Two Decades of Cooking Everything

Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mark Bittman’s ‘How to Cook Everything’ with this easy weeknight menu

This is not the place to muse about the dance of time, but taking a step back and appreciating the energy that has gone into “How to Cook Everything” and its related projects over the last 20 years provides me with a gratifying moment. Allow me to savor it and review this history for a minute, and then I’ll tell you why I’m so excited about this new edition.

The original HTCE was initially intended to be a little more glamorous than it turned out, but when we — I, my editor Jen Griffin, and my friend and book consultant Jack Bishop — looked at the manuscript, we realized that what I’d done was put together a classic basic cookbook, something that hadn’t been tackled in 20 years or so. There was nothing exotic or especially challenging about it: It was simply “how to cook.”

A not-intimidating, accessible, no-nonsense, take-good-ingredients-and-don’t-mess-them-up cookbook was exactly what was needed at the beginning of an era that featured more publicity for celebrity chefs than for real cooks, and a…