Over the course of my two-hour lunch with chef and cookbook author Samin Nosrat, she brings up fruit three times. My favourite is the last. We’ve spent the hours considering how to live a good life. I suggest maybe it’s as obvious as they say: that life is suffering, and we’re all trying to optimise for constant happiness, but joy is fleeting and will pass, and sadness happens and will pass. She says: “I think that’s why I love fruit.”
Nosrat tells me about a Persian mulberry tree on her street. It is the source of her favourite fruit. The berries last exactly 10 days. “You’re just standing there eating as many as you can,” she says, talking faster, as if each word is a berry, “knowing it won’t be there tomorrow.”
The world first read Nosrat in 2017, when her book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat codified what chefs know about flavour into a fun-to-read manual for the rest of us. It is not hyperbole to say it could be the most influential book on cooking in the 21st century, one that took 18 years of thought and seven of work, and sold nearly 1.5mn US copies (Holy Bible levels, in the cookbook world). It also spawned a Netflix series that made her, as she tells me later, America’s “joyful happy food friend”.