Breaking Bread

Today was one of the most stressful days of my life. Thankfully, I'm finally like calmed down. Every year, my friends Eric and Debbie host a dinner party in honor of Debbie's birthday. Tonight, there are 17 people smooshed around a string of folding tables that runs the entire length of their tiny Brooklyn apartment. Oh, it's so pretty. Thank you. The table is covered with brown paper and scattered with candles. Eric is bustling back and forth from the kitchen.

serving salad and refilling wine glasses. He makes awesome food, and he's not scared of the large group dinner parties, which I'm totally fearful of entirely. Debbie and her cook together most nights. but he uses their dinner parties as an excuse to go all out. Last year, he made a huge paella and several different tapas like blistered shishito peppers and Spanish tortilla.

Tonight, he's made his puttanesca lasagna. It's a recipe he's been perfecting for years. Here's Eric. So toasted fennel and lots of anchovies, lots of capers, lots of olives. roasted onions that are mixed with goat cheese and then topped with pecorino romano and sauce of course. This is back to the basics because I think we had to dial it back a little bit this year with regard to Margot and

Margo. She's passed out in their bedroom. She's been there since before we even arrived. She just had a terrible nap day, so you don't know if she's going to do her normal thing or something different. And we're both tired. Camargo's only three months old. She's their newborn daughter. And it's actually a miracle that she's still asleep with all this noise. That was the quietest happy birthday ever.

Hey, I'm Kathy Irway, and this is Why We Eat What We Eat, a podcast from Blue Apron and Gimlet Creative. This is our sixth and final episode of the season, and we decided to do something a little different. Because sometimes we eat what we eat.

of who we're with. Today we're bringing you four scenes of people cooking for others over the course of just one weekend. We sent producers around the country to record people getting together over food. From a Brooklyn apartment parents are having their first post-baby dinner party, to the heart of Cajun country where people are keeping traditional Cajun cooking alive, to the desert of Utah and a meal with a legend.

We've all heard the stats about how mealtimes are becoming a smaller and smaller part of Americans' lives. The average American eats one out of every five meals in their car. Americans eat alone nearly half the time. And when we eat alone, we tend to eat less healthy food. Oftentimes, it's because people are just too busy to cook. But then there are those times when we pause and take a moment to cook and share a meal with someone else.

Today's episode is about what can happen during those moments.

like meeting a long lost relative. You know, I met someone today that were probably distantly related. They live up in Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, but she's from Thibodeau and her grandmother was a landry. It's distant, it's over 200 years, but it's still family. That's Carl Landry, and we're at the Black Pot Festival in Lafayette, Louisiana. Carl came here to enter his jambalaya in the annual cook-off. Making a jambalaya, it's a dying art. There's a lot of people that they cook their rice.

separate and they want to call it a jambalaya and all it really is is rice engraving. What's the difference? Well the difference is cooking a jambalaya you're putting everything in the pot raw including the rice. The festival takes place in a living history museum, the kind of place where people in old-timey clothes show you how to use a butter churn. But during the festival, the chapel gets turned into a concert stage, and chefs like Carl set up outdoor kitchens on the grassy village lawn.

People come from all over to dance and eat, and everyone brings their own special twist to the cook-off, like gluten-free okra gravy and squirrel gumbo. If you really like good seasoned food that's cooked to a high, high level of expertise, say, okay? Because these guys have been doing it for a while. It ain't their first rodeo. And if you enjoy that, you ought to come. Because it's something to behold.

Lafayette is known as the heart of Cajun country. If Louisiana were a boot, Lafayette would be right above the little nook where the sole of the shoe meets the heel. The festival was started to celebrate and preserve Cajun culture. I love people and I love to cook and they go hand in hand. I cook, serve them, and then I enjoy the fact that they tell me they like my food. So if you cook it, they will eat it.

Culinary historians say jambalaya was originally an attempt by the Spanish to make paella in the New World. Settlers used tomatoes in place of saffron, and scraps of whatever else they had on hand. It could be crawfish, pork, chicken, or sausage, and what the Louisianans called the Holy Trinity of Vegetables. onion, celery and bell pepper. and, of course, rice.

Your short grain and medium grain absorb a different amount of water versus your long grain. But you decided it is long grain. I'm comfortable. I've been doing it with long grain for a while. I'm comfortable with it. I don't have a flat tire, so I'm not fixing it. Jambalaya is one of the defining dishes of Cajun culture.

