Transcript: Valerie Stivers
An interview with the author of The Writer's Table
For New Year’s every year, Lean Out brings you an episode that is lighter and more hopeful. This year, we set our sights on food and its ability to bring us together. My guest on the program this week has published a wonderful book about famous writers and their recipes, exploring the restorative power of home cooking.
Valerie Stivers is an American writer and a senior editor at UnHerd. Her new book is The Writer’s Table: Famous Authors and Their Favourite Recipes, inspired by her long-running column at The Paris Review.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show for our first episode of 2026, and indeed, our first episode of our fifth year as a podcast. As soon as I picked up your book, The Writer’s Table, I knew that I wanted to have you on. What a delight. The book springs from this long-running project at The Paris Review, with you cooking food from the pages of classic novels. In this book, you feature Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor and D.H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath. The stories and recipes span the globe, with the oldest dating back to 1547, and the youngest writer, Han Kang, born in 1970. Valerie, take us back to 2017. When you began this project, where did the seed of this idea come from?
VS: I’m a writer, I’m a reader, and I am a totally crazed home cook. I also lived in Russia for a while and was really into Russian literature. When I was living in Russia, I was trying to learn how to cook authentic Russian food, and learning from my now ex-husband’s mother, and going to markets and talking to old ladies in markets about pickling and jam-making. So, I had this whole personal passion project of figuring out Russian cuisine. And a writer who has a lot of wonderful food in his books is Gogol. As I was reading Gogol, I kept thinking, “I want to make this, I want to try to make that, and wouldn’t it be cool to do this for someone?”
I was a reader at that time for The Paris Review. They read the submissions and recommend if anything should go on to publication — which actually very, very rarely happens with unsolicited submissions. But nonetheless, we read them. Or we did at that time. I did. So I approached them and said, “Would you be interested?” And they did, at that time, a run of eight-week mini-columns. I said, “Would you like me to do one of these on cooking from Gogol?” [My editor] said, “Well, maybe eight weeks of Gogol is a little bit too much, but do you think you could find different writers and do a different writer each week?” I said, “Yeah, I guess so, probably.” Which is funny in retrospect because, in fact, not every book has food in it, but many do. I ended up doing the column for seven years. So yes, we could find other writers, and that was a fruitful idea.
TH: The book opens with Maya Angelou, and there’s a cake recipe that looks absolutely divine. Tell us about where she learned to cook and the role that food played in her life and her work.
VS: Maya Angelou was so cool, and actually this was a great one because she was one of the writers who had a cookbook. So, the way that I did this book was looking for people who had good name recognition, who people would care about their lives, and also had a lot of food [in their books], or had some real source material on food from their lives that they cooked. I was greatly excited when I would find someone who actually had written her own cookbook, as Maya Angelou had. So, this one, there’s this caramel cake recipe, and it really looks like something that I would want to cook and make, and we could do it just like she did it. So, yeah, she worked in a restaurant when she was young. She learned how to cook working in a restaurant and got a lot of confidence from that, and ended up being a great entertainer and cook in her personal life.
TH: She cooked for everyone. She cooked for Oprah. There’s all these famous stories of the people she entertained.
VS: Yeah, it’s a really satisfying thing to learn this kind of thing about writers that one loves because you know them through their work, and then when you start looking into this, you find out what kind of a social life they had. Some people had this great warmth and ability to bring people into their homes and to entertain, which is an aspect of them you wouldn’t necessarily expect. I was very surprised that Joan Didion was a big cook. She’s another one, like Maya Angelou, that cooked for everyone and had these society parties. You look at her and you don’t think Joan Didion is spending a lot of time in the kitchen. But she actually did.
TH: That’s hilarious. The recipe that you include, just so everyone knows, is a parsley salad. Which is fitting with her very slim, iconic look. But she did love to cook and apparently learned to cook at Vogue when she was editing recipes in her twenties. There’s a beautiful anecdote about her daughter and the lunches that she would make for her daughter every night. Tell us about that.
VS: Again, it’s just so surprising. I don’t remember exactly what she made, but she would make little sandwiches, and she would dip strawberries in chocolate, and she would send her daughter to school with these little jewel-box lunches. That one is almost, to me, as a mother, depressing. [Laughs] Because here’s Joan Didion performing at a very high level in her professional life, and she stayed up late to write. So, she was up all night writing. John Gregory Dunne has gone to bed, and she’s still up burning the midnight oil. And then at some point she’s in the kitchen dipping strawberries in chocolate for her child. You go, “Oh, that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? That’s what our lives are like.” It’s tough. [Laughs]
TH: Oh my gosh, indeed. I related to her story of learning to cook at magazines. I learned to cook when I was about 30, and I was working at a women’s magazine. I started doing a lot of the food features and then eventually became the food editor there. I didn’t know how to cook. So, I was learning in the interviews with chefs. But also the cookbooks got sent to me every week. It was such a magical time in my life. When did you learn to cook?
