Good Things from Samin Nosrat
Some days I find myself traveling the world via the pages of cookbooks. When the pandemic began in March 2020, I became a huge fan of Sam Sifton’s NYTimes Cooking column. While reading his suggestions for what to cook while coping with pandemic isolation, I learned about Samin Nosrat and her unorthodox cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. “Cookbooks help me escape these days,” wrote Nosrat. “Years before I ever set foot in Rome or the Chianti Valley, I traveled there by reading cookbooks.”
Her 480-page book—a master class on how to cook—won a James Beard Award, was a runaway bestseller and led to a four-part Netflix documentary inspired by her epicurious travels in Italy, Japan and Mexico. As I read about her travels in Italy, I found myself traveling back to Spannocchia—an Italian villa in the Tuscan hills with 12th century roots.
The evening Kit and I first arrived there, we were led to a dining room where an open wood fire burned warmly and enjoyed a meal of penne pasta, roasted pork, carrots seasoned with the estate’s own extra virgin olive oil and fresh rosemary, hearty Tuscan bread, and bottles of the villa’s own wines. That night, we slept the sleep of ages. The next morning, we joined the other guests for breakfast and tasted our first cup of dark Italian coffee, toasted Tuscan bread with butter and jam, yogurt and granola drizzled with local honey, hard-boiled eggs with orange yolks and brown shells still warm to the touch, and a huge bowl of fresh apples, oranges, kiwi fruit and grapes.
That week, I took part in a class with a local cook who grew up on the estate. The tastes that Samin Nosrat experienced while “traveling” through regional Italian cookbooks, I experienced while making fresh pasta in the villa’s kitchen. The Spannocchia Cookbook introduction begins, “In Italian, we speak of saperi e sapori which translates into knowledge and taste…. By creating traditional dishes, made from products grown on the property, by hands who have created these dishes for decades, we forge a connection to the past and keep knowledge and taste alive.”
I also travel to Italy through cookbooks written and illustrated by Suzanne Dunaway who lives in Rome and Southwest France. When I make focaccia bread, it’s from the pages of her cookbook, No Need to Knead: Homemade Italian Breads in 90 minutes. If I make a fresh tomato sauce, I turn to Suzanne’s second cookbook, Rome, at Home.
Eight years after her debut cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, Nosrat’s second cookbook Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love will be available on September 16. In the September 2025 issue of bon appétit magazine, food writer Amiel Stanek writes about Nosrat’s food journey in his column “As Good as it Gets” and shares four of her recipes. In the interview about her new cookbook, Nosrat explains, “Good Things is a meditation on what really matters in life, and why we cook in the first place.”
After initially struggling to write, Nosrat came to the realization that what motivated her to cook was being around people. “Cooking,” she believes, “is about more than nourishment. It’s a way to share what’s most valuable to you with the people you care about.” For Nosrat, “Gathering people together is a way to bring joy into the lives of others. It is essential to the meaning of life.”
“Amen,” I say to that. And on that note, I’m off to share a plum tart that I made early this morning with my good neighbors.