IF YOU GO
Lynne Rossetto Kasper makes a free appearance to promote How to Eat Supper at 5 p.m. Saturday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 305-442-4408.Yours are the hands that have launched a thousand -- at least -- dinners, nuking frozen blocks of mixed vegetables, patting that meatloaf into shape, adding the arroz to the pollo.
So why does Lynne Rossetto Kasper think you need a primer?
''We are at a point in America where food confuses us, puzzles us, engages us, fascinates us -- scares the heck out of us,'' says Kasper, host of public radio's The Splendid Table, heard at 3 p.m. Saturdays on WLRN-FM (91.3).
''We've perhaps forgotten the fact that it's something to take pleasure in.''
Frozen veggies and ground beef prove her point. (Though it's OK to use frozen niblets in her corn chowder.)
Rossetto Kasper will be in South Florida Saturday to promote her latest cookbook, How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories and Opinions from Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show (Clarkson Potter, $35), co-written with her long-time producer and food friend, Sally Swift. (They're based in Minnesota, hence the Midwestern ''supper'' in the title.)
Their friendship weathered the four-year process with the partners sitting side by side, finishing each other thoughts, filling in each other's blanks.
''It happened naturally,'' Swift says. ``We started working on the proposal, and it became apparent to Lynne -- not to me. She said, `You have to write this book with me.'
``It was an incredibly generous thing to do on her part. Both of our voices, both of our sensibilities are there. We were glued at the hip for many a month.''
Here's what they came up with: A cookbook that not only wants you to cook smarter, it implores you to be a smarter citizen of the world. Cooks are encouraged to build a library of books that explain where food comes from, how people on the other side of the world see food in their lives, how the health of the environment depends on the ways in which we use it to feed ourselves.
It's a book that gives you flavors to savor: a Moroccan green bean tagine with allspice and garam masala; preserved lemon to accompany roasted trout, refried beans with cinnamon and clove (and you can use canned beans!), carrots braised in white wine and sage, New York strip marinated in red wine and honey.
How to Eat Supper has moments of gravitas: Africans from Gambia and Angola ``made nearly six generations of [South Carolina] plantation gentry rich, while the slaves did the deadly work of cultivating the rice, with the ever-present snakes and diseases.''
And militancy: ``Scan a couple [of meat labels], and you might be surprised to find that a good part of what you're paying for is water, preservatives, salt and coloring. . . . This is what's happening to our steaks, chops, ribs and roasts.''
And just plain fun: There are curious and funny food quotes from a diversity of people (''Cabbage, n. A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and as wise as a man's head,'' Ambrose Bierce), Rossetto Kasper's signature dry and thoughtful wit (''These days, no matter what our philosophy, our politics, or the state or our psyche, we're all eating at the low end of the food chain as least some of the time'') and paragraphs in which the typeface changes size and color in mid-sentence.
''Part of it's very cheeky on our part. The typefaces I felt strongly about,'' Kasper says ``You may take your subject seriously, but don't take yourself seriously. It's meant to be playful.
``This may be considered a cheap trick by people who are deep and literary. But most people don't sit down and read cookbooks. Sixty percent of people who listen to the show have no interest in walking into a kitchen, but they find the information interesting -- the culture, the humor.''
Indeed, more than anything, How to Eat Supper is the printed and bound extension of the radio show, so much of both designed to make listeners and readers murmur, ``I didn't know that!''
They drop names mercilessly, but never smugly: Mario Batali, Nell Newman, Peter Mayle. After 12 years on the air, Rossetto has found food connections where others would never think of looking: Polar explorer Ann Bancroft talks about the lost expedition of 1845 (turns out badly canned foods spawned botulism); food historian Carolin Young revealed the concept behind King Louis XVI's ''pleasure dairies,'' set up on estates to let the aristocracy play at being peasants; neurologist Richard E. Cytowic discusses ''synesthesia,'' a crossed-wire condition where one, say, bites into a cookie and hears music.
''Food is entertaining us, challenging us,'' Rossetto Kasper says. ``It's so much more a part of the American psyche, it's the thing that's influencing us. We have come to a point where, I think,for a lot of different reasons, we're embracing how unique we are in the world. . . .
``We don't have a food tradition like France and Italy. I think we were almost embarrassed about that. But we are far more open-minded, far more welcoming and experimental on a day-to-day basis.''
Or should be. That's why Rossetto Kasper makes ''supper'' straightforward but not predictable, and much more than something that just fills the belly.
''Sometimes it's as simple as a piece of good bread with radishes and fresh cheese smeared on it, some scallion tops, a little coarse salt and a glass of beer,'' she says. ``It's something that you've done with your own hands, but something that's really genuine.
``We're entitled to
this, something
simple and really
delicious. Take a
breath for a while,''
she coaxes.
``It's clearing some
time out of your
life for yourself --
and it's fun.''
Nancy Ancrum
is The Miami
Herald's
Cultural
Kitchen
columnist and
the co-host of
Join Us at the
Table, heard
at 9 a.m.
Saturdays
on WMCU-
AM (1080).
