In 2006, when Deb Perelman started Smitten Kitchen, her now beloved food blog, she thought she was essentially shouting into a void. She had never cooked professionally and had no connections in the food world. Her background was in psychology. And yet, fourteen years later, she has outlasted most of her contemporaries (“Smitten Kitchen, these days, is not just a food blog: it is the food blog,” Emily Gould wrote in this magazine in 2017), married one of her readers, and nourished an audience that numbers in the millions. She has produced two best-selling cookbooks, with a third on the way.
Her mission is straightforward: provide recipes you can rely on. Deb, as her friends, family, and most loyal fans call her, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Martha and Ina, but she is not selling a fantasy of domestic bliss. She simply wants to eat well, and to show you how to do the same. She is guided by her own impulses and never pretends otherwise; she is incredibly honest and careful, both as writer and cook. She tests and tweaks and tests and tweaks in her tiny Manhattan kitchen, all on her own. (Last year, for the first time ever, she hired an assistant, but then COVID-19 struck.)
Once she’s perfected a recipe, she posts it onto the blog, where her tone has a gentle, inviting intimacy, and a notable lack of arrogance, which makes her all the more trustworthy. Nine times out of ten, when a friend tells me about a go-to recipe, it’s one they’ve found on Smitten Kitchen. A few months ago, when I asked on Twitter if anyone had ideas for what to do with leftover brewed coffee, someone suggested Perelman’s olive oil chocolate cake. I’ve made it three times since. When I tweeted more recently about craving cake at an hour too late to make any, someone else suggested I try the low-effort, high-yield peanut butter cookie recipe that Deb adapted from the Ovenly cookbook. A veritable Greek chorus chimed in to agree.
Over the summer and again in the fall, we spoke about the evolution of her career, cooking during the pandemic, using her voice both within and beyond the realm of food, and, of course, Thanksgiving. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s your Thanksgiving philosophy this year, and how does it differ, if at all, from other years?
Obviously, it’s going to be a lot smaller. And it’s really sad, at the end of a tough year, to still not be able to see your family. I’m getting a lot of questions, like, “So, can I make your turkey as a chicken? Can I halve this stuffing recipe?” Sometimes I say, Don’t worry about halving it—just make it in two pans and freeze half of it, and come Christmas, you have this delicious potato gratin or whatever waiting for you.
Even more fun would be finding new ways to do stuff. For all of the bad things about this year, we all have some new traditions. We have certain meals that we make more, we do so much more outside. Some of the creativity is really lovely. And I imagine, for some people, since Thanksgiving is like our cooking Olympics, it’s a tiny bit of relief.
I’ve come to sort of loathe the word Friendsgiving, but I really like the idea behind it. I think the holidays can feel prescriptive for people, and there’s something liberating about doing it your own way.
I think a lot more people’s Thanksgivings are going to look like Friendsgivings this year, which is to say, smaller, casual, only what you like. This is the perfect excuse to get rid of the pie you hated making. You can home in on the three dishes that, if they’re not on the table, it’s not Thanksgiving. I actually asked people about that on Instagram—what’s the dish that you won’t negotiate on? People are really into stuffing.
You were one of the original food bloggers. In the early days of blogging, it seemed like there was less trolling and a lot more goodwill. Do you think you’ve held onto the good will?
I don’t know if I’ve held on to the good will! I hope I haven’t done anything to lose it. I think once you reach any level of success or readership, there’s this idea that you did it with some sort of intentionality or authority, and I’ve never felt either of those things. I don’t actually think I’m, like, a smarter, better cook than everybody else. There’s always this tone in food writing: “Let me tell you how it is.” Ugh, gross. Who wants to be bossed around when you’re making dinner?
It’s just about inviting people to have a conversation.
Exactly. In my first book I called it telephone-cord cooking. This is definitely showing my age, but when I was a kid, my mom would be on the phone talking to a friend, you know, back when telephones had cords. She’d be talking and she’d be, like, “O.K., so what do you do with chicken? O.K. No, I’m not. We’re not gonna do that. That sounds ridiculous.” I liked the way telephone-cord cooking sounded, and I didn’t hear a lot of it in food writing.
How did you get into food writing?
I majored in psychology, and then I did this art therapy master’s program at George Washington, and then after that, I moved up to New York and I got a job as an art therapist at a nursing home. I did that for about four years. I liked working with old people, but I realized that I had absolutely chosen the wrong career path. It did not make me happy.
I didn’t know what else I was going to do with my life. Like, how do you get out of such a niche profession? So I started my Smitten blog, before Smitten Kitchen, in 2003, and I was doing that in the evenings. It took off pretty quickly, even though it was just essays and stuff. But I had no connections. I didn’t know anyone in media. I tried to apply for jobs at Gourmet and Bon Appétit and they were, like, Who are you?
Smitten was a dating blog, right?
It was just a whatever blog. There was dating in it, but you didn’t need to have a focus in 2003. You could just blog.
How did you get readers?
I remember, like, Gawker linked to stuff I wrote a few times, and not even in a mean way. And Gothamist. Around this time I also met my husband, who was an early reader. He left a comment, we moved it over to e-mail, we met for a drink, we got married two years later. I was, like, I like writing, I like you, I hate my job. I was so miserable.
One of my former co-worker’s husbands worked at a B2B publishing company, and he was, like, “We’re hiring an editorial assistant.” So I ended up doing that. And then, after a couple of months, they realized I could write, and I became a staff writer. Which is hilarious—at a tech magazine? I don’t know shit about tech. And I was there for about three years, but at the same time, I started Smitten Kitchen, in 2006. And, honestly, after not even a year, I think it was pretty clear that I could do that full time, because I was pulling enough from ads. So I quit in 2008.
Did you feel like there was a lot of energy around cooking blogs then? And did that help you feel like you could start one? Or was it just purely your natural interest?
I definitely knew about the existence of cooking blogs. There are some that are still around from those days. Heidi, from 101 Cookbooks, and Luisa Weiss, at Wednesday Chef, although I don’t think she blogs much. Molly Wizenberg.
But a lot of the food blogs that were out there were professional—they were, like, somebody going to cooking school, and they were sort of technique heavy. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I was a total beginner, and I fully expected it to be over in six months and then I would just retire from blogging. My cooking entries were, like, I don’t really think I like eggplant, but I tried this and it was pretty good! And I don’t think it’s changed. The difference is I’m a much better cook now. Before, I didn’t have go-to recipes for anything, and so the site was just a way of me collecting those recipes. I made Marian Burros’s plum torte, or the famous Marcella Hazan three-ingredient tomato sauce. There are a lot more original recipes now.
But adapting other people’s recipes is still part of your model.
I like the conversation in cooking. I like the messy way, where you’re, like, “Well, Carol, when I met her in Rome, told me about this. And then this lady…” But then people are like, “Oh, Deb doesn’t write her own recipes.” I actually think the world of food is more interesting when you talk about the pieces that come together. Nobody creates food in a vacuum. Sometimes you’re sitting in a restaurant, you’re inspired by a dish, and you come home and make something completely different. Is it the restaurant’s dish? A lot of people would say, “Well, I’m not going to give them credit, because I came up with this.” And I’m, like, “I want to give you credit cause I think you’re cool.” So I probably over-source, but I think it makes the conversation more interesting.
