Sara Moulton’s most personal cookbook yet

Sara Moulton has been involved in cooking shows for three decades. A protégé of Julia Child, she appeared on Food Network beginning in the 1990s and culminating with six years of the highly-rated “Cooking Live”. She was also a regular on ABC’s “Good Morning America” from 1997 through 2012, and now stars in the American Public Television series “Sara’s Weeknight Meals.” Despite this, a recent poll of millennials found that they didn’t realize she was still on TV. That could be due to her nearly non-existent social media presence, all-important to that demographic. But even though she might not be trending on Twitter, she’s still plugging away in the kitchen, and has recently released her most personal cookbook to date. 

“Cooking, to me, is about sharing and family dining – not competition,” Moulton says, responding to losing a JBF award to the cooking program Chopped. “It’s about nurturing, context. A life.” That viewpoint is echoed throughout Sara Moulton’s Home Cooking 101, in which Moulton shares tips and techniques through 150 recipes. Breaking with tradition, for this book Moulton worked by herself for a year. She notes that it was especially difficult because with her previous cookbooks, she always had help to do all of the shopping, testing and editing.

The first chapter of Home Cooking 101 contains a list of Moulton’s key home-cooking basics and reflects concepts she has learned over her long career. “Dispense with mise en place” ranks fifth on that list. “The rule is to prep and measure all your ingredients before you start cooking,” she writes. “I don’t bother with it anymore, except in a few rare cases. . . . I realized that I was spending a lot of time preparing all the ingredients in advance instead of taking advantage of lulls in the cooking time of one ingredient to prep the next ingredient.”

Moulton will soon embark on a tour in support of Home Cooking 101 (watch the World Calendar of Cookbook Events for details), and season five of Sara’s Weeknight Meals is now airing on public television stations across the country. Moulton is comfortable in her current, more relaxed television role. When asked if she would consider a reprise of “Cooking Live,” she demurs. “I would never do it now,” she says. “I’ve been replaced by Google. Everybody would call me and tell me what I was doing wrong.”