Interview With Cookbook Writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins

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Molly O'Neill is our Food Editor. She is the former food columnist for The New York Times Magazine. O'Neill is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook (Workman Publishing, 1992), A Well Seasoned Appetite (Penguin, 1997), and The Pleasure of Your Company (Viking, 1997). She was the host of the PBS series Great Food, and edited the critically acclaimed anthology American Food Writing (Library of America, 2007). Her latest work, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball (Scribner, 2006), recounts her childhood of growing up in a Major-League baseball family.

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by Molly O'Neill

It is a badge of honor among a certain set of parents to have children who'll eat just about anything. Picky eaters are out of fashion; what's in is the kid with the developed palate, the toddler who eats prosciutto instead of corn dogs, the child who never orders off the children's menu.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of Southern Italian Cooking (William Morrow Cookbooks, 2007) and a half-dozen other cookbooks, could not care less that it's hip; she's just happy to share delicious, "grown-up" foods with her 10-month-old grandson, Nadir. As the direct descendant of two generations of food wizards (Nancy's daughter, Sara Jenkins, is executive chef of the Mangia chain in New York), little Nadir gets to eat the way most of us wish we could all the time.

On a recent visit to Grandma Nancy's home in Cortona, Tuscany, Nadir slurped up mashes of just-picked Jerusalem artichokes, celery root, and beets (as well as more standard baby-food fare, such as pureed carrots). He gummed crusty loaves of freshly baked bread and sampled a bit of bean and farro soup from one of Grandma's chef friends. He sat under a shady tree to observe the autumn olive harvest, and got a taste of young olive oil for his efforts. His soft features tightened in surprise. "It was a little bitter," grandma admits. “It didn’t go down well.”

It's a far cry from the edicts she faced as a young mother in the late 1960s. Back then, babies ate baby food, plain and simple, and mothers spent obsessive hours sterilizing everything they might touch.

"We were just terrified of germs," she recalled. "We boiled the bottles, we boiled the nipples, we boiled the dishes. We threw out any leftover baby food — never refrigerated it — and for the life of me I can't figure out why. And we never fed them anything from our plate.

"My daughter is so much more relaxed with her son. She treats him like a human — a small human, yes — but a human. Not like a creature visiting from Mars!" she said with a laugh.

Mothers of Harmon Jenkins’s generation were obsessed with the “purity” of baby food due to their preoccupation with kitchen cleanliness. Today, she and her daughter value the purity of ingredients. As a cook who believes strongly in the importance of using ingredients that are local and seasonal, Harmon Jenkins looks forward to making foods for her grandson that are pure, fresh expressions of her two homes.

In Maine, she’ll make a hearty fish chowder for Nadir. Next summer in Tuscany, she’ll make pappa al pomodoro, a dense tomato and bread soup that is a perfect introduction to the flavors of the land that long ago captivated the imagination of his nonna.

Continue to the recipes: Nancy’s Pappa al Pomodoro (Tomato-Bread Soup) and Bread Soup With Wild Mushrooms