If there’s anything we all could use at the end of 2025, it’s comforting food with good company. Helping patrons get into the holiday feasting mindset, Hancher Auditorium hosted a conversation with acclaimed chef and author Samin Nosrat and Iowa City’s own Carmen Maria Machado on Nov. 13.
The auditorium, buzzing with food enthusiasts of all ages, leaned in to hear about Nosrat’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2017’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. The new book is Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love.
Good Things is the cookbook for Trader Joes’ frozen meal patrons who dream of dinner parties. It is a cookbook for people who know exactly how far $12 (or less) an hour takes you. It’s as much recipes as it is small steps to joy from the bottom of depression’s well. Nosrat lets us get to know her more intimately than ever. The author’s charisma leaps easily from page and screen to the stage.
Nosrat’s sensational first book was the product of close to 20 years of effort. It catapulted her into fame as the host of a Netflix docu-series based on the bestseller, and a tenure as a New York Times Magazine food columnist. But as Norat explained, the prospect of following up such a huge achievement felt insurmountable. After publishing an encyclopedia on how to cook anything you could ever imagine, she agonized over whether there was anything left to say about food.
Depression and isolation settled in during the pandemic, a spiral born from Nosrat’s lifelong perfectionism and fallout from the success of her first book. “In these last few years, I’ve realized there’s no invisible goal, there’s no force that’s going to tell you, ‘OK, now you can enjoy life — you have to do that now,” she shared with the Independent.
While Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was an atlas on how to cook, Nosrat was now asking why — as in, why bother cooking in the first place? In the pit of her isolation and grief, sharing food with others was her path back to joy.
Nosrat is a chef, but she is principally an artist and storyteller. She mentioned being an English major and thinking she was going to be a poet after college. Good Things is the work of a poet whose form is cooking.
She was bashfully humble on the Hancher stage as she recalled earning $12/hour as a cook and busing tables at Chez Panisse. She shared an experience that many children of immigrants can relate to — the triumph of finally achieving financial security, embittered by remembering who is left behind. Nosrat brought up cooks and other artists priced out of the Bay Area, which she has called home for almost 30 years.
Nosrat thanked the audience members for the time, effort and money spent to join her in that auditorium. Machado and Nosrat also put cooking and the value of time in the context of the attention economy. Every tech conglomerate wants our most precious resource. What a relief it is, then, to re-hone our attention to shelling fava beans, to organizing a dinner party, to making things with our hands for real people we love.
Feeding each other is the most tangible way to make positive change, something Nosrat realized during the pandemic. When she learned a local school was struggling, she used the plethora of overripe fruit trees in her Oakland neighborhood to make jam. She auctioned the jam off and raised $30,000. When you narrow the scope of your concern to what is just outside your door, making change can literally become low-hanging fruit.
Nosrat wanted to create a book of recipes for people with kids and normal grocery stores, people with little to no dinner party hosting experience but a desire to start. Like organizing in hopes of seeing just a glimpse of change, cooking is intimidating. You can agonize over niche ingredients and craft the most complex dinner possible, but if you’re not there to enjoy the company you’re in, you’ve lost the sauce. You might not even dare to make anything at all. Good Things is a lesson in giving up control in service of being present. The point is to gather.
Nosrat said some of her favorite food memories were eating leftover quinoa with hot sauce with her friends in tiny apartment kitchens. “The world didn’t end because we didn’t use organic sour cream,” she laughed. The point of cooking is not to be impressive. It’s to give people a soft place to land when the world feels unrelentingly hard.
“I think we all want to be around people a little bit more and off screens and feel comforted,” Nosrat said, “and food is a wonderful tool for doing that, because you can say to people, ‘Come over for soup’, but really you mean, ‘Come over so we can mourn together,’ but you don’t have to say that.”
The Q&A portion of the evening prioritized kids’ questions first. Later, there was a question from a cafeteria cook on how to imbue standardized school lunches with more joy, followed by many timely questions about Thanksgiving. Some takeaways: Use cooking as a lesson plan for young folks. Don’t try to roast one 20 lb turkey (get two 10-pound birds instead) and invest a lot of time (and moisture) into the stuffing. Remember that who’s around the table is more important than what’s on it.
Nosrat naturally brought the crowd to laugh out loud many times throughout the evening. She marveled at Iowa’s expansiveness and our casual stamina to drive long distances. If you’re in the mood to drive five hours, you must get par-cooked Sonora flour tortillas from Carmelo’s in Kansas City, she impressed.
The way Nosrat describes tortillas will have you believing they’re the most precious, fascinating things in the world. Perhaps we should all use our attention this way: to revere the small miracle of food, the understated “good things” that put life back into our hands.
