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For many years Kevin West was an active part of the Southern California cooking, teaching, and preserving scene. We lost him to the beauty of the Berkshires but in exchange, we get a new book.
The Cook's Garden: A Gardener's Guide to Selecting, Growing, and Savoring the Tastiest Vegetables of Each Season focuses on how and what to plant from a cook's point of view.
Kevin West: The poet W.S. Merwin wrote that a garden is made of hope. I think that the garden is a place where we can grow, literally, a better future for ourselves, for our families, for our communities. And to me, this notion of the garden as an act of defiance, as a way of proclaiming a better future, as a way of sticking up for the values we believe in, and as a way for caring for the soil and the environment and our families and ourselves and our communities. This is a very, very powerful and inspiring and relevant idea for this day today.
Evan Kleiman: The first sentence in your book is, "This is a book about flavor." I think most long-time gardeners understand this but for a cook, they might be befuddled as to how flavor intersects with growing things.
There are so many ways we can approach that but let's talk first about varietal character because I think it's something that gardeners have a really good intuitive sense of already. As a gardener, you know that a Cherokee Purple tomato is different than, say, a Sungold tomato , right? They're both tomatoes, but they have their very own needs in the garden. They grow differently. They have different sun requirements. I want to bring that same idea of varietal character into the kitchen, as well. So the book is about helping you select, grow, and cook the most flavorful varieties, and also to help you understand in the kitchen, how to make the best use of that Sungold versus the Cherokee Purple. Of course, it's not just tomatoes, it's also beans and corn and winter squash, and then even some of the staples, some of the pantry staples, like potatoes and garlic.
Summer tomatoes are practically a meal on their own. Photo by Kevin West.
You have a quick start guide in a book that I find so interesting and sobering. It starts with how much time do you want to spend? It has "very little time" and then it proceeds to give you options for spending more and more time. Then it also looks at how much space you have and starts with a couple of containers. You also give very specific examples of what you can do within distinct parameters. So give me an example of what we can do, given the smallest amount of time and the most limited amount of space.
I want to call out Elizabeth Keen who is the farmer here at Indian Line Farm and the Berkshires. Elizabeth is a real hero farmer. She's so fantastic, and she's a cornerstone of the Great Barrington Farmers Market . She was a really great teacher for me during the writing of this book and a great sounding board. She's the one who really drew my attention to this very important distinction. She said that most of us, when we think about planting a garden, we think about space, right? It's like, Oh, I've got this great big yard I can fill up. I've got so much sun, I've got good soil, I can plant so many things.
Elizabeth helped remind me, or help remind all of us, really, that the most limited resource in all of our lives is time. So plant according to how much time you have because an over-ambitious first garden is fatal to a second garden. If you only have a few minutes a day and you want to kind of test this out and see if you like the feeling of growing something, then grow three little pots of herbs. One pot might have parsley, let's make another pot with chives, and then let's have the third pot with something really fragrant, like basil or cilantro or rosemary or thyme. And with a few minutes a day, half an hour a week altogether, you can water those pots, tend those pots, and cook from them.
Right now is the perfect time to enjoy eggplant. Photo by Kevin West.
Did you grow up amidst gardeners? Where did you grow up?
I did grow up amidst gardeners. I come from East Tennessee farmers on my dad's side and Smoky Mountain hillbillies on my mom's side. So both of my parents, they grew up in families in East Tennessee that got most of their daily sustenance, and I would even say, most of their yearly sustenance out of the gardens that they grew.
I was lucky to spend time in my grandparents' garden and to learn a lot from childhood, just being around gardens and going out there and helping with little garden chores. From the beginning, I think that I was really lucky in that way, to have a glimpse of what we today call farm-to-table cooking, and what back then, we used to call just eating from the garden. Everyone knew that the best thing you could eat was whatever you had picked that day, or maybe whatever you had picked up at the farm stand down the road. Or, you know, we'd be driving down the little country road, and there'd be some fellow with a pickup truck selling corn off the back of his tailgate, and we'd stop and get corn.
That was the spirit of cooking from the garden. It didn't mean that you have to grow every single thing yourself. It meant that you are eating food from your area. You know who grew it, you know where it came from. We would today say that it's a locavore mentality. But of course, back in my childhood, there was no such word as locavore.
I tend to plant stuff very haphazardly, and some things work, and others don't. I've always felt like gardening shares a lot with cooking, that it's more of a practice than a set of rules. Can you talk us down off the ledge if we're just beginning?
Yeah, you've described it perfectly already, Evan. It's a practice. It is not about mastering a known set of rules. It's not a skill that you can put concisely into a how to guide with 10 instructions where you follow Step A to Step B, where you put this piece together with that piece using that screw. It's not like plumbing or electricity. It's really is more like cooking. What I would say is that it's more like skiing or more like learning to surf, right? It's a kind of practice.
You learn the basics, right? You pick up a few essential skills, you get some guidance from someone who's more experienced, and then you just throw yourself into it, and you figure it out as you go. Like learning to surf and learning to ski and learning to dance and so many other kinds of practice, there may be moments when you're a little confounded or when you're trying to figure out how to get something to work, and there may even be moments of frustration but essentially, it's really fun, right? It's like the learning and the doing is the interesting part. And, of course, you get to the end and you have some wonderful Sun Gold tomatoes, or you can go outside and pick a salad. But it's the doing that's as satisfying to me, at least as the having.
And one needs to know in advance to humble oneself, because the garden will do it for you.
The garden will do it for you. I say that there are a million ways to fail, and then I learn some new ways every year.
"I think that the garden is a place where we can grow, literally, a better future for ourselves," says Kevin West. Photo by William Hereford.