VS: Gosh, this is so strange that you just said it this way. This is also the modern world for us. Because I got hired at Time Out New York in the 90s. I got hired to be one of the shopping girls. There was a section called Check Out. It wasn’t a fashion section, it was a New York City shopping section. I got hired to be one of the Check Out editors, but Check Out was physically located in the magazine next to Eat Out, which was the restaurant section. When you got hired for one, you sort of got hired for both in the role that I was in. So, I also learned to cook because I was editing a cooking section.
TH: No way!
VS: Yes. I was in my twenties. I was completely uninterested in food and didn’t know how to cook anything. I had gone to boarding school. I had never been around a kitchen. Then, all of a sudden, I had to write about food in restaurants, which meant I had to start going to restaurants, and I had to grow up in terms of the food world. So yeah, that’s how women learn to cook these days. [Laughs]
TH: It’s so funny. I remember going to interview Jamie Oliver over tea once, and I was very anxious about learning how to cook. He was so matter-of-fact. He said, “I’ll give you some great advice. Just do what you’re effing told. Just follow the recipe. You’ll be fine.” [Laughs]
VS: Yeah, I mean, it takes a long time to be good enough to not follow the recipe, which was a mistake I made as a young woman. I would think, “Oh, I’m cooking, so I should just be able to throw this together.” I think that stopped me from learning until, again, my late twenties. Because when I tried in college, the creative, throw-it-together method produced bad results.
TH: There’s also, I think, a current in our culture of what Paulo Coelho calls “food fundamentalism,” which I think we see a lot of now. There’s a funny story [in your book]. He loved food and railed against food fundamentalism, but you tell a story of an interview he did at The Financial Times in 2003 at a five-star restaurant, where he only ate a single boiled egg and then left the restaurant to jog home. So, how do we contend with that puritanical aspect in our culture, on the one hand? And then, on the other hand, that a lot of our food is not good for us?
VS: Right. That was a wonderful anecdote. You also really felt for the reporter, who’s like, “But didn’t you understand this is what we’re supposed to be doing?” And Paulo Coelho is like, “Don’t care.” [Laughs] I don’t know, I feel like the whole restriction–indulgence continuum is the wrong continuum, basically. I don’t know how one gets out of that except, I would say, by embracing food. And by embracing healthy food, which you can pretty much eat as much as you want of if you’re making it for yourself and it’s good ingredients. You know, even normal food is an indulgence, and indulgent food is actually not an indulgence. So, the whole thing is really scrambled. And you do have to be careful if you’re the kind of person, like Paulo, that’s being invited out every single day of the week. You can’t keep your physical health and eat that way. It’s just not possible.
TH: What do you consider healthy food?
VS: Well, again, I feel like all food is healthy if it’s homemade. I mean, farmers’ market shopping is too expensive for most people at this point. Grocery store shopping is too expensive for most people! It’s too expensive for me. So, I have given up a lot of the more exciting Union Square farmers’ market things, because you just can’t spend that much on a $15 bunch of beets. You just have to say, “Oh, well, [that’s] not for me anymore.” But I cook basically everything, and I cook home food for my kids three meals a day. And if you’re cooking, it’s healthy.
TH: I also wanted to ask you about another anecdote. There’s a pea soup recipe for Jack Kerouac. We recently had Amanda Fortini on the podcast.
VS: Oh, I love her.
TH: Yeah, me too. We were talking about his daughter Jan Kerouac’s 1981 novel Baby Driver, that she wrote the introduction to. And we were mulling over the good and the bad of the Beat era — the chaos, but also the creativity. I had just read Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson. It was so interesting to read in your essay about Jack’s more domestic side, for the better with Joyce, it seemed, and then perhaps a little destructively with his life with his mother. How did you start unearthing that side of Jack Kerouac?
VS: Oh, the Kerouac thing was really a journey. Because there was this academic — I don’t remember if I quoted her. Her name is Audrey Sprenger, and she was a fan of my Paris Review column and was always saying, “You’ve got to do Kerouac because of this pea soup.” She thought that the recipe existed somewhere. So, we thought that we were going to be able to get this actual recipe that his mother had made. I think it may exist. The Kerouac estate may have that recipe. But we weren’t able to actually get it out of them, if it even existed, I’m not sure.
