Always Home | Fanny Singer
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery By the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Fanny Singer: Hi, my name is Fanny Singer and I'm the author of Always Home: A Daughter's Recipes & Stories.
Suzy Chase: This book was called Home as the working title and a dear family friend coined the title Always Home. I would love to hear the story, because that dear family friend is a Kansas Citian, like me, and also lives on the corner from me here in the West Village.
Fanny Singer: Yes. I really owe Calvin Trillin, or as as he's known to his familiars as Bud. He is like a sort of godfather of mine, I mean, to the extent that we have such things in Jewish culture, which we don't really, but I grew up knowing him and his wonderful wife, Alice. Bud is also a wonderful writer and longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and humorous. I was calling the book Home and my editor was really prodding me to come up with something just a little bit more distinguished or with a little more flare, and yet I really wanted to communicate the same sentiment, which is this sort of universality of this idea of home or that you can conjure home wherever you are. I was really stumped, but I was staying with Bud at the time and he said, "What about Always Home?"
Fanny Singer: Of course, this is well before we even had any inkling of the oncoming pandemic and quarantine and everything. I ended up releasing the hardback end of March 2020, at a moment when everyone was always home. It became this hilariously prophetic title, and I'm certain a lot of people picked it up probably for that alone, because it just seemed like it was too on the nose. After the pandemic kicked off and I realized it just how ridiculously resonant that the title was, I called Bud and I was like, "I owe you one for this. Thank you."
Suzy Chase: Totally. A little bit memoir, a little bit travel log, and a little bit cookbook. Tell me about the chapter names.
Fanny Singer: Basically the way I structured the book or the writing of the book was half recipes I knew needed to be in there and then the stories embroidered in a way off the recipe, and then half stories I knew needed to be in there and then the recipes that I could imagine coming out of those stories. The stories and the recipes are very integrated, in terms of narrative voice, and as you're going from a story into a recipe I didn't want it to feel jarring or like your jumping into some kind of method. I feel like some of the titles of the stories are really descriptive and some are perhaps a little bit more atmospheric.
Suzy Chase: For example, the chicken stock chapter, where we get a story about how your mom used to arrive at your apartment with the chicken in her purse. Then you also write about how to make garlicky noodle soup, but it's not in a typical recipe format. I'm curious about that.
Fanny Singer: I mean, I don't cook from recipes actually. I'm probably overly freewheeling and intuitive as a cook. I don't really like to read recipes for methods so much as for inspiration. I find I get a lot out of reading recipes, even ones that are much more method intensive, because I still find that they become a kind of poetry, a very evocative poetry for me, and I can immediately start to imagine how flavors and senses combine, but it's not how I reflexively cook. I wanted to write the recipes in a way that felt both like there was a continuity from the narrative story that precedes the recipes so that, like I mentioned, that you don't have this rift, but I also wanted them to be intuitive and very focused on tasting and smelling and actually really relying on your senses to guide you in how you cook.
Fanny Singer: I'm hoping, because the recipes are for the most part not particularly complex, that people will not feel intimidated by the absence of exact measurements and step-by-step method and actually feel like this is approachable. I can taste it and decide if I want more parsley or not, or I have a really big lemon so maybe I only need half. I find recipes are often calling for things that aren't necessarily realistic or that don't chime with the way produce, especially organic and farmer's market produce, exist in the real world, which is a lemon is not a lemon is not a lemon. My godmother's tree grows lemons that are the size of footballs, which would be way too much lemon juice for a standard recipe that's calling for half a lemon or whatever. I wanted to write in that way, that felt more fluid and more open to interpretation.
Fanny Singer: Weirdly, and I said this to my editor early on, I was like, "I don't really feel like people are going to use this as a cookbook. It's just going to be more of an atmospherics of food and they'll read it for the narrative," and he's like, "I think you're wrong. These recipes are enticing, I think a lot of people will cook them."
Suzy Chase: So wrong.
Fanny Singer: And I was completely wrong. I mean, I've seen someone post photos or write to me or republish versions of every single recipe in the book. I get a lot of messages about basically everything. I had completely misconstrued the extent of its utility as an actual cookbook, which just goes to show how out of touch I am with that world of recipe writing.
Suzy Chase: What was your favorite breakfast growing up?
Fanny Singer: My mom made this famous egg in the spoon, which was cooked in the fireplace, this just perfect fried egg. My company, Permanent Collection, made this spoon because this was something that I loved so much when I was a kid. We were like, "We should make it available to other people." However, I think really my favorite thing was the cream of wheat that my dad would make. It was just the simplest little porridge. Actually, it was legitimately just cream of wheat. I say this in the book, I'm like, "I have no idea how my mom let this stuff have a pass," because it was the real standard stuff, not organic wheat berries from some artisanal farm. But there was something about that flavor that, even as a kid, just seemed, maybe because it was so anathema, it was so mild and sweet, just with this little rim of milk and butter, that was unlike most of what my mom was cooking that I really savored it.