Yeah. Let's get philosophical for a minute. I feel like we're in a moment where many people might find emotional and mental relief growing some of their own food. Can you speak about gardening as an act of resistance?
Yeah, this is something that I discovered while researching the book, and really have come to celebrate. Let me take a half a step back and say that one of the inspirations for my book is The Victory Garden cookbook and the Victory Garden movement. Your listeners are probably familiar with the victory garden movement. It was an idea that emerged early in World War I and then was repeated in World War II to promote food independence at home. "Vegetables will win the war" was one of the mottos.
There is a different kind of garden that emerged during World War I at Manzanar, the internment camp in the Owens Valley along the eastern Sierra in California. During World War II, imprisoned Japanese and Japanese American detainees there planted gardens and grew these massive gardens that were incredibly productive. They grew the gardens to feed themselves, and they were feeding themselves out of kitchens that were also being run by prisoners with cultural, meaningful foods. The gardens were sustenance but the gardens were also a kind of act of resilience, an act of resistance. They are a way of proclaiming human dignity that would not be debased within this concentration camp. The garden was a garden of defiance.
To me, this idea of a garden of defiance is incredibly relevant today. The cause of the defiance is different. The ideology is different. The politics are different. For me, my garden is an act of resistance against chemical-soaked industrial agriculture. It's an act of resistance against the worst excesses of the food system that pumps out terrible junk food. We don't need to get going down that avenue because I think your listeners are familiar with the kind of industrial agriculture that I'm not in favor of, but the garden is, for me, a site of proclaiming a better future.
That's so wonderful. I love how you talk about growing a cuisine because if we go to a garden center and we see it starts and we look at all the varieties on offer or we go to a catalog of seeds and we look at all the different varieties, one very quickly gets overwhelmed. But if you put your initial thoughts about a garden in the terms of what you eat, I think it's so smart.
This idea of growing a cuisine came to me because I started one step away from that. I started with the idea of grow your recipes. Because when we think about a garden, we tend to think about just the grocery store, staples. Oh, let's grow some cucumbers. Let's grow some squash. Let's grow some sweet corn. But then I started to think, if we go out to the garden and we pick some cucumbers, what else are we going to need to make a cucumber salad or to make some dill pickles? So then you start thinking, let's get some garlic. We should plant some garlic. We should plant some herbs.
If you continue down that path of thinking about the foods that you love to have in your kitchen, the foods that you love to eat, what I found is that you begin thinking very quickly about the bigger collections of recipes that we call a cuisine.
So The Cook's Garden is a gardening book, but it's also a cookbook. Tell us about your green bean gratin.
I've got two things to say about that. One is that it's efficient, and two, it's lighter than the kinds of gratins that I grew up with, at least, which were based on a bechamel sauce. My idea for the green bean gratin is pretty simple. You have wonderful green beans and you have some fresh herbs, and you splash them with cream, and you grate a little Parmesan on them, and you toss all of that together with your hands, and you sort of tuck it into a baking dish, and you put it in the oven until it browns over on the top. It's very simple and light and delicious and flavorful.
The parmesan, of course, or the grated cheese of whatever sort, adds a lot of umami to the dish, and it's quite beautiful when it comes out of the of the oven, steaming, especially if you used different colors of beans in there, some wax beans and some green beans. It really can become the centerpiece for a vegetarian meal. I'm not vegetarian. I cook with all kinds of products, from bacon drippings to fish sauce and all of that.
But what I find is that when I'm eating out of the garden, I eat so many vegetables and I have so many vegetables on the table, that a lot of times I just skip the meat altogether, and I don't feel that I'm missing anything. So I'm a kind of accidental vegetarian a lot of the time when I'm cooking out of the garden, and that green bean gratin is a good example of that.
"The Cook's Garden" by Kevin West, 2025. Photo courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf.
I love your description of how you measure a pint of cherry tomatoes when you're picking in the garden.
Here's how you know you have a pint of cherry tomatoes. You go out to the garden and you start picking tomatoes, and you eat a few, and then you fill up your hands, and then you have to pull out the front of your shirt like a kangaroo pouch, and when you have your shirt front filled up, that's about a pint.
Kevin, it is such a great book. I could just spend so much time reading it. There's so much historical and philosophical little side conversations but I just love the play of the garden and the kitchen. Thank you for that.
Evan, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I hope to see you out at the market someday soon.
This green bean gratin is "lighter than the kinds of gratins that I grew up with, which were based on a bechamel sauce," says Kevin West. Photo by Kevin Miyazaki.
Green Bean Gratin
Serves 6 to 8
Quick to assemble, this summertime gratin replaces béchamel with cream, which binds the elements together with a lighter presence. Thanks to the umami deliciousness of grated Parmesan and the crunch of bread crumbs, it is a side dish that could anchor the plate for a vegetarian meal. A big leafy salad or a plate of sliced tomatoes or a platter of corn on the cob would finish the picture.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the baking dish
1 1/2 pounds tender green beans, trimmed but not snapped
2 cups diced seeded Roma tomatoes (4 to 5 large)
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons savory or thyme leaves, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (from 1/2 lemon)
1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated (3/4 cup lightly packed)
1 cup organic heavy cream
1 cup fresh bread crumbs, lightly toasted
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly oil a 12-inch oval gratin dish.
In a large bowl, toss together the green beans, tomatoes, garlic, savory, lemon zest, salt, pepper, Parmesan, and cream until coated. Separately, in a small bowl, toss the bread crumbs with the 1 tablespoon of olive oil.
Turn the green bean mixture into the gratin dish. Cover loosely with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes.
Remove the foil and scatter the bread crumbs over the top. Bake, uncovered, until the bread crumbs are browned and toasted, about 25 minutes.
From The Cook’s Garden © 2025 by Kevin West. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
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