But I ended up talking to Joyce and getting tons of crazy anecdotes from Joyce about her time with Kerouac. She didn’t have the recipe. So, we messed around a lot looking for that actual mom’s recipe, which would have been really cool. And we didn’t end up getting it. So yeah, I did one for The Paris Review where I recreated it myself, which is what I usually did. I mean, I didn’t do historical research for the Paris Review [columns]. I took inspiration from the pages, and then I made the food that I thought was going to represent the dish in the book.
So, in this book, in The Writer’s Table, this is good. Because when it’s one of my recipes, it’s not from the historical record and it’s actually been tested by me and is a good recipe. Whereas the Emily Dickinson coconut cake is the recipe that she actually used that is from the historical record, and it doesn’t have instructions. It just gives you some weights and says, “Go for it.” The different recipes here — some will work out well for you, like this Jack Kerouac soup, and some will be more figure-it-out-on-your-own adventure cooking.
TH: I was thrilled to see that you included Laurie Colwin, a famed American food writer. Her book Home Cooking is one of my favourites. I hadn’t remembered that this is a collection of her essays from Gourmet. I associate it more with food memoirs, like Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life or Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone. Valerie, why do you think nobody seems to be publishing that genre anymore?
VS: The death of magazines? Yeah, Laurie Colwin is a really interesting writer, and I feel a lot of connection to her because the thing that I do is between genres, too. I mean, now I’m just editing at a news website. But when I was doing this kind of freelancing, it’s not literary criticism, it’s not food writing, but it actually is really both. That makes it hard to pigeonhole. It has been a really wonderful personal journey for me and a wonderful addition to the culture. It got attention, people loved it. We don’t have many things in this world that are not commercially categorized, and sometimes that work slips through the cracks of contemporary life. When you think about it, it’s kind of crazy that it’s like that.
Laurie was another person that made her own genre — and didn’t have a genre — which was very cool about her. So yeah, I think there’s less of that because things now are even more intellectually industrialized than they once were.
TH: That’s so true. What was it about her writing that really moved you?
VS: I mean, she was great about men and women. All Laurie Colwin [novels] are: Somebody is having an affair and here’s how they feel. That, and also her impression of family life. She had this wonderful, warm, domestic, families-are-important [ethos]. “Here is how we really make a family, which is through these traditions around meals and the mother talking to her daughter about what they’re going to serve for a menu.” I do that with my mother.
TH: Me too.
VS: Right? You call your mother and talk about the menu for something. Laurie was really good at that stuff. She was really good at the ordinary but important details of human life. Some of that would be with the daughter and her mother, and some of that would be about what is this affair really like? Why are you doing it? Why do you love him? How do you feel in these moments? And then, how is it all going to go wrong? Obviously, it’s going to go wrong … So, yeah, she’s terrific.
TH: Now, you had limited space in the book. You couldn’t include everybody. But one of the ones I wondered about was why no Nora Ephron?
VS: Why no Nora Ephron? I don’t remember. I mean, I’ve cooked from Nora Ephron. I cooked from Nora Ephron for The Paris Review. That book, every one of those recipes, I cooked all of those recipes for The Paris Review. I said I was going to cook my way through every recipe in Heartburn and I did it. And besides for the lime bean casserole — which was, in fact, gross, as you would expect when you look at it. I mean, lima beans are a beautiful colour, I will give them that, but other than that, it was gross. But every [other] recipe in that book is fantastic and works. I still make Nora Ephron’s beef pot roast. I think it was Lillian Hellman’s beef pot roast. It has got powdered onion soup; it’s from a different era. But my photographer and I both thought it was the best pot roast we had ever had, and I make it all the time still.
I think it was a cheesecake — some of her desserts! Just everything Nora Ephron did was fast and easy and perfect. So yes, I have held out on readers in not doing her. But I think it was probably just the mix of how many American women from a certain era, and maybe we couldn’t get the rights. I don’t know.
TH: It makes sense. I also wanted to bring up — you’re a senior editor at UnHerd in the U.S. office, working with Sohrab Ahmari, who’s been on the show several times. So, you are swimming in the soup of politics on a daily basis. As am I. The food world used to be a refuge from all of that. But around the time that Alison Roman got cancelled, I was reading a lot of essays about racist donuts and culturally appropriated soup. How did you navigate that development?
