Why Did Carla Lalli Write A Cookbook About Her Divorce?
The Sporkful
Chef and cookbook author Carla Lalli discusses her deeply personal new book, 'Food Is A Feeling,' which chronicles her divorce and how it tr
Key takeaways
- Cooking became a form of self-care and emotional healing after Carla's divorce, allowing her to reconnect with pleasure and authenticity.
Main topics
- The emotional journey of divorce
- Reclaiming joy in cooking
Notable quotes
"I wrote this book during a tumultuous, pensive, painful, joyful, transformative, celebratory time in my life. The precipitating event was the dissolution of my 24-year marriage."
"With clarity, I saw the way I cooked as a reflection of who I am."
Conclusion
Carla Lalli's 'Food Is A Feeling' is a powerful testament to how food can serve
Transcript preview
Speaker 6 (0:05) This Speaker 4 (0:10) episode contains explicit language. Speaker 2 (0:14) Sort of spending that afternoon knowing that my kids were going to learn something later that day like they have no idea. And I'm in control of when this hammer's going to drop, you know. As a sort of a menu planning proposition, this is not one that's in any of the entertaining books, you know. This is not like a cute... Martha Stewart didn't cover this? It's not a graduation brunch. It's not a celebratory dinner. It's like, you know, something else. I kind of had to, like, figure out, do I try to serve something everyone loves and then potentially have that recipe ruined by the association? Do I serve something everyone kind of hates so it can all just be, like, that whole night sucked? Speaker 4 (1:02) This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Before we get to the show, I want to let you know about an upcoming event in New York. I'm going to be interviewing Chef Alon Shia at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday, October 11th, all about his new book, Memories of a Good Meal, Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. We'll also be joined by his co-author, culinary historian, June Hirsch. I love Alon's cooking, and I cannot wait to have a chance to talk with him and June. Tickets are on sale now. Get details at sporkful.com slash live. Okay, let's get into it. Today, I'm talking with chef, cookbook author, and YouTube host, Carla Lally. For decades, Carla's career followed a pretty typical path. She went to culinary school and cooked in high-end restaurants, transitioned to food media, where she created recipes at Bon Appetit, among others. Then she started writing cookbooks, including a New York Times bestseller. But now, 30 years into her career, She's breaking the mold with a book that many people told her not to write. It's called Food is a Feeling, and it's a lot more personal and intimate than her others. It has plenty of great recipes, yes, but at its core, it's a series of essays about her divorce from her husband and how that changed her relationship with food. When we first sat down in the studio, I asked Carla to read from the introduction. Speaker 2 (2:18) As a cookbook author and food writer, I've been taught that your recipe style should stay consistent over time. Regardless of where my previously published recipes have appeared or when they were written, I'm supposed to mimic their language when I come up with new ones. Well, that's not what's happening here. With due respect to my former self and anyone who has cooked my dishes before, it didn't feel right that my recipe voice should stay the same, because I am not the same. I wrote this book during a tumultuous, pensive, painful, joyful, transformative, celebratory time in my life. The precipitating event was the dissolution of my 24-year marriage. While I was experiencing the feelings and phases that followed the separation, I fell completely in love with cooking and eating again and with myself as a cook. As I moved through that crisis, I became overwhelmed with thankfulness for the role food has played through all my years as part of my nurturing and upbringing, as an education, as a practice, as a career, and as an outlet. With clarity, I saw the way I cooked as a reflection of who I am. Speaker 4 (3:27) Carla started in the food world by going to culinary school in New York. Her goal was to get a job in a high-end restaurant, even though she knew what to expect once she got there. Speaker 2 (3:35) Even in cooking school, they would say, oh, if you want to work in restaurant kitchens, you have to be tough. You're going to have to be resilient. It's going to be abusive. It's going to be this. It's going to be that. So I think I went into