Thinking & Eating: Recipes to nourish and inspire
368
Thinking & Eating: Recipes to nourish and inspire
368Hardcover
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Overview
From a morning shot of espresso to an absentminded sandwich at your desk, or a hastily assembled dinner with the leftovers from the fridge, eating is a ubiquitous daily undertaking. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves?
With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows us how ingredients and dishes can support certain ideas, emotions, and states of mind. In each recipe we discover how food can store, memorialize, and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.
- OVER 150 RECIPES TO NOURISH THE MIND
- INTRODUCES SIXTEEN KEY INGREDIENTS that evoke emotions like hope, playfulness, and self love.
- INCLUDES "CONVERSATION MENUS" that prompt fascinating conversations for eating with friends.
- FULL PAGE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781912891023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The School of Life |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2020 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
Read an Excerpt
3. With friends
One of the major obstacles to developing a good social life is the idea that doing so might be easy. Living well around other people, deepening and nourishing friendships, learning how to speak to someone with directness and vulnerability, hearing someone else’s story without interrupting or shutting them down are all part of an art that we are too seldom taught and rarely even think we might have to learn.
We accept that we will have to acquire skills to cook, but food can only ever be as fulfilling as the conversation and friendship that unfolds around it. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t divide the two tasks: learning how to cook would mean, more broadly, learning how to nourish – in mind and spirit – those we love.
The panic isn’t really about the practicalities of getting everything organised before the doorbell rings. It has a deeper root: we are unsure whether we can live up to the expectations we have raised in others. In inviting our friends, we haven’t only offered them a meal, we have put ourselves forward as the choreographers of their happiness for a few hours.
Now we are daunted and unsure. We rack our brains for ideas of what might please. We saw a recipe involving papaya, soy beans and chicken; someone mentioned a wonderful dish involving goat’s cheese and marinated liver they’d had in Spain; we hastily flick through a beautifully illustrated book of Middle Eastern recipes we’ve never yet explored.
We seek inspiration from evidence of what other, more prestigious human beings have liked. In our distress, we forget to tap into the most powerful resource we have: our existing knowledge of what gives us pleasure. In our distress, the last person we think of consulting is ourselves. We discard the claims of dishes we’ve reliably enjoyed for years, that we liked when we were twelve and still like now when we’re on our own. There’s a curious, misdirected modesty that can cause us to assume that others will be too sophisticated or too worldly to be charmed or delighted by something that is endorsed by nothing more than our own humble experience.
Curiously, the most satisfying moments in the history of art often involve independent-minded people learning to take their own pleasures seriously, and then discovering that many others are charmed by them too. In the 18th century, when most artists were painting grand scenes of aristocratic life or pivotal moments in the Gospel stories, the Welsh artist Thomas Jones stayed loyal to the pleasure he found in small scale sights of ordinary existence: in washing hung out to dry, for example, or old stone walls. He wasn’t trying to second-guess what might be attractive to others; he was following the sources of his own pleasure. In the process, Jones turned out some of the most delightful pictures ever made. Jones’s art grew out of the same question that lies behind good entertaining: ‘what, honestly, do I like?’ Not: ‘what might impress the world?’ but ‘what have I found that works for me?’
It is a tricky question to answer honestly when guests on whose affections we depend will be here in a few hours. Our tastes won’t be exactly the same as everyone else’s, but we stand a higher chance of fulfilling other people when we stay true to that vital source of data: our own appetite.
Table of Contents
I A food manifestoII Recipes
1 Key Ingredients
The Lemon - Symbol of Hope
The Lime - Symbol of Playfulness
The Fig - Symbol of Maturity
The Avocado - Symbol of Reassurance
Olive oil - Symbol of Diplomacy
The Caper - Symbol of Cynicism
The Aubergine - Symbol of Sensitivity
Mint - Symbol of Intelligence
Honey - Symbol of Kindness
The Pistachio - Symbol of Patience
The Mushroom - Symbol of Pessimism
The Walnut - Symbol of Self-knowledge
Dark chocolate - Symbol of Self-love
Garlic - Symbol of Assertiveness
The Egg - Symbol of Compassion
Rhubarb - Symbol of Appreciation
2 Looking after ourselves
3 With friends
4 Relationships
5 Good enough
6 Food for thinking
III Conversations