Bland Rescue

For restaurateurs across the country, this spring was brutal with shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic forcing them to shutter their doors or pivot to entirely different business models. For Vivian Howard, this forced her to temporarily close Chef and The Farmer, the restaurant that brought fame to her and her small town of Kinston in Eastern North Carolina, and permanently shut down the Boiler Room Oyster Bar, a well-loved local spot across the street. Meanwhile, she retooled Benny’s Big Time, her pizzeria in Wilmington, North Carolina, to offer delivery and pickup only. And all of this happened while she was still reeling from giving up her award-winning PBS television show, “A Chef’s Life,” and launching a new series, “Somewhere South,” which premiered at the end of March 2020 on PBS.

And yet, when I catch her one hot, humid afternoon in early June, she sounds positively rejuvenated. “It’s been going really well,” she says. “I may neveropen the dining rooms again.” It’s a startling admission for someone who was recently named the South’s Best Chef by Southern Living and has been a six-time semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast award. “I’m not saying we’re not going to reopen our dining rooms,” she clarifies, “but it’s certainly given me time to think about the things that I’d like to be different, and things that would make my life more comfortable.”

Her new book, “This Will Make It Taste Good,” played a pivotal part in her newfound optimism, though it was a struggle to get there. “My life was a dumpster fire,” she says bluntly, thinking back to 2019, when she began writing it. The book was just one of the things going wrong, she says—but one of the most disappointing, since all she’d ever wanted to be was a writer.

“I started working in a restaurant as a means to translate that experience to a career in food writing,” she says. “I found that I really loved working in the kitchen: I liked making stuff, I liked the camaraderie, I liked working toward a common goal—and it was a lot easier to get a job in a kitchen than to get a job writing.”

Like many young people with liberal arts degrees, Howard started working in restaurants when she arrived in New York City. She liked the restaurant world so much that she enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education and went on to work in a number of acclaimed restaurants, including Jean-Georges Vongterichten’s Spice Market. After she moved back to Eastern North Carolina to open a restaurant with her husband, Ben Knight—an artist whom she had met while they were working in the same New York City restaurant—the dream of becoming a writer moved even further away.

It wasn’t until she was well invested in running the restaurant that she returned to the idea of being the storyteller she had once dreamed of. “About five years after opening the Chef and The Farmer, I reached out to a childhood friend of mine who’s a documentary filmmaker to see if she would help me make a documentary about the dying food traditions of Eastern North Carolina,” Howard explains. This documentary turned into “A Chef’s Life,” which ran for five seasons on PBS, garnering a Peabody award and a daytime Emmy, and drawing unprecedented attention to her and her corner of the state.

It also gained her the opportunity to finally write a book, as agents came knocking on her door. That first book, “Deep Run Roots” turned out to be a phenomenal success. But the TV show was draining. Not only did it take her away from her restaurants and her family, but she ended up feeling trapped by the gulf between viewer expectations and the complicated, messy reality of cooking and farming today.Its success and that of her growing restaurant empire also taxed her relationships with her staff and her family. And then there was the new book to write—promised back when she had signed the contract for her first book.

In the chaos of her life, she struggled to figure out what the book should be, let alone when she would have time to write it, and missed her deadline. “Every day I let more and more people down. I felt lost,” she writes candidly in the intro to “This Will Make It Taste Good.” Her editor, however, didn’t give up on her.

Instead, he issued an ultimatum: Finish it in five months or forget it. Never one to back down from a challenge, Howard began writing at 5 a.m. daily—anathema to restaurant people, who rarely get to bed before midnight. She thought back to “Deep Run Roots” and the comments it attracted on Amazon. “I woke up every morning for a year and the first thing I did was read all the reviews,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t have kept reading them if most of them weren’t positive,” she jokes, “but the thing that came up over and over was, ‘So many of these recipes are too complicated.’ That really bothered me, because I didn’t think that they were complicated. Some of them were, but that’s just what people were seeing in a four-page-long recipe.” So she decided to focus on simple. “I felt like, I’m at home, and I cook dinner at home in 30 minutes for my family, and that’s simple.”

But simple turned out not to be so simple. While the basics of Howard’s everyday family dinners are simple, “there are all these things I’m pulling from to make it exciting,” she says. “When I was trying to write a simple cookbook without those things, it felt like I was just dumbing down everything that I actually did. It felt like I was almost writing in someone else’s voice—and kind of aimlessly.”

