Leftover food has some hard connotations to shake. I’m not sure if it’s the memory of one too many reheated casseroles, the ache of a poor childhood with few options when it came to food, or a parent who was a lousy cook, but the very word leftover makes some people recoil. I’ve had a few people tell me straight up, “I don’t eat leftovers.”
I feel differently, of course: leftovers feel almost like a gift from my past self. It’s joy, not drudgery that motivates me to make the most of my home-cooked food. Joy like that of my friends Robin and Molly, who both own booming food businesses in town. They get together with all their extra food every Monday and improvise a meal with what they have on hand. Or take my French hair stylist, Christophe: he fairly dances around the salon chair when he tells me about cooking leftovers. Once a week, he says, he’s in charge of working with the bits and bobs in the refrigerator and cooking them into something delicious. Spoiler alert: it’s often an omelet. The thing is, he’s working from a different language, where what’s left after a meal are called les restes, the remainders. It’s not such a different word from leftovers, but it doesn’t necessarily have that connotation of something left behind and devalued. “The leftover in a French cook’s hand is a precious ingredient to be turned into something exquisitely delicious,” Susan Herrmann Loomis, an American writer living in France, writes in her book In a French Kitchen.
A celebratory second meal—whether it’s a French standard like hachis parmentier made from beef stew (and akin to shepherd’s pie) or a delicious panful of enchiladas made with extra Thanksgiving turkey—is so much more festive than an obligation to leftovers. I want to bottle that pleasure I get from talking to Robin, Molly, and Christophe. Forgive me if I don’t use the word “leftover” very much throughout the book, even if you can bet that I am using my actual leftovers.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE L WORD
As historian Helen Veit points out in The Atlantic, the idea of leftovers as a discrete concept didn’t really exist before the end of the nineteenth century: “Using up leftover food was so fundamental to everyday cooking and eating that most people didn’t have a special name for it.” Before our era, food was plain worth more to the average American household: around the turn of the twentieth century, food costs took up 40 percent of the average American income (today it’s just above 10 percent). So in the United States, as in the rest of the world, last night’s stew would very likely be today’s breakfast. The dawn of home refrigeration—first ice chests and then mechanized refrigerators from the 1920s forward—gave Americans a new approach to perishability: they could buy more food than needed for a day or two, and any remains could be archived in a cool place, to be considered for later eating.
And with that, “left-overs” (hyphenated back in the day) became one of the key fixations of the Home Economy movement of the turn of the century and the first decades of the twentieth century. How a housewife managed the surplus food in her house was a key measure of her modern “scientific” approach to the kitchen. A flush of manuals were published for new refrigerator owners, including Elizabeth O. Hiller’s 1910 volume, published by the McCray Refrigerator company, called Left-over Foods and How to Use Them. Even writing so early in the twentieth century, Hiller notes that leftovers have some negative connotations. “It is the careless tossing together of ‘left-over’ food and giving the creation when finished, a name quite as unattractive as itself, that has caused this great antipathy so prevalent among people.” Like other home-ec contemporaries, Hiller favored heavy sauces, especially white sauces such as béchamel and velouté, to dignify—and camouflage—reheated leftovers.
In the midcentury, when mechanical refrigerators were more standard in American homes, béchamel was no longer a main method of reviving extra food. First off, if you were going to make a casserole, you no longer made white sauce: you’d just tip over a can of creamy soup. Color also became a signifier of freshness: you’d find sandwich loaves garnished with maraschino cherries and frozen fruit salad swaddled in lettuce leaves. And then there was the gelatin, the cool and jiggly repository of all that came before. Perhaps you’d like some “buffet meatloaf,” made with a layer of green gelatin studded with cucumber, celery, and green peppers and a red layer made from jellied tomato soup and leftover ground meat?
Food was getting cheaper and cheaper for the American public by the second half of the century, women were entering the workforce in greater numbers, and by the 1960s and ’70s overeagerness to reframe leftovers looked a little lame. In some cookbooks, like the More-with-Less cookbook, published by the Mennonite community in 1976 (and still in print), leftovers could take on a new meaning by being less taxing on the limited resources of the world’s food economy. But that attitude was an outlier as the more-is-more aesthetic of Reagan and Dallas, and microwavable dinners came roaring into play in the 1980s. Erma Bombeck summed up the ennui with a nod to a fellow funny woman: “Phyllis Diller used to talk about her idea of a perfect world—a stove that flushed.”
Packaged food somewhat limited the conundrum of extra portions: canned soup and eventually frozen meals were portioned to be consumed in one sitting. If there were leftovers, they weren’t so much reinvented as just zapped in the microwave. Heading into the twenty-first century, stores like Walmart and Costco encouraged people to get discounts on foods by buying in volumes that were once sold only to food-service establishments. Food was so relatively cheap that the idea of cooking leftovers was mostly left out of the conversation, at least in the glossier food publications. With takeout and “hot bars” at the grocery, today cooking itself has become an optional skill.
What’s changed? Why write this book now?
First, I think while food may not be the biggest part of our monthly budget anymore, time—for working people, parents, activists, bingers of streaming television—is at a premium now more than ever. If you can get more meals out of the effort you put into home cooking, so much the better.
Food might be relatively cheap for Americans, but if you opt for more produce, more whole grains, more sustainably harvested meats and seafood and eggs, well then, it isn’t cheap—not by any stretch. If, like me, you have bought into the idea that we should invest in food producers that are keeping their eyes on the future and the planet, then we need to figure out how to do that and also keep food budgets within reason.
And finally, we are all becoming more aware of the issue of food waste, thanks in large part to the voices of concerned chefs and environmental activists.