I remember so vividly picking up Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat for the first time. Sitting in the Bon Appétit offices in 2017, leafing through an advance copy of the Chez Panisse–trained chef ’s debut, curiosity quickly turned to a knowing sort of awe. “Whoa,” I recall muttering out loud. “She actually…did it.”

The “it,” in this case, was defying every commandment of modern cookbook publishing. Thou shalt develop a hundred crowd-pleasing recipes. Said recipes shalt be adjacent to glossy photographs. Thou shalt pose for the cover, ideally smiling and having a casually joyous time. It was, instead, 480 pages of beautiful blasphemy. A painstaking, profoundly nuanced master class in the fundamentals of cooking, with recipes that were not merely ends in themselves but opportunities to hone one’s newfound skills. For those of us in the business of writing about food, Nosrat’s book validated something we knew but rarely expressed. Recipes can only take you so far—this is how you learn to be a better cook.

It seemed a dubious proposition in a media moment characterized by instant gratification, one that privileged “one cool trick” over patient interrogation of processes. And yet, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was a runaway hit. Bestseller lists. A James Beard Award. Features in magazines. A four-part Netflix series. Nosrat had a deal for a second book and nowhere to go but up.

But behind the scenes she was struggling. The book was her life’s work, the culmination of a 17-year-long career, and now that it was in the world she felt unmoored. “My whole life was on a trajectory toward that book,” she says. “I was so focused on achievement for so long. And then I got somewhere and looked up and I was like, why? What do I have to show for this? I’m not actually full of joy. I don’t feel lighter.” She was diagnosed with depression. Started two versions of that second book, each as ambitious as her first, and gave up; she even tried to give back her advance. Suffered through the isolation of the pandemic, and her father’s long illness and death, a year in which she subsisted on watermelon and Trader Joe’s frozen pizza. “I had to ask myself, in the wake of all the things that I was going through…what am I going to say about cooking?”

The answer, after eight years of soulsearching, is called Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love. If the mission of her first book was to teach readers how to be good cooks, her latest is all about why anyone should want to be a good cook in the first place, a question that is as existential as it is practical. Not for the praise, not for self-aggrandizing satisfaction of a dish made perfectly. But because gathering the people you care about is essential to a meaningful life.