Cookbook Author Carla Lalli Listens to Her Gut

Carla Lalli’s third tome, “Food is a Feeling,” is a different kind of cookbook. In it, the Brooklyn-based James Beard Award-winning chef — known for her two previous bestsellers and years at Bon Appetit, which included hosting the brand’s “Back-to-Back Chef” YouTube series — tells a tale of transition, beginning with the end of her 24-year marriage.

Through a series of essays that touch on everything from comfort cooking to friendship loss to discovery and reinvention, Carla charts her journey back to herself, reclaiming her time, her tomatoes and her appetite. The recipes remain delicious but, she acknowledges in the intro, they don’t sound the same because she’s not the same.

Ahead of hosting a tea party at Ace Hotel Brooklyn this Sunday, we caught up with Carla about what’s changed (and how to change), how she got the gumption to make the book she wanted and the extraordinariness of ordinariness. Plus, her recipe for Banana Bread with Cocoa and Salted Peanuts from “Food is a Feeling.” Yum.

Food is a Feeling opens with an epigraph from Yorgos Lanthimos’ film “Kinds of Kindness” that concludes: “It’s better to eat something that’s always available than to depend on something that runs out early every morning.” How do you interpret that, and why was it a fitting sentiment for the story you proceed to tell?

I was in the pretty early stages of writing the book when I watched that movie, and that scene blew me away. I immediately rewound it and played it over and over and made a voice memo of it. To me, what she’s saying is that there may be a desire to save up for a special thing, but actually the most special thing is being able to have something every day. That immediately made me think about having very simple food — knowing that it’s there for you as the most sustaining thing rather than holding out for some big prize. I think it has to do, for me, with what a gift it is to have food in my life every day, and to have a healthy relationship with food and to enjoy food and cooking so much. I don’t have any other creative talents and thank God I have this one.

Also a feeling of, we talk about this a lot in my family, all of it is a special occasion. The special thing could be your everyday thing.

This book came together during a period of transition for you, beginning with the end of your marriage. What changed about your relationship to food and cooking during that time?

I was cooking for one half the time, because we were doing one week on, one week off with the kids. When you have kids who need to have dinner, you have to have a plan. But when it was just me, it was like, “Oh, am I eating dinner? What am I doing for dinner?” Lots of different things could be dinner. And so my cooking became more spontaneous, much more simple and also very grounding.

Then I was doing dinner for two with my younger son, which I realized actually you can push a little bit. Cooking for two is faster, there’s less prep. You can pull off something that feels a little bit special because it’s just the two of you. I wrote about the chicken cutlets being a chore for four, but when you cut your work in half … or things that felt a little bit special because it was a smaller quantity. I also was just much more willing to indulge whatever I was in the mood for.

I love the portion on tomatoes. That’s something that had completely been eliminated [due to your ex’s dislike of them], and you were able to reconnect with tomatoes.

That was very much coming back to self and to my own physical wants and needs and what pleases me.

Where else are you finding, perhaps unexpected, freedoms in your life now?

I mean, my current life is getting ready for the book. There’s a line, I think it’s in the beach peaches essay, that’s come up a lot ever since, which is: because I can do whatever I want, I fill in the blank. So in that essay, I decided to go to the beach in the middle of the day. I’ve been having a lot of “I can do whatever I want” where I can go out dancing by myself and roll up alone at 1am. And that is totally fine and acceptable and good. Being self-employed, I have a tendency to work seven days a week. And it’s been good to kind of give myself moments of compartmentalizing. Like, today we’re going to just pretend it’s the day off.

The book is so personal that people initially dissuaded you from writing it. How were you able to trust your gut and get it done on your terms?

The initial response was really disappointing. This was my third book with the same publisher, and I did not anticipate that they would be so skittish abou tthe fact that it was going to deal with the topic of my divorce. Everyone I had told what I was working on — people my age, friends who are in their 30s who are not married, queer friends — everyone’s response was like, “Fuck yeah.” So, I thought I had something pretty hot and they were so hesitant and concerned about it being a downer. I found myself having to do a lot of reassuring and convincing.

I also was dealing with the reality of selling a cookbook, which is that there aren’t an unlimited amount of people you can pitch to. I accepted an offer that was quite a bit lower than what they paid me for my second book. Part of how I went into the rest of the project was like, “Until I hear no, until there’s very firm pushback, I’m not interested in compromises.” And that was super important.

This is also a theme of, when you’re in either a long relationship whether it’s professional or personal, compromise can become such a big part of how you relate. I knew that if I didn’t have the confidence to just keep going, at the end of this I might really regret that I didn’t do exactly what I wanted. Part of that was also assembling my own team: I had my own outside designer; we pitched and got the photographer we wanted; my sister was my prop stylist, which she did for last two books; my food stylist is my friend Cybelle Tondu, who I had worked with for years on videos and I trusted them; and Alex Beggs, was my top editor who I hired separately from the publisher. I was so invested in their opinions, and that was the truth board.

Do you feel like the end result is true to that vision?

A million percent. Somebody asked me the other day, “Is there anything about the book that you wish you could change?” They wouldn’t let us have any embossing on the cover because it’s too expensive. That was a mini heartbreak, but no, not really.

What advice would you give to folks out there thinking about taking a risk or making a big change?

I believe that a certain amount of discomfort is absolutely necessary for change. The times in my life when I was the most scared, the most in over my head, didn’t know what I was doing — those moments ended up being the beginning of some other new transition that I could never have gotten to if I didn’t put myself in that situation. When I got hired at Bon Appétit, I was given a title and an expectation of a job that I was like, nobody knows that I literally don’t know how to do this. I was really scared that someone was going to figure it out before I could figure out how to do it.

I think also in the separation, I had to believe that I wouldn’t put myself through something so difficult, and put my family and friends through something so difficult, if I didn’t believe that it was going to get me somewhere where there was future happiness. I think if you’re just comfortable all the time, you’re probably avoiding something.

Tell us about bringing a tea leaf reader along for the book tour.

We’re actually working with local tea readers in all the cities that we’re doing tea reader parties. This was an idea when the tour conversations were starting to happen and I was thinking back to the other tours that I’ve done for my other books. The best part of every event is when the event is over and people just come up to talk to me one-on-one. That’s always where the most impactful moments, or people tell me really personal things that are amazing. One woman told me she had an estranged relationship with her mom and then they started cooking together once a week and it repaired their relationship. So I was like, “How can we skip the boring Q&A part and just have these moments?”

The tea reader events were just a dumb pun, basically, where I was like, “It’ll be like a tea party and then I’ll do a reading, but then there’s also a tea reader.” Get it? Does everybody get it?

• #Community
• #Food
• #Wellness
• #Writing