And people have very strong opinions about how to make it. What do you think about soaking the rice? That's what he's doing right now. You don't soak it in water before you put it in? No, no. Carl's outdoor kitchen is set up in front of his pickup truck. In front of him is a folding table piled with onions and green peppers and sausages. He learned how to make jambalaya about 15 years ago. the gentleman I learned from.

He passed away a couple years ago, Mr. Albert LeBlanc. And I'm not going to say I took his recipe, but I learned how he did it, and I kind of tweaked it and made this my own recipe. Passersby stopped to peek into Carl's giant cauldron of a pot. They assess his technique, asking him questions while he stirs his jambalaya with a utensil the size of a garden shovel.

My important thing is having the clientele come back and tell me that they like mine and that's all that counts. And then I get the camaraderie joking around having fun with the people. The festival goes on all day. And it wouldn't be a Cajun festival if it didn't have music. Nearby, people are doing the Cajun two-step on a dance floor set up outside. Cajun culture is rooted in French culture, and one phrase that has been passed down over the centuries is fey dodo.

The direct translation is go to sleep, but it's actually more like beddy-bye. So the story goes, Cajun parents sung this lullaby to help their kids fall asleep. up in the rafters of the barns. Then the parents stayed up all night dancing below. The name stuck, and nowadays it's used for any kind of Cajun dance party. And at the Black Pot Festival, the fey dodo is alive and well.

Yeah, you brought some goodies. What did you bring? Pecan pie. and a bottle of Diet Coke to watch those calories. That is funny. 1,400 miles away from Lafayette in Sparta, New Jersey, Meg McWilliams and her husband Wayne are having a dinner party. There's sort of a core group of us that... get together from time to time here, usually on a Sunday, but...

We did Saturday night. Sparta is a small town. Meg says if you sneeze while you're driving down Main Street, you'll miss it. Meg and Wayne live in a renovated old farmhouse. At around 6, their guests started to arrive. Welcome! Hey, Doug! Hello. You haven't been here yet. Oh, you have never been here. Meg's a vegetarian, but Wayne loves a good steak.

He grilled tenderloin for the carnivores and a portobello mushroom for Meg. Meg made a salad, along with her sweet potato hash. It's a signature dish of hers that's quick, easy, and always a hit. Lots and lots of desserts. We have pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and a cherry pie. So we don't even need to have a meal. That should be the meal, in my opinion. Spoken like a true alcoholic. Nearly everyone here is a recovering alcoholic. They met through AA. Tell us how long you've been sober.

20 years. God willing, November 2nd, it'll be 21 years. So I got sober at five. AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. You can find an AA meeting pretty much anywhere in the country any day of the week. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. This shared conviction is what binds Meg and her friends together. Over the years, people have come and gone, like one longtime acquaintance who's struggling to stay sober.

She's been around for like 20 years. In and out. Yeah, she had like three years at one time. Yeah, she was doing all right. Meg hosts this gathering of members from her AA group once or twice a month. They like to get together outside the formal meetings and have dinner as a way to catch up and learn more about what's going on in each other's lives.

She's, you know, Eric keeps giving me alcohol, and I'm like, that's bullshit. Like, nobody's forcing you, nobody's joxygening you with alcohol. You're drinking yourself, you know? What was that word again? When I was a kid, my big brother, he'd put his knees on my shoulders and he'd take his... athletic supporter, go, oxygen, oxygen, and make me breathe out of his chest. That's so disgusting. That's abuse. So if you wonder why I am.

They're all sitting around Meg's big wooden table, telling stories and talking about the big game or TV shows they watch as kids. Wayne teases Meg about how hard it is living with a vegetarian. Everyone compliments the sweet potato hash. It's kind of like a family dinner, which, depending on your family, can sometimes feel both very close and far away at the same time. We are people that would not mix normally. AA is the one place or the one group of people or the one fellowship that

everybody's pulling for each other. You know, we might not agree politically. We might not particularly like each other. But we all want to see each other stay sober and live. That's the amazing thing. Nowhere else in the world does people do that.

I have... That same day, at New Delhi Restaurant on Ellis Street in San Francisco, Ranjan Day is making curry. My name is Ranjan Bae. I'm the owner and chef of New Delhi Restaurant. Ranjan is prepping his restaurant's kitchen for what he hopes will be an especially large dinner rush. Because tonight, all his proceeds will go directly to the victims of the Northern California wildfires. This fall, wildfires ravaged the area, killing 43 people and destroying more than 8,900 buildings in total.

