A CENTURY AGO, Virginia Woolf opined,
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well,
if one has not dined well.” Leave it to the
wife of comedy juggernaut Jerry Seinfeld
to become the cookbook arena’s most irresistible figurehead. Jessica Seinfeld’s three
best-selling cookbooks—plus the just-pub-lished Food Swings: ;;;; Recipes to Enjoy
Your Life of Virtue & Vice—aim to provide
audiences with everything a frazzled novice
might need to simply, efficiently and enticingly prepare healthy food choices.
Whereas Seinfeld’s first two books targeted overworked parents (Deceptively
Delicious and Double Delicious!), Food
Swings is a primer resolved to provide
exhausted grown-ups with dietary balance
on their own plates.
“I feel like people have this conversa-
tion in their heads all day long about what
to eat and what not to eat, and then, if they
make the luxurious choice, they spend the
next ;; hours punishing themselves for it,”
says Seinfeld. “Food can be such a crazy
roller coaster.”
While Food Swings reveals Seinfeld’s
own gastronomic proclivities, it was, essen-
tially, penned for the sinner and the saint
in all of us. The book’s format divides reci-
pes into two sections: “Virtue,” with low-fat,
low-calorie, high-nutrient fare, and “Vice,”
devoted to toothsome indulgences. One may
struggle to properly parse the mouthwater-
ing from the merely nutritious with dishes
such as Chocolate-Popcorn Almond
Clusters or, say, Peach and Sriracha Chicken
over Coconut Rice.
Working with longtime collaborator
Sara Quessenberry, Seinfeld reviewed her
own family’s in-house dining habits, then
began revising the recipes toward healthier
outcomes, testing recipes with family and
friends. “First, because I intended to make
preparing meals and eating them a simpler
task for myself, the dishes needed to please
me,” Seinfeld says. “And then the goal was:
Does my husband go nuts for this? Are my
children excited to eat this? And then, will
these dishes please the crowd?”
Readers who are more hash slinger than
head chef need not fret over the complexity
of Seinfeld’s blueprints; they were designed
Serious eats
Jessica Seinfeld doesn’t joke about food
with the working parent or individual in
mind. “That’s really one of the most difficult things about eating healthy, isn’t it?”
she says. “We all work really hard. Many of
us have children. Home life and social life
can be demanding sometimes. Who wants
to cook on top of all of that? Food Swings is
kind of like a ‘cheat’ all the way through.
These dishes are simple to prepare.”
The simplicity factor was of utmost
importance to Seinfeld, who is a round-the-
clock mother of three children, but also
carries a full-time workload as founder and
steward of the Good; Foundation (good
plusfoundation.org), a Manhattan-based
nonprofit that provides counseling, instruc-
tion and material goods to impoverished
families worldwide.
Good; also provides its beneficiaries
with wisdom and tools for meal preparation.
Seinfeld believes that “the shared meal …
is a foundation of family life, the place
where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization.” This was Seinfeld’s childhood
experience in middle-class Burlington,
Vermont, raised by a social worker mother
and a software engineer father.
“I remember watching my mother cook
dinner every single night, and on the days
she had to be at work a little later I’d actually
get dinner started before she got home, and
then we’d all sit at the table over this meal
we’d prepared,” Seinfeld recalls. “At the
family dinner table, that’s where I learned
how to have real, intelligent conversations
with other human beings, where I learned
to hone my public speaking skills, how to
express an idea, how to address current
events. I think that’s where most of us learn
those things. Mealtime is family time.” C
J. Rentilly is a Los Angeles–based writer.
FOR YOUR TABLE
JO
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N
D
OL
AN
THECOSTCOCONNECTION
Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, Food Swings,
is available now at most Costco locations.
