In the Kitchen with Deb

The alumna behind Smitten Kitchen, Deb Perelman, talks about her somewhat dizzying rise to fame, her undying dedication to home cooking, her favorite recipes and more.

Story // Rachel Muir
Photos // William Atkins

Like its creator, Smitten Kitchen is unfussy, funny, kind and unpretentious. Since day one, the blog has candidly charted Perelman’s successes and failures in her now famously tiny Manhattan kitchen. And a fair amount of that cooking was done with her two small children (now ages 15 and nine) underfoot. She still answers emails and takes all the photos herself.

Perelman says the site’s popularity and longevity has been somewhat flabbergasting. “Honestly, I fully expected Smitten Kitchen to last six months,” she says. Perelman earned an undergrad degree at GW in psychology and fine arts and then a master’s in art therapy. But after five years as a therapist, “it was clear to me that it was not the thing I wanted to be doing.”

Perelman had no formal training or restaurant experience, but cooking was something she’d always liked to do. “I was then and am still obsessed with the idea of your one recipe, your go-to for a certain thing, like tomato sauce or fried chicken,” she says. “It’s about the recipe I want to make forever.” Plus, she adds, creating a blog was what you did in the early 2000s. (Perelman had a prior blog called Smitten, which she met her husband through. So blogs can pay off in multiple ways.)

“I don't think I’ve ever had a full picture of why it took off,” she says. “Maybe it was the right time and the right place or maybe it was just a way of talking about cooking without authority that I think people responded to.

“I really wanted it to be a conversation. I wanted it to be fun and chatty. I mean, I didn't really know how else to do it,” she says. “I wasn't going to insult your intelligence by explaining to you what a blood orange was, nor was I going to tell you were doing something wrong if you were doing it in a way that works for you. I still feel that way.”

It’s an approach that resonates not only with home cooks but also with classically trained chefs.

David Lebovitz, the bestselling author and world-renowned chef, says Perelman “has been able to tap into the thrill, angst and joy of baking and cooking.

“When she came on the scene, many of us finally found someone who we could relate to, who was curious and inquisitive in the kitchen, who was happy to try new things and to perfect recipes,” he says. “She put her neuroses about cooking in plain sight, which made her disarmingly popular amongst anyone who struggled with the question: What should I make?”

The Process

Perelman says recipe development is still her favorite part—even though her process is, shall we say, unorthodox. “Oh boy,” she says when asked to describe it, “it’s totally insane.”

Perelman contrasts hers with that of Serious Eats, the award-winning food and drink website that takes a scientific and meticulous approach to recipe development that can entail making a dish 40 or 50 times. “You will never see me working on a mac and cheese recipe even 25 times in a month,” Perelman says. “I don't want to eat mac and cheese 25 times in a month.”

At any given time Perelman has a couple hundred recipes she is working on all at different stages of development. Her strategy is to take very thorough notes and then come back to recipes when she’s craving them again.

Perelman says she particularly likes revisiting her earliest recipes. “I know so much more about cooking now than I did in 2006 in terms of how I'd write a recipe, why I would never use a certain method and, in general, this is how I would make this now.”

These days Perelman typically posts 25 or 30 new recipes a year. In the beginning, though, she posted a couple recipes a week, which she calls “wild” in hindsight.

Blog to Bestseller

Her first book, “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook,” was published in 2012. She describes it as a “love letter to approachable, uncompromised home cooking.” But it almost didn’t happen.

“I was so resistant to writing a cookbook,” Perelman says. “I loved having the site and having the freedom to write about whatever I wanted to cook that day.” She had also heard horror stories of food bloggers being pushed into impossible turnaround times or having to cede control of content and design.

Perelman’s longtime agent, Alison Fargis recognized Smitten Kitchen’s appeal right away. “Deb Perelman is a one-woman culinary powerhouse who doesn’t just write and develop all her recipes—she lives them, tests them to perfection and answers your panicked pie crust questions herself,” Fargis says. “In a world of outsourced content, Deb is Smitten Kitchen, start to finish. That’s why everything she makes works, and why we trust her with dinner, dessert and everything in between.”

Fargis reached out to Perelman in 2008, and that email sat in Perelman’s inbox for a year. Perelman only started to revisit her decision when her first child was born. She asked herself: What does a legacy look like? Is it a URL? Perelman wanted something more tangible than a website.

The accolades came swiftly both in news outlets and from home cooks. The LA Times called “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook” “a joy to read.” Amazon picked it as one of its top 10 cookbooks of the year. A reviewer on Amazon (where it has close to five stars and more than 2,000 reviews) wrote that the cookbook “is comfort food refined and perfected” and “by far one of my favorite cookbooks and certainly one that I keep referring to all the time.”

