Tables of Contents Community Cookbook | Evan Hanczor
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, cookery by the book and decorating by the book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by TWA plaid cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Evan Hanczor: I'm Evan Hanczor. I'm a chef and a writer. I'm the founder of Tables and Contents, which is an arts organization that uses food to create new experience of the literature and also the creator and editor of the Tables of Contents Community Cookbook.
Suzy Chase: So I finally met you for the first time last month at your reading series called Tables of Contents, and can I tell you, my husband and I had the best time, so I'm so thrilled to chat with you today.
Evan Hanczor: I'm so glad. It was really great to meet you all. I feel like coming to the event is the best way to really experience the full flavor of the series. It's exciting to talk about the cookbook, but the cookbook is born of these in-person gatherings, so I'm really glad you could be there.
Suzy Chase: So you say the restaurant Little Egg in Brooklyn became your back door into a world of writers you've long admired. Tell the story of your path to becoming a cook who hosts literary readings.
Evan Hanczor: I started cooking in New Orleans when I was in college. I went to Tulane University and in my last semester there I was studying poetry and philosophy. My last semester I was curious to see what working in a kitchen in neurons would be like. So I got a short-term job before I graduated at a place called Yield Collagen, which was kind of the watering hole for the post two lane baseball game, crowd frying catfish, tilapia for po, boys making salads, kind of very simple cooking, but a really fun environment. And while I enjoyed it, I left there thinking that would probably be my last kitchen job. I thought I'd pursue primarily writing, maybe go into publishing or academia or something. And after that I moved back to Connecticut where I'm from. I was looking for jobs in the publishing world and I started working at a restaurant called The Dressing Room, which is in Westport, Connecticut.
And that was a place where I was really introduced to sustainability and working with local farmers and also a lot of literature about food and food systems. I was reading Michael Pollan and Anna Lappeé and Wendell Berry, and I think something was seated there. I was still writing a lot at the time and I was getting really frustrated to have the work I was doing in the kitchen food showing up in my poems because it didn't seem to me to be the kind of thing I wanted to write about. But eventually I decided to move to New York and I was still grappling with these kind of dual passions, writing and cooking, and started working at a restaurant called Egg and Egg was in Williamsburg as a breakfast and lunch place. I worked there as a cook and eventually became the chef and the partner. And a few years later, some friends of ours were hosting a weekend long independent publishing festival called Food Book Fair.
And they got together all these different sort of food magazine publishers, speakers, panels, and for their closing dinner the Sunday of the festival, they asked if we'd cook a meal for some of their VIPs, some of their panelists and participants and supporters at what was to be Parish Hall, which is another restaurant we had in Williamsburg for a couple of years. And so instead of just cooking a regular seasonal market driven meal like we would for most of our services, it seemed like an interesting opportunity to do something with food and with writing given the thrust of the festival. And we decided to try making a meal inspired by a book. And that book was The Sun Also Rises, which was a book I'd read in college loved deeply. And every time I read it just found myself wanting to eat the food and drink the wine that was being laid out on the page.
And I often drank wine while I was reading that book, but I never had a chance to eat the meals. So we did a five course meal, each course inspired by different scenes in that book, a trout wrapped in ferns with a wine sauce, a sort of bull fight scene, a pernot sorbet. And that's what started really sort of sparked the idea of tables of contents as a thing that a place where these two passions could come together for food and for literature. And it took a few years until we started inviting contemporary writers into the mix. Took several more meals inspired by classic novels, but once we did, that became the way I guess I could invite writers to come read at our restaurant, have a conversation, and use food as kind of the lure to get them there, which works a lot better than some other ways of trying to invite people over
Suzy Chase: Tables of Contents, champions, diverse voices. Could you chat a little bit about your focus on curating voices and perspectives that are often under considered in the writing world
Evan Hanczor: In food? I think a lot of our mission through the restaurant has of course aligned with things like sustainability, but also social justice and food access and equity. And when we began the reading series, it started with a friend named Rebecca Diner Stein who had a book coming out and was looking for a space to do a reading. And I offered a space at egg since we were only serving breakfast and lunch at the time and we had the dining room available at night. It felt like trying a reading out in the space would make sense. That's when the first TOC reading happened. Becky invited, I think had we had planned two months to start thinking that would be it, just two sessions of this reading series, three authors each night, group of friends, they're all women writers and I have to believe that some of our curation is where you start and then getting recommendations from folks for friends.
