (3:32) So, yeah. And they're both creative endeavors. Speaker 2 (3:36) Yes, they're creative endeavors. They're craft with a dollop of art mixed in, right? Speaker 1 (3:41) Yeah. I mean, I get great pleasure from people loving my cooking. I also get great pleasure from making people laugh. Hopefully they're not laughing at my cooking. Speaker 2 (3:52) That's awesome. So what was your food life like growing up in Mount Vernon? Your dad was a doctor. Right. And your mom was a Russian professor. Yeah. So I was thinking like... Was your mom making chicken Kiev Speaker 1 (4:07) at the same time your dad was going, this Speaker 2 (4:09) isn't good for you? Speaker 1 (4:11) No, he was not. Most doctors know nothing about nutrition. That's just a fact. Maybe it's different now, but I don't think much. My dad was always overweight. My mother had her Russian specialties that she made that her mother taught her. Beef stroganoff, chicken Kiev, borscht, a Russian borscht. Her secret recipe was that she would use V8 juice in the borscht. She wasn't a great cook, but she had her couple of things. And I was kind of particular. I would only eat filet mignon, for example. So she would wait till filet mignon went on sale and she would buy it for me. But whatever I told her I liked, then I was inundated with forever. Like I remember once telling her I liked bologna. I had a bologna sandwich every day for lunch for like three years until I wanted to kill myself. Speaker 2 (5:06) You should never tell your mom what you like. Speaker 1 (5:08) Well, you know, but when I think back on her and I was one of four, she had four kids. We had dinner every night. She made dinner every night for a family of six. And then there was always friends there. So it was maybe eight or 10. I mean, they all did in that generation. So Speaker 2 (5:25) how ironic is it that all those years later, You meet Jimmy. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:31) Four Speaker 2 (5:31) children. You're cooking for six. Speaker 1 (5:35) Yeah. Except it's different now. Now, I mean, I assume that you would say when we were kids, we never went out to eat. Speaker 2 (5:41) No. Speaker 1 (5:42) Never. I mean, we went to the Speaker 2 (5:43) Chinese restaurant. On Sundays, maybe. Right. Speaker 1 (5:45) Yeah. Or on Thursdays when my dad would work late, we would sometimes get pizza. But that was it. Yes. Same with Speaker 2 (5:52) us. Speaker 1 (5:52) My kids were brought up eating out. You know, my kids were brought up eating out all the time. We didn't have dinner. It was a different kind of thing than how I was brought up. And I think it's a problem, actually, because now that they're adults living on their own, they're used to eating out all the time. They don't realize how expensive it is. Speaker 2 (6:06) Yes, and that gateway to cooking is sometimes hard to find, isn't it, for like your kids? Speaker 1 (6:12) Well, no, they're all foodies. They drove me crazy by the only channel that was ever on in my house was the Food Channel. It was Food Network or the Cooking Channel. And they all love to cook. That's amazing. And they all love to watch food shows. That's their favorite thing to watch. I shouldn't complain about that. It would just drive me crazy. You know how many times I had to watch I Know What's-Her-Face Name? I Know Garden. Yeah, exactly. I think there was something about it that was soothing to them. Yes, Speaker 2 (6:39) it is. In Speaker 1 (6:41) the Speaker 2 (6:41) same way that I watch TCM, you know? Yes, Ina Garten to them was like the accommodating, friendly aunt. Right. that they might have never had or wanted to have or wanted to be present. And Speaker 1 (6:55) there was something about watching the creation of a meal that was extremely soothing to them. It was very mellow for them to always have the cooking channel on, the food network on in the background. It Speaker 2 (7:06) grounded Speaker 1 (7:06) them. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 (7:08) And it sort of was in direct contrast to what their hormones were telling them to do. Speaker 1 (7:13) Exactly, which was not pretty. Speaker 1 (7:18) You know, when I first met them, I was still a vegetarian. Did I ever tell you how I stopped being a vegetarian? No, no, I was going to get to that. I want to hear this. Okay. So I think it was about two and a half, three years ago. It was around then. And I got, and Jimmy, my husband, he's a meat and potatoes kind of guy. And I got him a bacon of the month club for his birthday. Oh, I know that Speaker 2 (7:41) from The Grateful Palate. Speaker 1 (7:43) I don't remember what it was from. It was Zingerman's. It was from Zingerman's. Because, you know, you run out of stuff to get. It's like you're constantly trying to come up with new gift ideas. So I got him the Bacon of the Month Club. And I was a, I ate fish, but no chicken, no beef, not even, I was very careful in my soups to make sure it wasn't chicken stock. 35 years. Asked Jeffrey Steingarten. Speaker 2 (8:07) Who will get to that in a second. He Speaker 1 (8:09) had contempt for me, for my vegetarianism. So Jimmy's making the bacon, and I smell the bacon. And you know what bacon, I mean, is there any better odor than bacon? Speaker 2 (8:20) Odor bacon is probably the finest cologne in the history of mankind. Exactly. Speaker 1 (8:24) So I'm smelling the bacon, and suddenly I'm thinking, why am I not eating this? Bacon was really your gateway food. It was. What was I thinking all these years that I was not? It smelled amazing, and I took a bite. And then that was it. That was it. And I was in a better mood. I was in a way better mood after I started. My body, I think, needed the iron or the meat or something. My whole personality changed after I started eating meat. I swear to you it's true. You could ask my husband. You Speaker 2 (8:59) know Speaker 1 (8:59) why? Because when Speaker 2 (9:00) you eat vegetables, there's like, there's... Only vegetables. Even we have fantastic vegetarian recipes on the site and Kenji eats a lot of vegetables. I still Speaker 1 (9:12) eat a lot of vegetables. I love vegetables. It Speaker 2 (9:14) doesn't mean that you have to neglect vegetables. It just means that there's a certain