Yotam Ottolenghi Cooks and Books Up Comfort

It’s impossible not to respect the up-front honesty of a cookbook — yes, a cookbook — that offers the following sentence in its introduction: “For the most part, we live in a batshit-crazy world.” That indisputable claim kicks off the need for the latest book from esteemed chef Yotam Ottolenghi (and his co-authors Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley), Comfort.

“I think food is the best antidote to the madness we live in,” Ottolenghi said during a recent Zoom interview. “If you cook something you know and you’ve cooked before and love, it gives you a sense of stability and a sense of place — this is what I think we are missing. So, this is another layer of comfort I would hope to explore with people, to hear how food gives them comfort through their personal lives and personal journeys.”

Ottolenghi and lucky ticket-holders will get to do that exploration in person on October 14 at the Granada, in an evening presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Joining him as moderator for the night will be Ben Mims, former cooking columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

As the book suggests, Ottolenghi’s personal journey “takes in Italy and Germany (from his parents), Jerusalem to Amsterdam (where he lived and ate his body weight in croquettes), to London.” London is where he currently co-owns a group of deli shops and the fine dining restaurants NOPI and ROVI, and grew into a publishing icon. In particular 2010’s Plenty — all vegetarian and all delicious — became a book on every cook’s shelves.

Ottolenghi has only been to Santa Barbara virtually, participating in a pandemic-days online presentation with Samin Nosrat for Arts & Lectures in February 2021. This time, he says the first part of the evening “is going to be about how food gives us comfort, how that changes when we come in contact with other people, how we use that familiarity to create great meals.” Not surprisingly given his own upbringing hopscotching the globe, issues of migration and nostalgia will be sure to surface.

The second part of the evening will feature a demo, but he wanted to avoid spilling too many details so it would be a surprise for the crowd. “I’m not going to cook a dish from start to finish,” Ottolenghi explains, “but I’m going to have ingredients in front of me and try to put them together with audience participation.” The evening will end with queries from the audience.

There certainly will be much to discuss, for as the book’s intro confesses, “Trying to pin down a specific set of comfort food recipes is as slippery as a bowl of noodles.” So whether a reader opts to attempt to make “thousand” hole pancakes inspired by Moroccan beghrir or butter-braised kohlrabi with olive chimichurri, Ottolenghi hopes for simplicity.

“My instinct has always been to create a book that people would really cook from,” he insists. “It would be such a shame if people treated it like an idea rather than a practical thing to be used. It’s not very comforting to be sitting in your kitchen for hours getting your mise en place in place and then stressing out before you even put it together because so many things could go wrong. These recipes are very forgiving, and that’s a sense of comfort I like to convey.”

Take one of his personal favorite comfort foods. The book offers a recipe for cauliflower and butternut squash pakoras, about which he claims, “Everything fried is good just by definition, but what makes these pakoras particularly good is they do the fried thing, but they also do the vegetable thing.” Stressing they are far from stodgy, they also “don’t turn too greasy because the vegetables inside, they kind of steam, so you’ve got a crunchy outside and a steamy middle.”

Even 10 cookbooks in, plus what he publishes in The Guardian and The New York Times, he just laughs when asked, “Does it get difficult trying to keep coming up with new dishes? Do you ever stare at an eggplant and think, ‘What the heck can I do with you this time?’”

“It gets difficult, but I suppose it also gets a little bit easier in the sense you kind of know what you’re doing because you’ve been there before,” he says. “I’ve got a team, and we work together, and ideas flow from different directions, so it’s not necessarily harder; it’s just a different kind of work. There’s a lot of conversation going on.”

Indeed, the word “collaborators” repeatedly popped up in our interview, which one would expect for someone who has devoted his life to what we can bring to the table. “I think people are looking at a world that’s increasingly virtual and increasingly uncertain and are looking for something that really connects you to what is ultimately human” is how Ottolenghi put it. “Basic human conversation, interaction, time spent in the kitchen — those kinds of fundamental activities that are beyond time, that transcend time, I think become particularly important these days. These are the sort of activities that the virtual world can’t offer you. So cooking is really one of those.”

Yotam Ottolenghi will be at The Granada Theatre (1214 State St.) on Monday, October 14, at 7:30 p.m. See bit.ly/3XKte95 for info and tickets.