A Magical Salad—and the Vinaigrette of Your Dreams—from Amy Thielen
From her beautiful, inspiring, and kinda revolutionary new book, Company.
I’VE FINALLY FOUND THE PERFECT COOKBOOK for entertaining at home. And I believe it will set us all free.
It absolutely refuses to tell you how to create a perfect kitchen for making perfect dinners to serve to perfectly dressed people in your perfect dining room while obediently adhering to whatever idea of the perfect menu or food-related thinking is au courant. What a relief!
“I realized I don’t really care about napkin rings,” said Amy Thielen by phone recently, with a laugh. She’s the author of the cookbook in question, Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others.
And although she declines to do so, Thielen is way more than qualified to tell help you with all those perfect-people goals listed above. After culinary school, she spent seven years as a chef in NYC, where she worked under such star-chefs as David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. You might know her as the star of her own television show, The Heartland Table, which ran for two years on the Food Network, or for her previous books, The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes and Give a Girl a Knife, a beloved memoir. Or for her two James Beard Awards.
But today, Thielen is back in her native Minnesota, where she and her artist husband, Aaron Spangler, and son, Hank, live deep in the woods, about 25 miles north of the rural town she grew up in, Park Rapids, on land her husband’s family bought back in the 1980s.
“When I tell people it’s remote, I mean remote-remote,” Thielen said. So when she started working on Company, as the pandemic was at its peak, the isolation seemed doubly intense. “I really missed having people over,” she said. “Most professional cooks I know are the same way. We love to share.”
“It’s just my nature,” she added, a fact that may be hereditary. Thielen’s mother was a terrific cook who loved having company, too, in a part of the country where—to this day—you have people over because it makes more sense than meeting someone an hour away at some restaurant.
“She did give the kinds of parties where she dressed up, with her heels sinking into the carpet, but she often had parties in the garage, too,” Thielen told me. “Everyone did. That way you don’t have to remove your snowy boots in the winter.”
When I asked Thielen if her own friends have ever balked at coming so far to have dinner at her house in the woods, she just laughed. “To be honest, we’re kind of a destination,” she said. And so is her friend Katie, who throws a horseradish party every year. (I’m going to try to get myself invited.) And her friend Bruce, who has a community dinner every Monday. It’s just how they live up there.
But during the pandemic, Thielen found she was immobilized with grief, unable to write the cookbook she was supposed to be writing. “I was jealous of my own life, from before,” she said. “It was awful.”
Finally, she thought: “What would happen if I just did a book that was the truth?”
So rather than the glossy cookbook we tend to expect from fancy chefs, Thielen’s book evolved into something much richer and deeper: A personal, melancholy love letter to the way of life she’d lost, however temporarily, to the shutting down of the world.
She’s a beautiful, lyrical writer, and now that I’ve read the book—which is broken down into menus for Saturday Night (Parties of Six to Eight), Holiday (Tables of Eight to Twelve), Perennial Parties (Groups of Six to Ten), and Casual Walkabouts (Buffets for Fifteen to Twenty, or More) —I kind of yearn for the genuinely casual gatherings Thielen had before the pandemic, too, even though I wasn’t even there. It has that effect on you.
I can’t wait to make the bundt-pan chicken with bagna-cauda butter, the yellow split pea soup with spareribs, the bohemian poppy seed coffee cake, green cabbage sipping soup, pork-stuffed barbecued chicken thighs, corn soup with coconut and littleneck clams, bacon-fat-roasted cauliflower with herb salad, or the creamy baby turnip salad with dill, to name a few fetching dishes.
But while the book features moody, intimate photos of the family’s rambling house and patio gardens filled with friends enjoying beautiful food, it aims to transport you not to the actual dinners and gatherings but to the moments Thielen loves best.
“It finally crystallized for me: I love the before dinner, when you’re getting ready for everyone to come over,” she said.
And that’s where the “radically casual” part comes in. Thielen—simply by being her true self—gently but powerfully defies a culture that wants to send all of us on the exhausting fool’s errand of perfection. And her book encourages you to do the same, starting in your own kitchen.
