Good Things happen: Samin Nosrat interview

‘Never meet your heroes.’ Unequivocally one of the worst bits of advice going.

Samin Nosrat has figured high in my WLTM list for years – and, having met her, I can say that she’s just as warm, funny and engaging as I’d imagined. She’s also disarmingly offbeat and surprisingly vulnerable. Despite her considerable fame, this is a woman with absolutely nothing of the diva about her.

Samin was in London to promote her new cookbook Good Things: recipes to share with people you love, and I was lucky enough to interview her for an upcoming issue of Waitrose Food magazine.

I’d first come across Samin’s name years ago in Michael Pollan’s Cooked (2013). Samin was Pollan’s food-writing student at UC Berkeley, where she was studying English literature, and already nurturing an ambition to be a writer. She in turn (famously) taught Pollan how to cook – from how to chop onions (“when chopping onions, just chop onions”) to the importance of properly, consciously seasoning your food. Everyone ought to have a cooking teacher like Samin.

Pollan wrote, “Samin is on excellent terms with the exclamation point. Words tumble from her mouth; laughter, too; and her deep, expressive eyes are always up to something.” That description is just as on-target 12 years later.

Born in San Diego in 1979, Samin is the daughter of Iranian émigrés who left home in 1976, three years before the revolution. Adherents of the Baha’i faith, her family feared persecution. They intended to return to Iran ‘someday’. Farsi was spoken at home and Persian food was on the table every day.

Becoming a chef was never part of Samin’s grand plan. Her first cooking job, which she took on in 2000 while still at Berkeley, was at Chez Panisse under the legendary Alice Waters. A single, life-changingly spectacular meal there led unexpectedly to her future career as a chef, teacher and food writer.

She tells me how she “bamboozled” her way into an apprenticeship and was taken under the wing of chef-mentor Christopher Lee. She felt the pressure to prove herself. “You have to remember, I was basically a suburban kid from San Diego who was enchanted and wanted to learn – but I had no skills or background in any restaurant or anything. It took some time and resilience, which I have plenty of, to prove that I truly meant it, that I was not just on a lark.”

It was while immersing herself in the abundant kitchen wisdom at Chez Panisse that she had a revelation: “Salt, fat, acid and heat were the four elements that guided basic decision-making in every single dish, no matter what.” This concept simmered in the back of her mind for years, as she continued cooking, travelling, learning and teaching others to cook.

She began writing Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in earnest with the encouragement of Michael Pollan. It was nearly 20 years in the making but when it was published in 2017 it became an instant classic, storming best-seller charts, winning plaudits from Alice Waters herself, and nabbing a James Beard Award. The book’s success led to the Netflix series, which made Samin a household name.

Insightful, hugely original, and beautifully written and illustrated (by Wendy MacNaughton), the book remains a work of genius. If you want to understand – really understand – how cooking works, this is the one you reach for.

Good Things, aimed squarely at home cooks, is a very different book. It is, fundamentally, a recipe book – and therein lies an enormous irony. In the introduction she writes, “I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that at times it felt like a betrayal – to myself and to you – to assemble a book of recipes after writing Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is a veritable manifesto designed to free cooks from relying on them.”

One gets the feeling that this was not an easy book to write, and Samin tells me that working on her second book came with “a lot of internal struggle”. It was written during Covid, a tumultuous, anxiety-driven time for many, and in Good Things she writes frankly about the depression and un-rootedness that dogged her during this time.

She lives on her own (well, with her dog, Fava) in Oakland now and, like many people, cooks just for herself much of the time. Her life has moved on from her restaurant-chef days and her cooking has, too.

“Is that a relief?” I ask. “The thing that is a relief is the understanding it. I think for a long time I was just thinking,  ‘Well, now I’m just lazy and bad’. There has been such an internal struggle and an internal standard in that I learned to do everything at the highest restaurant level and that’s just not possible at home.”

She continues, “Part of it too has been an ever-evolving understanding of what I do for my own self. There are so many manifestations that being a cook can take, professionally. I have always very much identified as a cook, and to me that meant a professional cook in a restaurant. But I haven’t done that in over a decade now. And so – what am I? I had a lot of internal struggle making this book because there was so much of it feeling like, ‘Well, I guess people are going to see what a fraud I am’.”

There is a bittersweetness that comes across in Samin’s writing – ironically, enough, in the chapter on sweets, where she writes about having spent her life “denying herself pleasures great and small”.

When I ask her about that she replies, “‘Sweets’ is just like a physical metaphor, but so much of my life has been about that. Like I’m investing in some invisible bank account and at some point, someone will notify me and say I’ve been good enough and I’ve done well enough, that now I could enjoy life.”

‘Is that because of your American upbringing?’, I venture (this feeling being something I experience most days). “I don’t think it’s the American-ness but for me it’s definitely related to the immigrant child part of it,” she says. “For me it was very much like: put your head down, earn your money, keep your money… And then at some point in your life you think, ‘For what?’”

Trying to answer this question “took a lot of years of untangling and therapy, and also – and I don’t think this is unique to me – but watching my dad die, I realised, ‘Oh, I’m going to die someday, and I could just be like this until I die. Or I could have a little bit of joy’.”

Writing this book clearly required her to dig deep, and in the process Samin has struck gold. This is not a book about cooking to impress, but to nourish, to appreciate, to share – as a centrepoint to what Samin calls a good life. There’s no novelty-seeking or cheffy grandstanding. This is how people cook in home kitchens everywhere (on a good day).

The recipes and stories in Good Things are also very personal. These are dishes she that has cooked regularly for years, and there’s great pleasure to be taken from that. “Every time I make something, I remember, ‘Oh, I made this for so and so’. It’s almost like having a Rolodex of memories from your own self that you get to refer to every time … It is this beautiful tradition built into the seasonality of cooking.”

As well as the bittersweetness, there’s a real sense of that joy that comes through in each recipe. Baking bread brings “sensory pleasures that money can’t buy”. Through cooking and sharing with friends, she writes, she has “finally found the meaning – in cooking and in life – that I’ve sought for so long”.

Good things, indeed.

Good Things is published on 15 September 2025 by Ebury Press.