By the time she had struggled through writing out a detailed proposal for the book, she realized that there was only one chapter that excited her. “At the bottom of the proposal, there was a whole chapter that was like, ‘This will make it taste good.’ Basically, what I was saying is, if you find all this other stuff boring, make these things. It just became really clear— that’s what I should do, and just, like, take the time to do it, and don’t gloss over it. Make the whole book about this.”

In the end, the name “This Will Make It Taste Good” telegraphs the confidence she wrote her book with, and the conviction of her beliefs are evident in the energy of the prose and the boldness of the photographs. It shows what can happen when an idea fits so well that it essentially becomes an extension of yourself.

Essentially (and surprisingly), it’s a book about 10 condiments—what she calls “heroes”—and how to use them as shortcuts to deliciousness on the fly. “As soon as I figured out what I was doing and got the green light, I didn’t agonize over anything,” Howard says. “Coming up with recipes was so easy because it’s what I cook for myself all the time. I really have these things on hand.”

Some of the condiments are easy enough to whip up right before dinner time—like her favorite, Little Green Dress. As she describes it: “The hero that makes my heart beat fast, the one I would rush in to save from the flames if my house were burning down, is Little Green Dress. Also affectionately known as LGD, this little number is like chimichurri and salsa verde had a baby in a bed of olives. LGD is condiment, ingredient, texture, acid, herb, oil and salt all at once. Like the little black dress that’s your sure thing, LGD is pretty much perfect for every occasion. … It’s a key that opens the door to delicious and makes boring bold, makes simple shine. It’s the ultimate trick.” A spoonful is all that’s needed to take a hard-boiled egg or tuna salad to the next level; it also creates an insanely addictive version of what she calls Gas Station Biscuits, a local offering of biscuits with hoop cheese baked into their soft middles.

Other heroes take foresight to make ahead but will pay off in the long run. “With all the people who tested the recipes, the kraut has been a revelation for everyone,” Howard says of Can-Do Kraut. She’s upfront about the fact that many people will need coaxing to even try it, but she makes a strong case for it. “I’m well aware that a lot of you don’t look at kraut and see yourselves in it,” she begins the chapter. “But I’m here today on this page to tell you that you are wrong. You can make it. You can cook with it. You can and should eat it. Kraut can change your life.”

She then lays out just how easy it is to make the recipe, which takes only 20 minutes of active time before you let it sit and work its own magic for a week or more. And she follows that up with 11 great reasons to make it—from Picklesicles (yes, frozen pickle brine, which is incredibly thirst-quenching on a hot day) to a sweet potato-and-bacon chowder spiked with its crunchy, acidic punch. “We were all surprised just how much we enjoyed eating it out of hand, and in how many unexpected ways it makes things so much better. When you think about it, in so many ways it’s acid and texture.”

In fact, you could think of the condiments as building blocks of flavor—they are just more elaborate versions of the sweet, sour, acid and bitter notes you have in texture and flavor. “The interesting thing is, I shared this book with several of my chef friends, and one said, ‘This is such a brilliant idea. Anyone who cooks professionally has things we turn to over and over again.' If you’re in the dining room eating, you may not know it, but that thing is represented in several of the dishes you are eating. So this really is the way that we do stuff as professional chefs, but it’s always seemed too complicated to explain that to home cooks.’ ”

Whether readers will actually take the time to make the heroes remains a question in Howard’s mind—even though she thoroughly believes that spending 45 minutes on Sunday evening making her R-Rated Onions will get you further in the pursuit of deliciousness than spending the same time precooking quinoa and broccoli to be reheated later in the week. But while she was worrying about this, the pandemic struck. “Everyone was at home,” she says. “I kept thinking, God I wish this book were out.”

Unfortunately, she couldn’t get the book out any faster (it’s slated for October 2020), but she could get the heroes into people’s hands. She launched a mail-order business with the Little Green Dress and sold 500 bottles in 45 minutes. “It was like watching a ticker tape,” she says. The demand had her running all over the area, trying to buy herbs from people’s backyards so she could get more made.

She now credits the Little Green Dress with having saved her sanity. The success of the heroes not only confirmed her belief in their power to make people happy but also showed her the way to a new business. “It was the first time in five years that I felt I was really leading my kitchen and my small team with purpose— and I felt grounded, hopeful, full of gratitude and energized.”

You can follow Howard on Instagram at @handyandhot to get in on ordering the condiments for delivery to your door. But she hopes many people will take the time to try their own hand at it. “I just think if they do, they’ll understand how much easier it makes their life and how much more exciting it makes their food. And how they’ll become empowered to make dishes on their own. That’s really my goal.”