Sun-warmed cherries, picked and eaten standing up. That is a single entry in Tamar Adler’s year-long record of kitchen delights, and it contains, in miniature, everything the book is trying to do: notice the pleasure, name it, move on before the naming spoils it.
Feast on Your Life is a daily devotional of sorts — short entries, some a few phrases long, some a page, each one a celebration of the small happinesses that cooking and eating provide when you are paying attention. Adler, whose An Everlasting Meal made the case that cooking is a continuous act, is here making a gentler argument: that delight is available to anyone who slows down enough to notice it.
Where MFK Fisher brought intellectual rigour to the pleasures of the table, Adler brings something closer to devotion — the attention of someone who has decided that the kitchen is a practice, like meditation, and that the practice is its own reward.
Keep it on the kitchen counter. Open it to any page. It will be the right one.