it thinking, like, I got to put armor on. Speaker 4 (3:49) She got her first job out of culinary school at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. She was one of the few women working in the kitchen. Speaker 2 (3:55) I didn't want help. I didn't want to be treated like a girl. The idea of being, like, good for a girl was just, like, horrifying to me. And I knew that you kind of have to, like, prove your merit. Speaker 4 (4:14) The work was grueling, and in some ways it seemed designed to make the cooks' lives harder. Like at another high-end restaurant called Union Pacific, where Carla was told to peel fava beans. Speaker 2 (4:23) For anyone who doesn't know, fava beans come in this, like, big kind of fuzzy pod. Inside the pod, there's the individual beans. Like Speaker 4 (4:30) snap peas. Speaker 2 (4:31) Yeah, but each of those beans inside is, like, has its own little sheath, its own thin skin around it. If you shell the fava beans and you blanch those favas, it is really easy to just pop them right out of that thin little skin. So Speaker 4 (4:47) you take the fava beans out of the big pod. Yep. Now you have three beans or whatever it is. And if you drop them in boiling water for a minute or two, if you blanch them, then it's very easy to take that sheath off. Speaker 2 (4:57) Exactly. But that's not how we did it at Union Pacific. You had to shell them before blanching them, which is much harder. That skin is sort of adhered. You have to do it with your fingers. If you are too aggressive with it, you'll stick your fingernail into it or you might split the two peas that are sort of stuck together. It was just a pain in the ass and it took a really long time. And when you have prep, you're just like watching the clock incessantly. And so there was this one day that I was doing it and I knew better. than to challenge. So I just asked the sous chef. Speaker 4 (5:30) You weren't going to go straight to the head chef and be like, why don't we do this? We're doing Speaker 2 (5:33) this dumb. Yeah, this seems dumb. Speaker 4 (5:35) So you asked like a... I say to Speaker 2 (5:37) the sous chef, why is it that we shell before we blanch rather than blanch and then shell? And he just looked at me and he was like, well, shelling them before blanching is harder. If the chef had a choice between doing something harder or doing it easier, he's going to want us to do it harder. And that was it. And I was like. Speaker 2 (6:00) OK, like that's a terrible. That's not a real reason. Right. Speaker 4 (6:04) It's also I mean, this is a mentality that I see across all kinds of creative fields and across a lot of all different professions that I think is so stupid, which is like it's not possible to do great work unless you are suffering. Speaker 2 (6:17) Exactly. Speaker 4 (6:18) And that is not true. Right. Especially once you've been doing your job for a while. It's possible to do really great work, work very hard. Yeah. And not. be miserable. Totally. In these jobs, Carla was belittled for making mistakes and body checked on a regular basis. She saw one head chef throw hot metal plates at other cooks when he got angry. But she also saw this chef come in with a word of praise just when it seemed he had pushed someone to the brink. Speaker 2 (6:44) I mean, I don't think there's like a ton of other ways to get people to like abuse their bodies for like an amount of money that is not appropriate. for however many hours a week. Like, there has to be something else. For me, it was realizing that I did perform for praise and love and the positive feedback. That was like, I would put myself through anything to feel that I did a good job. So I'm perfect for that job. Speaker 4 (7:24) Parla left fine dining and transitioned to food media. She spent years at Bon Appetit, where she became a mainstay in their YouTube videos. Later, she created her own YouTube channel, where she shot videos in her kitchen. Her online persona throughout this time was like your wacky aunt, a wry, sometimes goofy, and always enthusiastic home cook. But in her actual home life, raising two kids and working full-time, cooking was much more complicated. Speaker 2 (7:47) I think being the person who, like, was going to make dinner gave me an out. You know, there are certain activities that at a certain point, like, I can't do this anymore. I can't be in the playground anymore. I can't pretend I'm a bear anymore because, like, I have to cook. Being a mother is like, a working mother especially, is an incredibly, like, guilt-ridden existence. I never really felt like I was 100 %