They'd recommend other writers. When you put certain voices at the center of the work, then you sort of invite welcome in, attract more voices that are aligned. And for me, trying to highlight women writers, bipoc authors, queer writers as a white male running the series, it sort of felt as simple as math. Like, okay, we already have one white guy up there. Let's have a diversity of other voices. Because I know in food systems, diversity creates more flavor, healthier soil, a more resilient system, and obviously maybe not obviously, but I believe that in society as well, more diverse societies, more diverse communities build strength and build resilience. And it felt like that was an important thing to center in the reading series as well.
Suzy Chase: Community cookbooks, especially those from churches, PTAs and organizations have a special place in American culture. Each contributor brings not only a recipe but also a piece of their personal history. So how did you choose the contributors for this cookbook?
Evan Hanczor: So there was this idea that felt like it would touch again on both topics. If we put together a cookbook featuring past authors from tables of contents, it'd be a way to engage with those authors. It'd be a way to bring the spirit of TOC to folks in their homes when we couldn't really gather in person the way we had been before. And it could also serve to support the tangible food delivery work that we were doing through FIG at the time. And I think that idea came up just before Thanksgiving of, I guess it was 2020, and I just sent out a few emails to authors to see who might be interested in participating. I think it was a pretty wide blast, anyone I could think of who had taken part in tables of contents before and the response was quick and beautiful. We got so many yeses right away. And to illustrate for anyone who understands publishing timelines, which often the idea of a book precedes the publication of the book by a couple years, maybe this book who was I guess conceived of in mid-November and published in February only a few months later, but it was really just overwhelmingly inspiring how many folks quickly got back to me and said, yeah, I'd love to contribute a recipe and a head note and make this book possible.
Suzy Chase: It is interesting how that cookbook is really a moment in time reading through it, reading what the recipe contributors wrote. I mean, it just took me back.
Evan Hanczor: It gave me so much comfort to have a project like this to work on in that time when I closed my restaurant, obviously all of our lives were in this very surreal, uncertain place where again, time was sort of hard to understand. Sometimes a week felt like a year. And yeah, we were all just trying to navigate this, especially in that loss of connection or the way our in-person connection shrunk down to our little pods for a brief moment, maybe folks were, I think we saw this, a lot of folks were cooking more at home, cooking more for smaller groups of people. And that cookbook I think also reflected what was going on in our author's lives at that time. In that way,
Suzy Chase: The cookbook is visually stunning with illustrations by over 18 artists in the cookbook you write, this is an exploration of what food illustration can be. So what does that mean?
Evan Hanczor: We thought a lot about how to bring color and illustration in life to the cookbook, and I think we've always been lucky to have our friend Farci photograph tables of contents events. We've had great photography from past readings, but as we were thinking about, and I was working with an amazing designer, Mariah Grace Rodriguez who joined the project early on was just so instrumental in making the physical object the way it is, the layout cover, the design of the book overall,
Suzy Chase: The cover.
Evan Hanczor: The cover was so special the way it came together.
Suzy Chase: So good.
Evan Hanczor: The image was originally from a shoot we had done a few years before with my friend Kate Kins. We were just messing around trying to do some sort of food and literature, food styled photos. We felt a little sacrilege, but bought some copies of books and chopped 'em up and stacked them like pancakes and drizzled some syrup on it. And that was our one of the shots we got out of that day. But that really felt like a perfect image for the front. So Mariah, she's an amazing illustrator and the plan was for her to illustrate all the recipes and we quickly realized that was just an enormous task. We have 36 or so recipes in the book. And so in the spirit of the community cookbook and the spirit of tables of contents, which is collaborative where there's contributions from writers and chefs and in this case an opportunity to welcome in collaboration with illustrators.
