Samin Nosrat majored in English at Berkeley.
In her sophomore year, she and her boyfriend had saved up $220 to eat at Chez Panisse. The restaurant was renowned as one of the best in the country. Samin immediately applied and got a job there as a busser.
She’d always wanted to become a writer, but she also came from a food-loving family. In her words, “Every day I go to work, and it’s magical. So I think, maybe I can do this. It wasn’t a coherent thing, just maybe I can try to cook.”
She asked if she could volunteer in the kitchen, and the restaurant agreed to let her do one day a week in addition to her paid work as a busser. While volunteering, she asked one of the chefs, Chris, whether she could ever intern at the restaurant. He told her, “You don’t know enough. Here’s this stack of books. Pay attention. Go to the tastings. Watch how the cooks talk about tasting. And then come back to me in six months.”
She did everything Chris advised and began noticing patterns. Whenever cooks were sampling a dish, they’d respond with the same type of response:
- This needs more salt
- This needs a squeeze of lemon
- Add parmesan
- Add olive oil
Then, when they let her near a stove, she noticed more patterns:
- Bring to boil and then turn down to simmer
- Braise at 475, then turn it down to 325
After a year and a half of working in the kitchen, she tells Chris, “I think I see a pattern. Salt, fat, acid, heat. That’s what everything we cook comes down to.”
Chris responded, “Yeah, everyone knows that.”
As a novice, Samin knew that everyone did not know that. It was not in any of the books she had read, because those books were written by people like Chris. Experts who knew it as nothing more than common sense.
Samin wanted to write the book right then and there: twelve pages long, with three pages on each element of cooking. But she realised she needed to learn how to cook before she wrote the book.
Over the next ten years, she progressed to sous-chef, working for Chris after he left Chez Panisse to open his own restaurant. During those ten years, especially in the latter half, she taught younger cooks and built the vocabulary she’d use to articulate the core principles of cooking with salt, oil, heat, and acid.
But though she’d moved through her career as a cook, she still longed to be a writer.
She took a food journalism class at Berkeley and started writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. She told her teacher and bestselling food journalist, Michael Pollan, “I’ve been putting this pressure on myself to come up with an idea of a book to write that would be groundbreaking.”
Michael told her, “Write the book you know.”
She told him she was thinking about salt, fat, acid, and heat.
Michael, a food journalist but not a professional cook himself, said, “No one’s ever said that before. It’s a gold mine.”
Samin started teaching classes on salt, fat, acid, and heat. She’s receiving student feedback in real time, recognising what she needs to expand on, what needs visualising, and what needs cutting back.
She started pitching the book idea to agents. Rejection, rejection, rejection. They told her she wasn’t qualified to write the book because she wasn’t a famous chef. They told her the book wouldn’t sell because it didn’t have eight chapters, and all cookbooks need eight chapters. They told her it wouldn’t sell because it didn’t have any photos.
Nobody was interested.
Until she partnered with illustrator Wendy MacNaughton. Together, they made a forty-page, illustrated proposal for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. This was a completely new concept, and Wendy helped Samin visualise it. A book that taught the reader how to cook rather than one that shared a collection of recipes. Now, instead of rejection, she was greeted by an auction of 15 publishers bidding for the book.
As you probably know, the resulting book became a perennial bestseller. It won several prestigious awards and subsequently landed Samin a Netflix series.
Strip it back to the essentials
The market is rarely interested in the intricacies of your expertise. They want you to have it, but they don’t want to hear it. If what you’re putting out resonates with peers but not clients, that’s a sign that you’re doing the opposite of what Samin did.
As an intern, Samin learned that cooking good food was about adjusting four elements: salt, fat, acid, and heat. For people learning how to cook, anything beyond that was a detail they didn’t need. And nobody owned the frame, so it was a novel concept.
That’s the art of articulating a solution.
Holding the depth and nuance of expertise in your head, recognising how to strip it back to its absolute fundamentals, hooking it to the burning frustration your market wants to solve. Then, using language that’s relatable to the intended audience.
Entertain and enlighten the people who aren’t experts in what you do, because often, they’re your buyers.
Strip it back.
P.S. Samin Nosrat's story and quotes in this email are from The Work of Art, by Adam Moss. I recommend it!