Most days, my partner and I have something we call egg lunch. At its most basic, it is an egg and rice. Sometimes there’s soy sauce and American cheese, or chile crisp, or the last of a wilting scallion and some other condiment, but sometimes it’s just egg and rice. Because did you know meals come three times a day? That you can’t just eat one big meal and be sustained for the rest of the week like a snake? You just keep needing food. It’s ridiculous.
Margaret Eby’s new cookbook, You Gotta Eat, out November 19 from Quirk Books, opens with a mantra that might seem antithetical to cookbooks: “You do not have to cook.” Sometimes you are depressed. Sometimes you are too broke to buy fresh herbs. Sometimes you are just so busy that suddenly it’s 7 p.m. and your stomach is growling and you are too overwhelmed to even think about following a recipe. You Gotta Eat was written for those moments. It’s divided not into appetizers and desserts, but by what you feel you have energy for. Can you open a can? Here’s how to make a bean salad. Can you work the microwave? Make a baked potato with it. There are some recipes, but mostly, Eby guides you through technique and flavor, whether it’s how to make rice in a mug or doing a choose-your-own-adventure canape recipe (Triscuits with cream cheese and hot sauce can absolutely be dinner).
You Gotta Eat is as much about granting permission as it is showing you how to assemble a meal out of the dregs of your kitchen. Eby notes the absolute mess human society has made of food, from the diet-industrial complex to gendered domestic labor to the welfare of every worker that gets canned beans into your pantry. But despite all that, you can’t just opt out of eating. “When food felt like a chore, I kept reminding myself: The best food is the food that you’ll eat,” writes Eby. We spoke to her about rediscovering the joy in cooking, surprising flavor combinations, and why the microwave is your friend.
Eater: There’s a whole genre of cookbook purporting to make cooking easy, but yours feels really distinct from that. What did you want to do differently?
Margaret Eby: One of the things I think about with easy or simple recipes is: Easy for who? Recipe development is a translation project that requires you to make so many assumptions about the person using the recipe: What their skill level in the kitchen is, what kind of equipment they’re working with, what’s in their pantry, and how comfortable they are with various techniques, and with recipes in general. “Easy” means something radically different to different people. What I was hoping to do with this book is to break things down to a starting place that was as unintimidating as possible. So before we even get to the stage of chopping an onion, ask, ok, what are you up for? Do you have time and energy to turn on the oven at all, or is today an assemble-things-from-cans kind of meal day? Do you have time and bandwidth to boil water or do you just want to figure out how to make a cheese sandwich slightly more exciting? What are the things that feel hard to you in the kitchen for whatever reason, and how do you avoid them when you can’t face them?
So many of those cookbooks make these assumptions, like, all you need to do is dig up fresh herbs you’re supposed to have on your patio. I’m like, I have wilted spinach, half a jar of peanut butter, and this is my energy level. What I need is someone to talk me into not ordering delivery again. I really admire a lot of those cookbooks, and I took a lot of inspiration from them. There’s no knock against them. But I really wanted this to be so accessible, and give people permission to use what they have, and take it easy on themselves. Do what you can with what you’ve got.
There’s this fallacy in food media, where you and I are both participants, that every meal should be the best meal you’ve ever had. No, some meals are frozen burritos, and that is fine. And I know also from experience, many of the people putting together the beautiful and aspirational food and making the photos look gorgeous are like, Well, I have 20 minutes for lunch, so I’m going to eat a cheese rind and an orange.
Reading your book made me realize just how many expectations are in other “easy” cookbooks. They all seem to think I have fresh lemons around, and I just don’t.
Another big thing was I wanted to make sure not to introduce an element of shame. What’s actually in people’s pantries is so varied, so dependent on their lives and how often they get to go to the supermarket, or how much time and money they have to devote to fresh produce versus frozen things. A lot of these casual assumptions end up boxing people in rather than actually helping and being instructional.
You talk a little bit in the introduction about the life and health things that can get in the way of cooking, like depression, or just being overwhelmed with other things. Was there a moment when you realized this book needed to be made for those moments?
During the pandemic, when I was working for Food & Wine, I was in this exact scenario. There was a lasagna on the cover of the magazine and it was completely gorgeous. And it took literally two days to make, doing the noodles from scratch. It was a real showstopper recipe. Meanwhile, I was so anxious and stressed out, and so tired of cooking. The only way for me to get through was to eat like a child. I bought an economy-sized bag of Bagel Bites, because it’s technically food and it’s delicious.
