Asking a splendid DUO

After 12 years of working together as the voice and producer, respectively, of public radio's "The Splendid Table," Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift have collaborated in another medium. "The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions From Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show" (Clarkson Potter, $35), is a broadcast-to-cookbook rarity: It reads the way the show sounds, mirroring its eclectic blend of approachability and authority. The book's hook is getting the evening meal on the table, an idea that grew out of the show's popular "Weeknight Kitchen" e-newsletter (sign up at www.splendidtable.org). Yet along the way, as the duo drew upon material gleaned from nearly 400 episodes, the project developed into something far richer. Practical yet engrossing, this is one title that's destined to beat a well-worn path between kitchen counter and bedside stand. ¶ In a recent finish-one-another's-sentences conversation, the two Twin Citians discussed suppertime semantics, the Japanese word umami, New Year's resolutions and why there isn't a "Splendid" follow-up on the books.

Q Where does the title come from?

LRK: We wanted "The Splendid Table," obviously. And we wanted to get into the title how we look at food on the show, which is far more than the recipe. At one point, Sally said, "I think we should call it, 'How to Eat Supper.' '' We both agreed that it was ballsy enough. Then we started batting around what we were going to use as a subtitle. "Recipes and stories," that was easy. But of course I insisted on "opinions" [laughs].

SS: People have really mixed feelings about the word "supper." It's very Midwestern.

LRK: I grew up in the Northeast, and we ate supper. Not "dinner." These are words with class connotations.

SS: That's what I like about "supper."

LRK: Supper is the easiest. It's entry-level. It's not about how many courses are being served, or the color of the tablecloth. Forget that.

Q So why "eat" supper, rather than "cook" supper?

SS: Because eating is what it's all about, that's ultimately the goal. The how-to part is the umbrella over it all.

LRK: We've changed the way we eat supper. It used to be so elaborate. I've been teaching cooking since the late 1960s, and back then you began with the alphabet -- the grammar of cooking -- and then and only then could you go on and do something more elaborate. Today people cook because they think, "I want to have friends over this weekend and I want to try a recipe." They may never cook again for another four months, but it doesn't matter. This book will hopefully welcome them into that experience.

Q The word umami pops up frequently in the book. How do you pronounce it?

SS: Ooh-mah-me. We like umami. It's the sixth sense. It's MSG, frankly, it's that savory brown taste. I love the idea that we have a new taste, how insane is that?

LRK: It's a catalyst, it enhances anything it comes in contact with. It's like having an arsenal that you can build in the kitchen, hence talking about the fish sauce, the tomato, the red wine, the mushroom. When we started talking about it on the air, I found myself doing very small things that I would have never done before. A pasta sauce with a few drops of fish sauce in it? I think of it as an insurance policy; it couldn't hurt.

Q Everyone should mimic Sally's annual New Year's resolution of picking a cookbook and cooking through it, cover to cover. What's your 2008 title?

SS: This is the first year I haven't picked one, but it's been a little crazy this year.

LRK: I thought you had one.

SS: I had a French thing, but you shot it down [laughs].

LRK: I did not shoot it down [laughs].

Q So what was last year's?

SS: It was Madhur Jaffrey's "From Curries to Kebabs," and it was great. Right now I'm on a bread binge. I've found a perfect place in the middle between Mark Bittman and Zoe Francois [who have written about two no-knead formulas], I really have. It's unbelievable.

LRK: I want to interview you on the show, about bread. I think it would be a hoot.

SS: Bread is an interesting topic, although I've banned baking on the show. I hate baking calls. I find them so boring.

Q Is that why there's very little baking in the book?

SS: It's because we got hung up on what you really bake when you get home at night.

LRK: Originally we weren't going to have sweets in the book at all. But then Sally said, "You know, you have the oven on anyway," and we realized that there is some great stuff you can throw together quickly.

Q Like that gingerbread, which is great; so delicious, and so easy to make. Not that it's dessert, but garlic bread? I read that and thought, hmmmm, that's a little Olive Garden-ey for Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

LRK: Exactly. That's why I did it, because people have this image of a person who would never contaminate herself with garlic bread. But that's not the reality. Just walk into my kitchen.

SS: OK, but your garlic bread isn't made with garlic powder, I have to point that out.

LRK: Well, no, but there are things that you just love because you love them. I have a food-writer friend, she's a purist beyond belief. But everyone has their secret passions, and from the time she was a little kid she loved Velveeta. So as a joke, I bought the biggest block of Velveeta that I could find, and I stuck it into the cupboard because I was going to wrap it up and send it to her for her birthday. That was the weekend that my editor of "The Splendid Table" [Rossetto Kasper's award-winning 1992 cookbook] came to visit for the first time. Of course, when I opened that cabinet, what is the first thing that she sees in my kitchen? Velveeta.

SS: You fake, you fraud [laughs].

Q While there's no Velveeta thumbs-up, you do endorse products throughout the book. Is that the beauty of non-commercial radio, that you can name names?

SS: Totally.

LRK: We also name names of the products we don't like. I get so annoyed when people tell you, "'We tasted all these products and this one is the best." How about telling us what they didn't like?

Q The book has a somewhat unorthodox structure, in a good way. Where did that come from?

LRK: Early on we were talking about a cookbook that would not necessarily look like most other cookbooks.

SS: Remember the book 'The Happy Lion'? That was my model. Seriously [laughs].

LRK: There was Sally and me, at the Red Balloon [a St. Paul children's bookstore] or some place like that, with all these kids' books laid out all over the place. Because how do people absorb information today? We're so visual, we see things in small units.

SS: The way kids' books do.

LRK: And they do it brilliantly. Mario Batali had done something very interesting with his first book; it obviously didn't have the budget for color photographs by the thousands, so they did this fabulous playfulness with the type. I told our editor how much we loved that.

SS: And it turns out that she had edited that book, which we didn't know.

Q When you've surveyed 12 years of shows, some material obviously couldn't make it into print. Such as?

SS: We cut out a whole chapter, a great one, frankly, full of odd little things: Pimento cheese, preserved lemons.

LRK: And fabulous icebox pickles. That was the hardest part. There was so much to talk about, it's like picking your children. If we weren't writing a book that was specifically about supper, there would be this whole other book, easily.

SS: But she won't do it.

LRK: No. No more books. The thing is, the show is immensely time-consuming, which it should be. But at this point we have so many more opportunities, and we want to try all kinds of new ways of communicating with people. When you focus on a book, it requires tremendous focus, two and a half years of focus. It's not that I hate books.

SS: It's that you hate writing.

LRK: Well, that's true, I really don't like to write. I love to write the show, but to me that's not writing; that's just putting words on paper so that I can go on the air and do our thing.