So Mariah connected us with a bunch of friends that she knew. I reached out to folks I knew who were illustrators. We did some sort of social media outreach. I think almost in the planning of it, my concern was that it would feel caco or hectic or too much, but these illustrations in all these different styles I know somehow really worked, and I don't even know how to describe how that happened, but you get such a range from digital sort of production to collage, to watercolor so many styles. And in a way I think it echoed the stylistic and diversity of the authors we were working with and the recipes and leaned into that. Here's a bunch of stuff all slapped together that community cookbooks do in a way that can feel a little uncurated, not as tight and tidy as a concept of a traditional cookbook, but that's where the beauty is in the range and in the diversity of it.
Suzy Chase: And I have to hand it to you for pulling all these people together. I mean, that's amazing that you gathered all the, and you continue to gather all these people together.
Evan Hanczor: I'd say that's one of my favorite things to do or roles to play. I think I use the term pollinator a lot, but gathering people together or connecting folks across disciplines, that's so exciting for me. I'm someone who cooks and loves to cook and loves literature and reading and interviewing people and talking with people. I mean, it's no surprise that although I was a poet in college or pursuing poetry that's like most solitary feeling of all acts, maybe almost monastic sort of way of being. In some ways that as much as I love poetry and love working in that sort of discipline, I was really unavoidably drawn to something that's almost the opposite is food is gathering people every day around a table for food and conversation.
Suzy Chase: I love Emma Straub, an author and she's the owner of Books are Magic in Brooklyn,
Evan Hanczor: One of the greats,
Suzy Chase: Her recipe every single day, rice salad, born out of pandemic cooking by a non cook. I love that. But the recipe is actually delicious, versatile, and easy to pull together with rice, chickpeas, kale or cauliflower or broccolini or asparagus. And then she says, or whatever vegetable you have, and then maybe some feta, avocado and something seedy. Then she gives us three different recipes for dressing. So food as a means of storytelling is definitely a theme in this cookbook. Each recipe is paired with a reflection on food. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Evan Hanczor: I mean, I love Emma as well, or writing her whole being in the world. Every time I see her, she just lights up my day, the room, everywhere she goes. It feels like books are magic. I used to live down the street from there, one of my favorite bookstores anywhere really generous supporters of the cookbook. They were willing to stock it and help spread the word for us. And I love this recipe that she contributed as well. It feels so real. It feels like the way you cook at home. I think sometimes cookbooks can be primarily an assembly of aspirational recipes looking like, oh, one day I want to cook that, or I'll put in the work to gather all these ingredients to follow this recipe, that tea, and make something sort of outside of myself and outside of my life. And that approach to cooking and cookbooks is beautiful.
It's a way to travel, it's a way to discover something new about yourself, about food, but this kind of recipe, which is how I cook all the time, you open the fridge and you see what's in there and you might have a few pieces of broccolini and you might have half a jar of coconut milk you didn't use or some leftover or some wilting radishes or cucumbers. You can make something really delicious out of that. And in a lot of ways, I feel like Emma's books, which feel so reflective and they pull so much out of everyday life and pull so much out of the emotions of family and time and memory, it's not surprising that she wrote a recipe like this that offers so much and so many ways to experience it and also feels so rooted in the real simple and joyful experience in way of feeding yourself and your family, especially in our case.
I know she talks about that in the book in the recipe too. That is among many, I mean, I love Maria Lambertino's recipe for a single girl's chicken. I love Alexander Chi's recipe. I love caramel Maria Machado's recipe for this pineapples stud cheese ball. Again, sort of like the illustrations, these recipes, because they're being written from literally many different voices from many different backgrounds, you can really feel the author in the recipe and that feels really exciting to me. I wasn't sure that that would be the case. I thought maybe we'll just get a bunch of recipes and we'll slap 'em together. But to have these head notes that all the authors contributed as well, where you really hear their voice. It's so cool to hear these masters of storytelling, not necessarily trying to practice that craft in these recipes or in these stories, but they can't help also coming through in the ways that we love their work through each of their recipes. And that I think is a big part of what gives the real brightness and real distinctiveness to this book.
Suzy Chase: That's what I loved about Emma's recipe. I was like, oh God, is this going to be like some beef borgen yawn or some complicated? I can see her in her brownstone in Brooklyn making this up and she's like, I don't even cook.
Evan Hanczor: Right?
Suzy Chase: It was so good.
Evan Hanczor: Yeah, it's great.