Sonoma and Napa counties were hit particularly hard. Two places that rely heavily on tourism, like restaurants, vineyards, and hotels. About 80,000 people in Sonoma and Napa work in either the wine or tourism industries. These are people that Ranjan has worked with for years. They have lost their jobs, they've lost their home, they've lost everything. We need to help them right now.

Ronton has been in business for 30 years, and during that time, he's hosted many fundraisers. But tonight, he's specifically raising money for his colleagues in the hospitality industry, who've been affected by the wildfire. And he's doing it by doing what he does best. Cooking. Ranjan designed a 10-course buffet packed with all his customers' favorites. samosas, sag paneer, chana masala. But he also created a brand new dish for tonight.

a special curry using local ingredients from Napa and Sonoma. Napa cabbage, Petaluma chicken, California raisins, cherry tomatoes, jalapenos. He added some Bengali healing spices. turmeric, ginger, whole mustard, cumin, anise, onion seed, and fenugreek. And then he added the secret ingredient. Pine nuts.

Well, pine cones. To harvest pine nuts, you have to dry out the pine cones right before they start to open up. And once they're dry, you smash them with a hammer and collect the little seeds inside. Northern California's forests are full of pine trees. And when they catch fire, their pine cones get so hot they explode, scattering pine nuts everywhere. I wanted to create this dish to remind everybody that...

You know, this is why we are doing it. Because when you have huge forest fire, the pine cone has to pop to start the rebirth of everything. Ranjan believes the businesses that have been damaged by the fires will come back stronger than ever. But right now, they need his help. And tonight's menu is about giving it to them. For some people, cooking can be a way to cope, to manage feeling helpless.

It's a way to contribute when you don't know what else to do. So the healing spices are so appropriate to be using for making a dish. By the end of the evening, Ranjan had raised over $15,000, counting both outside donations and proceeds from the buffet. And for the rest of the month, Ranjan will put the special pine nut curry on the menu, and all sales will go towards helping

victims of the wildfires. And while his customers are enjoying the meal tonight, Ranjan is really cooking for the people who can't be here.

Our last meal comes from Kat Jaffe in Utah. Hi, Jim. How's it going? I'm just going to pull up right behind you. Yeah. I won't hit your solar panel. Kat is a radio producer based in the Southwest. She was working on a story about elderly mountain climbers when she ran into Jim Danini in a coffee shop outside Arches National Park. At 74, Jim is possibly one of the world's most famous mountain climbers. My name is Jim Donini.

And I'm an aging climber who's still active and still going for it. And I've been climbing actively for a half century. And I've actually climbed in about 50 different countries. I've climbed on all seven continents. And it's been my life. Jim told Kat she could join him for dinner at his seasonal camp, which is tucked away in a remote part of the world called Indian Creek. Jim's campsite sits high up on top of a rocky knoll. This isn't a campground.

There's no running water for miles. You have to stand on a hill to get a cell signal. It's literally off the beaten path. So where are we right now? We're coming into my 25-year-old sportsmobile. Jim's camp consists of his sportsmobile. It's like a souped-up, off-road VW bus. and a few chairs and a table, which he set up around a small campfire.

From Jim's campsite, you have a 360-degree view of the horizon. You can see mountains in the distance that are hundreds of miles away. The landscape below is full of dried out sagebrush and scrub. Kat says it looks like the bottom of the ocean if you drained it. And out here, it gets very, very quiet, which is exactly how Jim likes it. There's no wind blowing. There's no traffic noise. No sirens going off.

The only thing that you'll hear tonight is maybe coyotes, and that's a beautiful sound. During the climbing season, Jim stays here a few nights a week. Then he goes home to Colorado to shower, stock up on supplies, and spend some time with his wife before coming back to camp. As it starts to get dark, Jim gets busy with the cooking. I've got some, that's just actually steelhead. which is a rainbow trout. So I'm going to cook.

the steelhead with the asparagus, do some instant mashed potatoes, roasted garlic, and do a sesame Asian chopped salad, and then a little apple pie for dessert. Does that sound okay? Yeah, it sounds amazing. Jim grabs a jar of pesto and the fish from the cooler. He spreads the pesto on the fish and tosses the asparagus in olive oil with salt and pepper. Then he places it all directly on his tiny charcoal grill.