Her first book was followed up by two other bestsellers, “Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites,” which focuses on simple delicious meals for real people, and “Smitten Kitchen Keepers: A Kitchen Counter Conversation,” which hearkens back to her obsession with creating that one perfect recipe you keep coming back to. Bon Appetit said of “Keepers,” which came out in 2022, “This book feels like an old friend who shows up to the party with the eggs you’ve run out of—plus a perfect carrot cake.” All three books were “New York Times” bestsellers.

(At first Perelman wasn’t sure what to make of the bestseller status. “Truly, I didn't know anything about publishing,” she says. “When I was on my book tour, and they called me to say I was on the New York Times-bestseller list, I was like, cool, that’s good, right?”)

Playing Favorites

Is picking a favorite recipe like picking a favorite child? Not exactly. “I'm that person that my favorite thing is always the last thing I made or the next thing I make,” she says, “like my favorite dress is always the newest one.”

Recently, Perelman has been into ziti chickpeas with sausage and kale, a recipe posted earlier this year on her site that she describes as “meaty, greeny, cheesy, beany and spicy.”

Other current favorites include ones from her latest book, “Smitten Kitchen Keepers,” including a recipe for fettuccine with white ragu— “the coziness, the deliciousness of it is unparalleled”—and the green spaghetti on the book’s cover. It’s a simple-to-make pasta, roast garlic and spinach dish, which is apparently a favorite with toddlers. “A number of people have sent me pictures of their kids with green spaghetti all over their face,” Perelman says. “I think they like it because it looks like Play-Doh.”

For novice cooks, she recommends starting with “things that never taste right when somebody else makes it.

“You need that drive to get it right,” Perelman says. “You have to be in a place where you think matzo ball soup doesn't ever taste the way it should, or you think pancakes in diners are terrible.” She advises picking a recipe that has reviews, so you aren’t going in in the dark and “have a solid chance that it’s going to work.”

There is one thing Perelman can’t live without in the kitchen: a brasier pan from the French company Staub. She likes it so much she now has a collaboration with Staub, but emphasizes she bought her original one for full price. “I have the receipt from 2014,” she says.

The pan is a four-quart Dutch oven that also doubles as a sauté pan, casserole dish and soup pot. She likes the lower profile and smaller size. “A few years after I bought it, they stopped selling it. I went to them, and I begged them to bring it back.” Hence, the collaboration.

When asked to choose a favorite cookbook, Perelman hesitates then cites Marion Cunningham’s “The Breakfast Book.” “It’s such a classic,” she says. The book, which came out in 1987, has nearly 300 recipes spanning pancakes, scones, all kinds of eggs, coffee cake, muffins and more. “I like it so much that it’s one of my favorites to give as a gift,” she says.

Fame and the Future

“It took me a lot of years to be aware of Smitten Kitchen outside of my apartment,” says Perelman, citing the insular nature of cooking and blogging from home.

Perelman still feels somewhat uncomfortable with the fame—albeit grateful for it. “The first time I was recognized I was on the crosstown bus with my kid, and this woman turned to me and said, ‘Hi, are you Deb? I love Smitten Kitchen,’” she says. “I didn't know what to do. I had just finished an apple cider caramel recipe, and I had a few in my purse so I offered her a caramel.

“I’m like an old lady with candies in her purse,” she says. “I have the social skills of somebody who sits in front of a laptop all day by themselves.” (She does not.)

The cookbooks aren’t her only venture beyond the blog. Perelman also has a newish podcast, the Recipe, on which she and Kenji López-Alt, the acclaimed Serious Eats chef, “nerd out” on cooking.

“We pick something each week that we both have recipes for and opinions on,” Perelman says. “Sometimes it’s kind of niche, like broccoli cheddar soup, but we've also done things like mac and cheese and pancakes that we’ve both made a lot of in different ways.”

The episodes are back-and-forth conversations that end with a few regular wrap-up questions, including whether the recipe can be waffled (tomato soup: not recommended) and whether it can be fried in butter (meatloaf: “amazing”; Caesar salad: “don’t even want to think about it”).

What’s next? Perelman is starting to work on a new cookbook focused on parties and entertaining. “The goal is not to be sweating in the kitchen while everybody has fun without you,” she says, “so the cooking will be stress free or be done before people get there.”

She wants to talk about the real reasons people shy away from entertaining—and find ways to take the pressure off, she says.

It’s that frank, funny and friendly approach that has made her a trusted friend and mentor in millions of kitchens.

“She was able to show us that anyone—even a mom of two cooking in a minuscule New York kitchen—could make scrumptious meals and desserts with relative ease,” says Lebovitz. “Deb tapped into our consciousness with her ‘can-do’ attitude, one that we could all relate (or at least aspire) to.”