By Allison Tyler | Off The Shelf - Tuesday, July 15, 2014

When Tamar Adler writes, “The amount of food you have left from a meal is always the perfect amount for something,” it is the sort of guidance that makes her book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, feel like having a good friend in the kitchen with you. It gives wise advice, is highly entertaining, witty, makes you think, and leaves you wanting more; even if it won’t help wash the dishes.

 Part thrifty cooking manual, part recipe book, part autobiography, Adler writes conversationally with the smooth palatability of M.F.K. Fisher, whose writings inspired this book; but An Everlasting Meal is all Adler’s own. Her voice is pure poetry in its intimacy, whether she’s describing how to rescue a panful of burned roasted vegetables, enlivening our salads, elevating simple mayonnaise, or suggesting what to cook from our pot of bean broth or stale ends of bread.

 Adler doesn’t just teach us how to prepare meals, she educates us in how to look at, taste, and think about food, fresh and leftover, and that in turn allows us to know what do with it. These skills are obviously important when we’re standing mesmerized before pyramids of glorious summer abundance at the farmer’s market, but they’re equally paramount in the dead of winter when we’re staring at the lone dusty onion in the bin, or a can of green beans in the pantry, with a rumbling in our bellies. She gives a spicy recipe for those beans that’s only slightly more involved than plopping them into a pot and turning on the flame, and it’s delicious. Ever prepared, Adler keeps anchovies, olives, capers and astringent pickles on hand, and when she explains that, “They are not all universally loved, but few powerful things are,” she’s feeding us a life lesson, along with a cooking one.