Suzy Chase: So tell me about the Tables of Contents residency in upstate New York.
Evan Hanczor: Yeah, that's one of our newer projects. And as we talked about before, supporting a community of artists and particularly with a diverse lens and a priority on a diverse group of artists has been part of the reading series for a long time. And the residency came up through food. There's a farm and agricultural nonprofit called Glenwood that's just an incredible place, one of my favorite places in the world, stunningly beautiful. So Inspiringly run the mission of supporting farming in the Hudson Valley and the ways that they pursue that through community building and collaborative effort and farmer training and research and really sharing resources is a beacon for me. And I've been lucky over the years to work with Glenwood on fundraising dinners for their work or on all sorts of geeky food world. Things like maintaining heirloom seed varieties or testing apple varieties for cider or developing CSA models.
All this stuff that I think that folks who don't work in food but consume food really benefit from. And Glenwood helps in a lot of ways to do the work that can make those things possible. We were talking a couple years ago, I guess it was probably three or four years ago at this point, I was talking with Kathleen, who's the president of Glenwood because one of our TOC authors, Natalie Diaz, was sort of one of the rare benefits of Twitter, which I now find hard to engage with in anyway. But at that point I had seen a tweet of hers or there was a last minute sabbatical or semester off or something like that, and she was looking for a residency whose deadline for application she hadn't yet missed. And we did not have a residency. I didn't have a place for residency. But something even in just seeing that sparked the idea of Glenwood of this property in connection that I have and sort of had this why not a residency there? This seems like such a perfect way to extend the food and literature core of cables of contents into another way of supporting artists. But Kathleen, when we discussed the idea, was super supportive and said, there's this cottage clove cottage, we don't really use it in the off season October to March when we don't have the farmer apprentices on onsite. If you want to give it a shot, go for it. Sort of the space is yours if you can put everything else together. And we got to trial that residency with a TOC author.
And it has become, it's still very early stages, but at this point we've had four residents. We just opened applications for our next residency, which is a new step for us. Previously we were just taking nominations and inviting folks based on that. And the hope is to grow this program into a thing that continues to try to bring food and writing and the arts closer.
Suzy Chase: So when is the next reading series?
Evan Hanczor: So the next reading series, I think by the time this comes out will be November 18th, and then our last reading series of the, it'll be December 9th. So we've got two more in 2024. And we're planning, of course, a return to the monthly reading series for 2025, but also have some other interesting ideas for tables of contents going into next year.
Suzy Chase: Awesome. So now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of a favorite dish,
Evan Hanczor: I love bread and butter, sometimes I think that would be my last meal. I love building these kind of no surprises, is going to really align with everything we've talked about, terms of collaboration and pollination and community, but bites from all the little leftovers on different plates at a meal sitting with friends at a dinner party, you might've had three different, four different dishes and there's little scraps left in each bowl or platter and you're like, Ooh, this would go well with this and this would go well with this. And one of my favorite versions of that is really nice crusty bread with some butter and after eating a salad, the leftover vinegarette or a couple piece of nuts or cheese, whatever left in the bottom of the bowl and just wiping out the bowl so you get all the richness and acidity and brightness of the leftover vinegarette and whatever else is in there that on some crusty bread, usually it's the bite that comes in the middle of the meal. You finish your salad and you're going to have something else afterwards. But I often find myself wanting that bite again at the end to lean into the learnings of the great Samin Nora, the salt, the acid, the fat of those elements and the texture of that crusty bread slightly softened and just perfectly soggy from dipping and a dressing. I love that textural contrast.
Suzy Chase: God, that's good. Where can we find you on the web and social media
Evan Hanczor: On Instagram? We're at tables dot of dot contents. I'm at Evan Hanczor and the restaurant is Egg Restaurant,
Suzy Chase: H-A-N-C-Z-O-R.
Evan Hanczor: Yeah, you're right. That's a good reminder. It's not as it sounds. And then on our website, Tables of Contents.org
Suzy Chase: Tables of Contents creates unique and delicious gatherings and conversations at the intersections of food, literature, arts, and culture. Thanks so much, Evan, for coming on Dinner Party Podcast.
Evan Hanczor: Thank you so much for having me. This is such a joy.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzy chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the book and Cookery by the book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
