Handpicked Nation Interview: The Real Food Cookbook

This interview was published on Handpicked Nation in June 2014.

Editor's Note: We met Nina a little over ten years ago, when she was heading up the Greenmarket Farmers Markets in New York City. Her husband Rob once told us that essentially, Nina is a food scientist, and we agree! Her knowledge about the many facets of food is vast and we have learned so much from her in the intervening years. We spoke with her recently about her life, her family and her passion for real food. Her new book, The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for the Modern Cook, is to be published on June 10, 2014.

Your latest book, The Real Food Cookbook, seems to be your most personal writing to date. Tell us from where this book came.

Nina Planck: Well, I honored my mother and father by starting farmers’ markets in London, honored my mother by writing The Farmers’ Market Cookbook, honored my mother again by writing Real Food, honored her one more time by writing Real Food for Mother and Baby, and with this cookbook, I honor my husband and the way I cook and eat today. I’ve been cooking for twenty-six years, and the only thing that has not really changed is the way I cook vegetables: in large quantities, with plenty of salt and butter. My mother taught me that.

With three kids, two households–we all know your cheesemonger husband needs, shall we say, attention–how did you find the time and energy to produce this gorgeous book?

NP: I tend to knock things out. The idea hits me as if fully formed and then I write a proposal. If it sells, I write a draft quickly, from top to bottom. I wrote my first two books–The Farmers’ Market Cookbook and Real Food–as a single, childless person in one year apiece. But I need editing for quality, clarity, and even quantity. I had to cut forty percent of the Real Food manuscript not once but twice, at the wise suggestions of my editor at Bloomsbury, Kathy Belden.

After my son Julian was born my general productivity slowed a bit, but I knew what I wanted to say, so when I rented a tiny office and wrote Mother and Baby, which is much shorter than the others, the writing work took just a year.

Once again, there was lots of mandatory editing after. By the Mother and Baby book tour, I was pregnant with Rose and Jacob, eating seven meals a day, puffing and panting a lot, throwing up once a week, and falling down all the time. Those symptoms lasted 38 weeks; after being pregnant, giving birth to and breastfeeding twins for two and a half years was a great physical relief. Once we had three children, it took me three years, six photo shoots, and the help of three friends (Emily Duff, Martha Wilkie, and Michele Pulaski) to write The Real Food Cookbook. And this project waited ten years to be born. I have notes dated 2004 from my dear friend Wendell Steavenson on the idea for this cookbook…