Suzy Chase: You wrote this on Instagram a few weeks ago. "On cold mornings or melancholy mornings or lonely mornings, I make myself a bowl of porridge, stir in some butter and get back in bed."
Fanny Singer: Yes, exactly. It's still my panacea for whenever I'm feeling a little glum or just in need of something nostalgic. Although, I will say I do now make a version that's organic and with generally a bunch of different interesting grains and it that make it a little more nutritionally interesting.
Suzy Chase: You had to.
Fanny Singer: You know, I've grown up a little. What can I say?
Suzy Chase: One of the most distinctive things about your mother is her hands. You say her hands are a mirror of her determination. I'd love to hear about chapter four, Peeling Fruit.
Fanny Singer: My mother's hands really are remarkable. They're very small, she keeps her nails very, very short. She's never had nails, which meant she was always terrible at giving back scratches, which I always greedily wanted. She wears all these Victorian and Edwardian era rings on her fingers that are always missing a little stone here or there, kind of dinged up, because she uses her hands all the time. I mean, she just plunges them into hot stock. She'll do whatever she needs to do, I mean, she doesn't hesitate. When I was like kid, I was like, "You have asbestos hands," and of course now I'm exactly the same. I'll just reach into a boiling thing if I need to fish something out.
Fanny Singer: But they're also, for being hands that she uses all the time, they're very soft and smooth. I would really focus in on them when she was doing tasks, like the peeling of the fruit, which was this kind of ritual at the end of every meal. We never had anything really sweet for dessert, we didn't have cakes or cookies. She didn't bake, and so actually there was never really a culture of having a sweet thing at the end. Occasionally, when I was older, we'd go to Chez Panisse and order dessert, but it wasn't really a fixture at home. There was always this beautiful bowl of whatever seasonal fruit was available in the middle of the dining table. She would feel around for the most perfectly ripe fruit and then it would become this almost meditative practice of peeling this fruit, whether it was a tangerine. She would always do this with a knife, even citrus, she would peel with a knife and section, or a perfect pear or a plum or nectarine or peach, slipping the skin off a peach.
Fanny Singer: I just have such vivid of memories of that, because she would also ask me to go get her the little knife. Even when I was little, I was trusted to go get this somewhat hazardous implement and bring it to her with a little plate. I was implicated in this ritual and I was also usually the recipient of the choicest little morsel. It was one of my favorite moments of any meal together.
Suzy Chase: I, frankly, was shocked to hear that you and your mom don't bake, but I was also happy because I don't love baking.
Fanny Singer: It's definitely just not for everyone. To be honest, I think we lack the rigor and focus. It's just it takes paying attention. I wrote this in an Instagram post recently, because I felt like I needed to let people know that just because I was attempting or I had made scones did not mean that I'd had what you could strictly describe as baking success. I had had to make scones because while I was trying to make muffins, I thought I was following a recipe and was just mindlessly cutting butter into the flour, which is not what you do for muffins. You're just supposed to melt the oil and add it into the dry ingredients with the wet. I was like, "What am I doing?" I had to put that flour that now had pea-sized butter in it into the fridge and just I was like, "I guess I could make cream scones with that." That's how bad I am at following a baking recipe. I'm abysmal, not my forte.
Suzy Chase: It's so messy too.
Fanny Singer: I think if you're someone who's really good at following a recipe, you're also someone who knows how to keep some kind of order when you are baking, but me, both bad at following recipes and just generally distracted, with baking it's like I look like I've set off a bomb in the kitchen when I've baked.
Suzy Chase: Yes.
Fanny Singer: There's flour everywhere, I've used twice or three times as many bowls should have been used for the recipe. My boyfriend will come in and just be like, "What happened?" and I was like, "I tried to make a tart, just I don't know what happened."
Suzy Chase: I found the smell chapter so very interesting. You would inspect your mother's scent when she came through the door every day and try to guess the food scent on her. You called that sniffing and guessing.
Fanny Singer: Ah, yes. My sense of smell remains my most acute sense, and it has always been. I mean, I think actually there must have been some kind of compensation for how bad my eyesight is. I've been wearing glasses since I was little. There's some genetic element to it, because obviously my mom has a really wonderful palette and a wonderful sense of smell and is very discerning in that regard, but my dad too has been involved in the wine business for his entire career and became obsessed with wine even when he was a teenager, a Jewish teenager in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I think he tasted one good bottle of wine in his dad's business partner's house and became really interested in wine and it's provenance and different varietals and started to keep a diary, even when he was a teenager in Oklahoma who had effectively no access to good wine up until he started prodding his dad to buy some decent bottles from Europe. So my father, too, has this really amazing palette.
