Sam Sifton, The New York Times food editor, columnist, and former restaurant critic, believes that regular dinners with family and friends can make your life better, and the lives of those who eat with you as well. These dinners aren’t parties. They’re a metaphor for connection, space where memories can be shared as easily as salt or hot sauce, where deliciousness reigns. Even if you don’t particularly like entertaining, there is a great pleasure to be found in cooking for others—and great pleasure to be found in gathering with others, more often than sometimes, on a regular schedule

The point is simply to gather around a table with good company and to enjoy good food, and to do so regularly enough that people know they’ll be happening because they happen every week. Sunday dinners aren’t special occasions. They become that way over time… Sam Sifton’s See You on Sunday:A Cookbook for Family and Friends(Random House | February 18, 2020,| $35.00 | Hardcover) is the book to make them possible.

See You on Sunday is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though all the recipes can be scaled down or up). The recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive and derive from decades Sifton spent cooking for groups from six to sixty. 

Readers will learn how to shuck an oyster and about the perfection of Mallomars served with Champagne flutes filled with milk, as well as the joys of grilled eggplant, gumbo, rice and beans, big meats and big pots. There are a few words on salad, a diatribe on the needless complexity of desserts, and many points of discussion: how to stock your kitchen; how to stretch a lobster; how to carve a ham. You’ll find proteins and grains, vegetables and desserts, as well as odes to taco dinners and pizza parties – and a chapter on the exception of family dinners, just for us. 

In addition to Sifton’s prose and argument, his sermonizing and storytelling, See You on Sunday is filled with low-stress, high-impact recipes designed to make eating with family and friends young and old easier and more joyful. See You on Sunday is an indispensable addition to any home cook’s library, and it will inspire you to get in the kitchen and get cooking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

SAM SIFTON is the food editor of The New York Times, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and the founding editor of the NYT Cooking, an award-winning digital cookbook and cooking school. Formerly the newspaper’s national news editor, its chief restaurant critic and culture editor, he is also the author of Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

SEE YOU ON SUNDAY
by Sam Sifton
Random House
February 18, 2020
ISBN: 9781400069927• $35.00 • HardcoverÂ