On his camp stove, he boils the water for the instant mashed potatoes, which Jim says he'd eat even if he weren't out in the middle of the desert. And then he pours Kat some Pinot Noir. Oh, my goodness, what a feast. It says some of the asparagus has gotten crisped, but that's okay. It tastes all right. A camp feast, and it was all ready in minutes. You know, I'd rather eat inside. in a pleasurable environment and then go outside and sit by the campfire and...

If there's kids around, you can do some smorgs. But campfires are for after dinner. They're not for dinner. They take their feast into Jim's sportsmobile, where they sit at a rickety table, making sure not to hit their heads on his bunk directly above.

Once they're settled in, can ask Jim about his life. I always wanted to be an explorer. I remember growing up in Philadelphia and reading all these books of exploration and thinking, oh my God. It's all been explored. But then I found that in the mountains it hadn't been. Because if you climb...

Even if you climb a route that hasn't been climbed on an unclimbed peak, you're going somewhere where no one's ever been. You can end up spending a night on a ledge, no one's ever been there. They talk about Jim's three marriages and how Everest is overrated. Then the conversation turns to one of Jim's most dangerous climbs, where he nearly died, back in 1978 in Pakistan, on a mountain called Latok 1. Right from the start, there was trouble. We had a week-long storm early on.

And then we got a week-long storm at the end, and one of our climbers got really ill and was unconscious. With 14 days of food, we spent 26 days on the mountain. We all nearly died. We got 300 feet from the summit. So it became an epic story of survival and an amazing climb that almost got finished but didn't quite get finished. To this day, no one has finished that climb on the same path that Jim and his friends started. And the people who tried didn't even get close.

Then last year, a world-renowned climber named Thomas Huber attempted that climb on LaTeX One. He invited Jim and another friend of theirs named George Lowe, who also survived that same climb back in 1978. Just like that first time around, the mountain was unforgiving. There were storms. And early on, two young climbers on their team got lost in a storm and died. After seven weeks at the base of Latok 1, they were ready to pack up and head home.

But before they left, after all they'd been through, Jim, Thomas, and George decided to go on one last trek and climb a neighboring peak to take in a view of the mountain where their friends had died. The same mountain where Jim and George had almost died, nearly 40 years earlier. So we got up before dawn, and we hiked up an hour and a half right below Latok 1. At the top, they huddled together. And all of a sudden, you know, all three of us were crying. And it was just so emotional.

And George and I, after 38 years, could look back to where we were in most of the biggest event in my life in terms of survival and climbing. And the three of us together were two different generations in this beautiful cirque, this cathedral of mountains. I call it a cathedral because I'm not religious, but I am spiritual. And that was just very special. The campfire had burned down to a pile of glowing embers.

and the stars were out in full. You could see every constellation against the pitch-black sky. It was getting late, but in the desert, you can't tell what time it is. Kat has just one last question. Why do we do this? I don't know. It's the siren call. And it's almost like you're being brought back and God was waiting for you. But there is this siren call that you can't ignore. They sit together by the fire for a while. Jim eventually piles up the dishes to be done in the morning.

and puts out the fire. Kat lays out her sleeping bag under the waxing moon, and Jim heads to his bunk in the sportsmobile. He has to wake up early the next morning, ready for another climb.

Cooking for others is an act of generosity. And when you cook for other people, you're not just nourishing them, you're nourishing yourself. It's also a way to explore, to dig deeper and learn new things, to express yourself, pass down stories and cultures, to connect. What We Eat is a podcast from Blue Apron and Gimlet Creative. This episode was produced by Francis Harlow, Jorge Estrada, Matt Schultz, Julia Botero, Abby Rizica, and Rachel Ward. Production assistance from Tom Cody.

Special thanks to Shane K. Bernard.

for answering all of our questions about Cajun cuisine, and to everyone who sent us their meals and stories. Extra special thanks to Abby Feldman and Inez Starani for letting us crash their brunch date, and to Willa Kammerer for inviting us to go to her NYC going cocktail party and thank you so much for joining us for this season we've really loved hearing from you you can find every episode of why we eat what we eat on apple podcast spotify stitcher and wherever else you get your podcasts

subscribe for updates from us and use the hashtag why we eat to keep in touch. I'm Kathy Irway. Thanks for listening.