Fanny Singer: My mom used to love playing this game with him where she would blind pour him a glass of wine and make him guess where it was from, maybe the chateau, what vintage, and he was uncannily correct most of the time. I think I come by the sense of smell honestly, but it has been a mixture of blessing and tyranny because, I mean, I'm so harassed by bad smells as much as I feel like I can be discerning and enjoy really good smells.
Fanny Singer: But I wanted to find a way to write about food that felt very olfactory specific. I don't feel like that exists in a lot of writing, culinary writing specifically. I think we get a lot of good visual imagery, we get a lot of good visual description and some good palette notes and stuff, but less in terms of the specificity of a scent and a fragrance to things and how much that can be a bellwether for how you cook.
Fanny Singer: I love that Ruth Reichl, and I was talking to her, this is a couple years ago and we were supposed to be doing this 92nd Street Y event and we ended up doing it virtually and she was just chatting with me and my mom beforehand, and she mentioned that her mother cooked by smell and didn't really taste as she was going along. I never heard that before, but that's kind of how I cook. I will taste before I plate something, but I don't really taste that much as I'm cooking. I really rely on my senses of smell to guide me, like does that have enough fat in it? Can I smell the fat? Can I smell the aromatics? Does it have enough basal in it? Did I add enough herbs or enough chili? Those things come to me entirely through my sense of smell, so I rely on it for all kinds of information.
Suzy Chase: What's your first memory of Chez Panisse?
Fanny Singer: It's really a tapestry in a way, a kind of melded sense memory tapestry. I mean, writing a memoir, I was like, "I kind of feel like I have a bad memory for someone who's about to write a memoir," because a lot of my memories really are impressionistic, especially from early days. But I do completely remember, for instance, being a little girl playing under the tables downstairs in the restaurant with my mom's business partner at the time, his name was Tom, who I just adored. He would play little tea parties with me and we'd have little cups, we'd use the espresso cups. He would make some tea and we'd had little tiny tea parties under the table. He was probably 6'3" or something, I don't know how he managed to like crane himself underneath these tables, but I do have a memory of that.
Fanny Singer: Just so many people really, actually, at the restaurant. The pastry chef still today, Mary Jo, who at one point left for a period of time and opened a wonderful restaurant. She's back in the fold at Chez Panisse, but she was there when I was little and she was also my babysitter outside of the restaurant. She was someone that I loved. I would sit on the counter with her in the pastry department and she would put little frozen raspberries on my fingertips and draw little faces on them. I just loved spending time with her in that part of the kitchen because there was always something beautifully aromatic, like caramel being made or fruit cooking down.
Suzy Chase: There are so many beautifully written vignettes about a loving and unconventional upbringing focused on cooking and eating delicious food. Did you ever feel rebellious, like "I'm going to go through McDonald's drive-thru today."
Fanny Singer: You know, listen, I'm not completely pure. I definitely ate some chicken nuggets at some point when I was in high school. But the intensity of her rigor when it comes to food, it didn't actually feel ungenerous when I was a kid or when I was a teenager. It felt, in fact, on the contrary, it felt like the most loving, most invested, most secure expression of love. Even when I was a teenager and my parents were going through divorce and it wasn't all smooth sailing, I really understood that she loved me and she was constant and she was there for me because of the way that she communicated through food. It never was something I wanted to repudiate, it was something that felt like a total loving embrace.
Fanny Singer: It's what I really keep trying to say is maybe one takeaway from the book, which is I hope people understand that food is not just about nourishment, it's also about communication. I mean, it's about communicating the kind of quality of care, not just for the person that you are feeding, but also for the planet and for the people who are growing the food. It's really a conversation that begins in the ground and ends in the mouth, in the belly. As a teenager I didn't have this kind of language for it, but I did implicitly understand what it was all about and I didn't have the impulse to shove it away. It's not to say I didn't love those disgusting sour candy straws and I would get them in the gas station from time to time.
Fanny Singer: There were a few little things that were minor, minor rebellions, but not on the order of wanting to refuse everything and do this just 180, and mostly because all those other options were so much less delicious. I think when you're presented with the most delicious thing, it's like everything in your body is thrilling towards it, rather than the opposite.
Suzy Chase: Chapter eight is entitled Salad. I'm curious to know why you were trying to get away from talking about salad. You mention it here and there, and it's your mother's favorite food and I think your favorite food too, if I'm not mistaken.
Fanny Singer: I mean, nothing tops salad for me. Obviously I eat other things, but I just love to have salad with every meal pretty much, like breakfast, lunch and dinner if I have my way. I mean, you need good salad obviously, not just any old salad, but I just have always loved roughage, and my mom too. It's almost something that's I feel is encoded in our genes. But I think I felt is there enough substance here to write a chapter? Yes, we love salad, but does anyone really care? Then I was like, "All right, it's got to have a little chapter, even if it's a short one, because it is something that we always yearn for when we don't have access to it and it's something that always features on our table."