Being in that place, and having a lot of people who aren’t in food come to me for advice, made me think a lot about this aspirational branch of food media. Like the Martha Stewart image, or this idea that food people have secret knowledge that regular people do not have that allows them to constantly make beautifully plated lunches. I can do that, and I can tell you how to do that, but I was also amazed how much it helped people when I was just being very honest with them about where I was at. I can tell you how to make that lasagna if you have the energy, but I’m making cheese toast.
Speaking of shame, you talk about all the ways that we’re told our instincts are wrong in the kitchen. How did you start to get over that? Because even reading it, I had this immediate gut reaction when you said something about putting beans in tuna salad. I was like, You can’t do that! And then thought, Actually that sounds good, why do I think you can’t do that?
I think in my head I had for a long time — and kind of still do, to be honest — this idea of a secret cabal of “real” food people who are constantly judging me. Maybe that’s just an anxiety thing. I came into the food world as an entertainment journalist who was just interested in food, but I hadn’t worked in restaurants. But I put myself through French culinary school, very duck l’orange and mother sauces, and it started to dismantle the cabal. They don’t exist, but even if they did, who cares? In real life, people are like, You put Doritos on your sandwich? Nice. Maybe Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud would think it was gross, but I don’t know them.
It made me realize how much I had internalized this Eurocentric, patriarchal idea of food. People have been making food for themselves for as long as people have existed. Why are they wrong? Why is it wrong to approach a problem differently than a man in the 1800s who was cooking for a French king? The more I realize that, and the more I talk to actual people who work in restaurants who are mostly enthusiasts and weird nerds, the more I see these rules are made up. What you really need to be able to do is take care of yourself in whatever way you can. I was really hoping to make it more useful than something that felt like it was holding people back, to explain why you add butter to stuff or where you can add a bunch of salt, as opposed to being like, Oh, you don’t know how to make a bechamel sauce?
Is there a recipe or flavor combination that shocked you when it worked?
The one sandwich that always makes people freak out at me is the mayonnaise and pineapple one. Everyone is going along with the ride, and then I’m like, Have you tried canned pineapple and mayonnaise? And everyone’s getting off the train. But you try it and it’s pretty good! It feels very like born of the Great Depression, or maybe a stoner thing, but it is a flavor combination that really works,
How else did your friends react when they were helping you try out these recipes?
One of my first readers is my wonderful friend, Jet Allen, they’re a cartoonist. I was like, you’re a regular human, will you please read this book and tell me if these are food things that are helpful to you or make sense. And I was so happy with their response, because they read it, and they gave me a few notes, and then they made nachos. Nachos are limitless, and you can do whatever you want with them. I wanted to be a pep talk from your friend about what you should make for dinner when you’re not feeling up to it, but you want someone to convince you not to order takeout.
I know that the point of this book is allowing yourself to do less when you need to do less. But I’m curious if there are any kitchen appliances that have come in handy for cooking like this.
For a lot of the book I come off as this midcentury small-appliance evangelist. Like, have you heard of the microwave? But it’s really amazing how much it helps to have a microwave or a blender or a food processor, and also to not feel like they are less legitimate ways of cooking something. My aunt is the queen of cooking eggs in the microwave. You can just use it to make your life better. But also, I had a recipe in the book for crispy garlic that you can make in the microwave, but you can also buy crispy garlic. There is often this mentality that if you can’t do it with a cast iron skillet and a knife, you are inadequate as a cook, and that’s stupid. It’s fine to embrace newer technologies. Mine are maybe a bit old-fashioned. I love my toaster oven. I love my blender. I love my microwave. And I use my rice cooker every day.
You mentioned crispy garlic. Are there other ingredients that yes, you can technically make, but store-bought really is fine?
This whole book is absolutely the mantra, store-bought is fine. There’s a green sauce recipe in there, because I love making random science-experiment green sauces, but jarred pesto, totally fine. Similarly, you can make noodles from scratch, but you absolutely do not need to, because box noodles exist. I always have a stack of tortillas in my fridge. Could I make my own tortillas? Yes. Have I made my own tortillas? Yes. Are they as good as the ones that I buy? Maybe, but they’re like, 3,000 percent more effort. There’s a wonderful Mexican market down the street from me that makes hot corn tortillas every day. If it’s worth it for you to make it yourself, then don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t. But also, if you have decided that your time investment in this thing is less valuable to you than having tortillas immediately, then that is absolutely legitimate.
