…so, do you know what day it is? Did you remember to make a reservation or get me something? Don’t tell me you forgot!
It’s our one year anniversary! Well, it’s the one year anniversary of this version of the newsletter. If I can be earnest for a moment… Thank you so much for being here, for reading, for your comments and messages when something has resonated. It’s such a privilege that you sincerely smart people read my words every week!
On this, our paper anniversary, I thought I’d dive into the name To Taste. The origin story.
Way back in the summer of 2018 BTT (Before TikTok), I launched the website for my company, To Taste. I had assembled a small but incredible team. We billed our product as a modern day recipe box because you were able to edit and change any recipe that we had on site. You could make each and every one your own, whether that meant sweeter, saltier, vegetarian, spicier, bigger, smaller, healthier, junkier, whatever. No big deal, but Fast Company Design called it brilliant and our graphic designer won an award for it. We got recipes from really awesome chefs, celebs, and home cooks from points all over. It was so much fun. To put it very succinctly, though, trying to build a company and fundraise while going through a divorce, parenting a young child, and then the whole global pandemic thing was not it. I had to shutter. But that’s not the point of this story.
This story is about why. Why is it called To Taste? And why does that still fit even when I’m writing about parenting or dating instead of food?
Perhaps obviously, To Taste is pulled from the little aside in an ingredients list in a recipe that says, for example, “salt and pepper, to taste” which suggests you add as much salt and pepper as your little heart desires. I wanted you to change every single recipe that I lovingly curated, rewrote, or tested for the website, to make them all your own. To know how you’d make it.
Zoomed out a bit, it’s the idea that there really is no such thing as a best recipe. There’s no “best” chocolate chip cookie recipe and no “best” roast chicken recipe and yet we all search for those all of the time. There’s no all-encompassing best because we are not (yet!) robots. I like my chocolate chip cookies with a great many dark choc chunks, sea salt, and I am too lazy to brown my butter, I’m sorry. You might like yours with oats or nuts or milk chocolate chips and browned butter. One is not better than the other. There are simply my tastebuds and your tastebuds. Not to mention, none of us knows everything about cooking. If you make things some way I’ve never considered, I want to know. I want to try it.
Zoomed out even more, my therapist at the time noted how relevant that concept was to my personal life. Naming my company after the idea of cooking to one’s own taste was interesting considering how much I hadn’t been doing anything to my own taste for years.
A small moment had been stuck in my head back then… A year or two prior to that therapy session, I was pregnant and living in NYC. I ran into a college ex-boyfriend who said, with a glint in his eye which told me this was meant as a compliment despite the wording, “you always did do things your own weird way, huh.”
It had stuck because he said it at a time when I had completely forgotten about that part of me. No, not forgotten. I had told her to shut the fuck up for the purposes of being chosen, guided, and right. But right according to whom? I was living the way we search for recipes, by putting “best” at the front and clicking on the link that has been algorithm’d, curated, presented at the top. I was desperate for someone to say here’s how to do it. No missteps here! This is the best!
Spoiler, those proverbial top search results aren’t the best for me.
Obviously, I get why we want the best. We’re strapped for time, we don’t want to waste our ingredients or go through the process of making a recipe that turns out to be inedible or disappointing. Not every recipe is worthy of a trip to the store and it can be hard to tell which ones are. But that has nothing to do with “best.” That’s about finding a trustworthy source (read the reviews! With a grain of salt!), about learning what works for you, and, frustratingly, about trial and error. Much like life. Isn’t that annoying?
Now that To Taste is sometimes about food and sometimes about my double life, the name might be even more apropos than it was before. And at the very least, the name is my (and your) constant reminder that there’s no “best” way to do things. No “best” vodka sauce recipe, no “best” way to spend a summer, no “best” way to live.
Links and a few good memes…
Elizabeth Minchilli is living my dream.
How good does this easy summer strawberry cake look!? I also have a huge soft spot for this strawberry spoon cake…
Relevant: Guilty pleasures don’t exist, only pleasures. Including, of course, reading whatever the hell you want. Yep, even romance novels.
How good is this dress? Which may or may not be on its way to me right now.
I kinda want these raffia slides, too.
NYers, have you seen Alex Edelman’s one man show, Just for Us that everyone is raving about!?
Loved this fun interview with author Emily Henry.
A beautiful reninder, via Swiss Miss: “You have no obligation to your former self.”
Just booked: The incredible Hotel Cala di Volpe on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda. I cannot wait to turn green with envy over my client’s photos from their stay.
The New Yorker’s (sensational headline; grumpy, nihilistic piece) “The case against travel”… A few bitter sections: “Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.” Or “we unchanged changers, we tourists.” And finally, “Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?” Bah humbug.
That article reminded me of a recent post from Supersonic, a restaurants newsletter that I usually love, called “Am I the bad diner?” to which my reply was a loud YEP.
One of my very close friends sent me this and I love it:
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ning off to make my best chocolate chip cookies to celebrate our anniversary!
xoxo,
Nicole
Happy one year!