The Uncanny Conundrum of Can't Please Them All

An Ode to Summer Minestrone

In an unusual circumstance—born of a long Kitchen Shrink vacation—today’s column replies to two letters with a single recommendation. I preface it with this confession: this advice also replies to a question I was not asked, but always sense hovering: What should I cook? I was recently convinced of the rightness of one reply to that question in all its variations, including the two below.

Dear Tamar:

My sweet family is made up of people with specific preferences and dietary needs: elders wanting “nothing weird,” active teens needing nutrition, and a spouse (and myself!) wanting variety and health. I'd love to compose culinary greats nightly. But I just need to feed these people! I’m grateful for people to feed and the means to feed them. But what can I lean on when feeding multiple people with multiple needs?

-Can’t Please Them All

Dear Tamar:

I have gone from a family of five to being an empty nester. I overbuy good produce, and I constantly "put up" leftovers in the freezer, but that's getting full. Cooking is a joy, especially after reading (and re-reading) your first book, so can I find a balance?

-And Then There was One

Dear Can’t Please Them All and And Then There was One,

When I’m lucky enough to find inspiration—in my mind, a vivacious synonym for the word “answer”—I think of a half-remembered fragment of Milan Kundera I read when I was very young. It suggested, in essence, that if humans were immortal, all stories would find their ends.

This fragment was galloping through my mind during a final lunch in Italy last week. I’d read the short, changing menu at Trattoria Mangiabuono in Genova. It started me ruminating about inspiration and its anchor in patience and observation and passing time. The dish was “Minestrone alla Genovese Tiepido.” I escaped my pensive paralysis only long enough to order it, then sunk back into my dreaming, sipping Pigato.

Minestrone Genovese is a vegetable-bean-starch soup. I’ve long believed it the perfect food, the answer to all culinary questions, bolstering every cooking and eating priority: If you want to eat more vegetables, make minestrone. If you want a use for a single butternut squash bought impulsively at a farm-stand, minestrone provides it. If you’ve spent $4 on a single, beautifully splotchy tomato of which there are a few slices left, minestrone offers itself as a destination for those precious remains. If you need a meal for vegetarians: minestrone. If you need an inexpensive meal: minestrone. Something that freezes well; something that won’t suffer if you’re missing an ingredient and won’t mutiny if you add an extra; something to absorb the last swipe of chopped parsley, the olive oil left in a dipping dish, the last of the grilled vegetables: minestrone, minestrone, minestrone.

The lightning bolt that struck me from the mustard yellow paper menu in Genova was the adjective tiepido, or tepid.

Have you read what Anne Carson wrote about adjectives in Autobiography of Red?

Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

“Tepid” latched the beans and vegetables in broth to my imagination, to my thinking about cooking. Other adjectives might have, too. I’ve seen the same soup called “minestrone freddo” (cold minestrone) and “minestrone estivo” (summer minestrone.) I urge any cook to trade the impertinent honesty of “tepid” for the neutrality of “cold” or the allure of “summer.” What struck me in the chosen “imported mechanism” was the restaurant’s adaptation of an already adaptable soup to the conditions of the day—a vivid reminder that, for those of us lucky enough to have enough to eat, our ideas about eating, informed by custom or by fear, impose limitations reality doesn’t.

The menu at Mangiabuono awoke me from a daze. It seemed such an obvious and natural treatment of soup on a hot day, underlined by the waiter’s imperious brow, which seemed always to be saying, “Obviously.” The soup itself offered the reminder, upon first bite, that when temperature isn’t the primary impression made by a dish, its flavors are more prominent, more generous, more direct. The serene richness of tender beans, fregola, summer potatoes was jauntily met by copious olive oil. The tiny round pebbles of cheese covering the top seemed to pop. Each ingredient was itself and of the whole. The tepid soup held my attention; it filled the time.

To be blithe: to the questions of what to feed eaters with multiple needs, and what to cook when you’re only one, I answer: Tepid minestrone. In earnest, however, I answer with the lesson I took from being served the dish: cook and serve what is already there, even if you must adjust your preconceptions to see it. The best perspective from which to view either situation may be that of an imperious, avuncular Genovese waiter.

Last weekend, I made tepid minestrone for a group that included an elder, two teenagers, a gluten-free husband, and a gastronomically-timid eight-year old. I shopped for it with jet lag, which resulted in a glut of some ingredients—green beans, corn—and the absence of others—carrots, potatoes, fennel. I had to omit pasta, even the fregola that had lent my Genovese minestrone its pleasant chew. Aspects of the set up were uneven and unpredictable in a way that brought both of your letters to mind.

I doubt Mangiabuono’s minestrone is the same day to day. Mine had no carrots. I substituted rice for pasta. I had beautiful, thin, summer beans, and corn—at its apex of sweetness right now. To prepare for reluctance if not outright refusal by my son, I filled a cutting board with sliced peaches, prosciutto, speck, and mortadella, and copiously distributed butter and lots of bread. I laid the table with a jar of Calabrian chilies a friend had given me; my mother brought peperonata.

Dear cooks, try making minestrone. Let yours fit the demands of your kitchen and your eater(s). See it all with eyes of a patient being who believes the answer is already there. Let the soup cool. Drizzle it with the best oil you have, and blanket it with Parmigiano. Serve it with bread and lots of fruit. When the meal ends, refrigerate what’s left. I promise: it’s just as good cold.