Fanny Singer: It's something that is its own kind of ritual, of cleaning it and rolling it in these long linen torchon towels and putting it in the refrigerator and then taking it back out like a salad baby, and just the care that you invest in making a really perfect salad. It's not an afterthought, it actually is a kind of main event.
Suzy Chase: I think I've heard you talk about, and I might be butchering the story, about when you were young, traveling with your mother, I don't know if it was your mother and your father, to Italy. You'd be at some random Italian restaurant and your mom would ask them if they could make a green salad and they'd look at her crazy.
Fanny Singer: Yeah. I mean, you'd think actually, in Italy, that you would be able to get such a thing, but it's not customary on menus to have just leaves, like a very simple green salad. You might find a tricolore, like salad has some radicchio and arugula in it, but even a chicory salad, even when the chicories are in season, even when you can see the farmer's market right adjacent to the restaurant selling beautiful lettuce, it's still seen as a kind of you have that at home, you don't eat that at a restaurant. Because a simple arugula salad with shaved Parmesan is such a standard Italian salad, but it features on menus in American restaurants that are Italian, but not in Italy proper.
Fanny Singer: I just remember we were in Palermo. We were at a wonderful restaurant and it was this local joint and we had beautiful breaded tripe and all kinds of standard things. Then we were like, "We need a salad, desperately need a salad." We ordered a salad and we were like, "Do you have any like verdura, verdura is vegetables, "Or leaves?" And we get this iceberg lettuce. It was a fantastic restaurant, the salad, they were like, "What?" It's like they found an iceberg lettuce somewhere in the refrigerator and it had these parched graded carrots on it. We were like, "How can this be possible?"
Fanny Singer: But it's why now we're obsessively cooking at home. Even when we travel to countries, we're always making sure to go to the farmer's markets and get these beautiful products and then feasting on salad whenever we're cooking at home so that we can then have just pasta when we're out.
Suzy Chase: Well, speaking of traveling, the last recipe in the book is Coming Home Pasta, a recipe you ate all the time when you were a kid and it's one of those indelible memories of your childhood. Could you please describe Coming Home Pasta and when you'd make it?
Fanny Singer: Yes. Coming Home Pasta, which I think did turn out to be the most "viral" recipe of the book, probably because its ingredients are really quite spare and the book came out at a time when there were just desolate supermarket shells everywhere and I think people were actually looking for recipes that lacked any serious adornment in the flavor department and so it was anything you could put together from pantry staples.
Fanny Singer: This pasta was really something that we made when we came back from a long trip and there wasn't much in the refrigerator and the pantry was spare, but you can reliably source a little bit of garlic that hadn't gone totally to sprout. There were always some capers and you could definitely find some good chili in your condiment cabinet. There was always enough Parm, even it was blooming with age spots, and at least a couple kinds of pasta that you could cobble something together. It was something that we would make to create a sense of coming home, like an atmosphere of being back together and back in this place that had a little bit of a flavor of being disused. I always talked about the smell of turning the heaters back on and smelling the particles of dust roasting in the heaters because the heaters had been off. There were these old Victorian floor heaters and in our house. You're trying to get back in the rhythm of being home and everyone's a little bit tired and jetlagged and out of it from travel.
Fanny Singer: One of my parents would go grab a bottle of wine from the cellar and I'd get sent out to the garden to get some parsley, during which time my mom would usually put, at the time, reviled anchovies into this white puttanesca sauce that we are making. It's that, it's anchovies, it's garlic, it's chili and capers. Everything's minced to a uniform size and the herbs are added at the end and a little bit of parm and really good olive oil. It's just the most delicious pasta, and it's also this feeling of return, this feeling really being back home.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why. For this segment, it can only be one person. I cannot wait to hear what you have to say.
Fanny Singer: I mean, I think it would have to be M.F.K. Fisher, but her writing has been so influential to me. I think it would just be interesting. I don't know if I would cook anything that she would like to eat, but I just feel like there's something to reach across the ages and to identify with someone so keenly on how they write about food with the experience of conviviality and bringing people together. It would be intimidating, but it would also be an honor, of course, of my life to cook for her. But moreover, I'd want her to just regale me with stories about food.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Fanny Singer: I am on Instagram as @fannysinger, and I run a design brand that focuses a lot on actually cooking stuff, which is @permanentcollection. You can find me in both of those places. I also have a PhD in art history, so I do quite a bit of writing on art and contemporary art and review thins for magazines like Frieze and Art Agenda. You can find pieces I've written about art, very different topics. Yeah.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Always Home, out in paperback, and support the podcast, head over to cookerybythebook.com. Thank you so much, Fanny, for coming on Cookery By the Book podcast.
Fanny Singer: Thank you so much, Suzy, for having me. This has been such a pleasure.
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