Q&A: Hetty McKinnon on “Linger”

Hetty Lui McKinnon’s new book, “Linger,” documents a yearlong project in which she invited friends over for lunch every month and served them salads. To Hetty, it was crucial, especially after the covid lockdown of 2020, to remind people about what connection really means: not how many followers you have on social media or how many “likes” you’re getting, but “taking a moment to experience what it feels like to be with people without networking.”

After I made her gorgeous Squash and Kale with Green Fregola (here’s another link to that recipe!), I called her up so we could discuss her book. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

Joe: You say this projects feels more urgent than ever. What do you mean?

Hetty: Well, the world is just so divisive, or we’re being told that it is. On social media people are speaking to each other really in such a rude way, and that's very jarring because I didn't realize that we had stooped so low and dropped so far as as a human race. Before social media, you only could speak to people on the phone or in real life, and each time there was a voice involved. But now, well, it’s so different when you don’t have to actually show up. And “Linger” is about showing up.

Joe: Why did you choose to make lunch and not breakfast or dinner?

Hetty: Some of it was practicality because I knew I wanted to photograph the food, and you can't really photograph it at night. Also, I live in a small apartment with a family, with three kids, and I wanted it to not be invading their space. I didn't really tell the guests that much about what I was doing. But the invitation felt so unusual. The people just put their trust in me. It was like, well, if Hetty is going to invite me for lunch, I'm going to go.

Joe: That’s exactly what I would have said.

Hetty: It shouldn't be a crime to stop work for lunch. But I haven't worked in an office in a long time, and I now hear that some people are not even allowed to have lunch breaks. Most of the time, these lunches didn't last for more than an hour and a half, two hours. But it would be your fuel for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the month.

People still talk about those lunches, which really tells you how important it is just to stop for a moment and share food in a really kind of non-threatening, safe environment with friends. That feels like quite a radical act these days.

Joe: That reminds me of when I talked to you for a book event in D.C. a few years ago, and some people there had experienced the original office lunches from Arthur Street Kitchen. The way they talked about it reminded me of people saying I saw REM in this tiny little place back in 1983 and there were only 200 people there. Arthur Street was like this legendary, almost iconic experience in the food world.

Hetty: It's a little cultish. People do have quite a visceral and emotional reaction to my food and my books. I think it's because the work I do requires people to invest a bit more.

Joe: Your career began with salads, and you really learned how to cook by making them. What makes them so well suited for gathering — or lingering — with friends?

Hetty: For one, they can be pre-prepped, right? A lot of people don’t understand that about salads. For a long time, people thought just of leaves and raw things, tomatoes, cucumber, vinaigrette. But there's not a salad in the book that falls into that category. They all have cooked elements. They're elements that can be pre-prepared.

This book was made in real time. I had to prep the salads in the two days leading up to when people were coming over for lunch. So I, in writing the book, showed that it can be done. I will pre-cook my grains. I will even pre-wash and store the herbs so they're all ready to go. So that makes it perfect for lingering. They can be made and they can sit until people arrive.

Joe: You don’t have to be rushing back and forth from the kitchen to the table.

Hetty: I just don't entertain like that anymore. Salads can be served at room temperature. The hardier ones, you can even toss beforehand. If there's a salad where there's some leaves, for example, and it's not going to deal well with sitting once it’s dressed, you can layer it in a salad bowl. Have the dressing at the bottom and then layer with the hardiest ingredients next up to the most delicate ingredients at the top. And then you just toss it right before people arrive.

Joe: When I read that in your book, it was game-changing. I can’t believe I never thought of that.

Hetty: You know what's also game-changing when you have people over? To actually be a guest at your own table. I took a couple of photos, but I really put the camera away when people arrived. I left the table maybe just to fill up water. Everyone deserves to be a guest at the table with your guests, to enjoy everything, to not miss out on one moment of conversation.

Joe: As we're coming up on Thanksgiving, I was thinking about how this frees people from this idea that everything has to be hot. Also, people really do get so excited when you give them a good salad.

Hetty: It’s a dish that speaks of care because it does require a little bit more thought than just, I don't know, throwing a slab of meat on a grill. I’m being facetious because as a non-meat eater, I don’t even know what you do with meat. With a salad, you do have to think about the elements, but once you get it right, it really is glorious.

Joe: Maybe it's because every bite ends up being so interesting.

Hetty: Exactly. But it's still a re-education. Like I know that people still don't see a lot of these foods as salads. but if it makes you feel better not to think about these as salads, just think about them as dishes you can eat at room temperature.

Joe: You've proven over time that anything can be a salad, with, say, your dumpling salads. In this book, one of the recipes I think best proves your ability to do this is the veggie burger salad. It looks so good. But let me ask you this: what unites salads?

Hetty: It’s a dressing. I don't think you can have a salad without a dressing or a sauce. There's probably one or two exceptions in here, because I also stretch the definition of a dressing. A lot are almost dips that’s a base for layered ingredients on top, which is then tied together with a little more of the dressing on top. Like the salted egg rice salad.

The dressing is key for me because that's where the story comes in. You canmake a pile of noodles into a dan dan noodle salad with the dressing, just like you can turn crispy tofu into a mapo tofu salad. You can change up the vegetables according to what you have, according to the seasons. You can swap out beans with grains. But the dressing really drives home the story of the dish.

Joe: This idea also gives a blueprint for even weekday dinner salads. I always hope that people will get into the habit of turning their fridge into like their own personal Sweetgreen, you know? Where you've just got a lot of things ready, and you can just pull them together into a salad however they want.

Hetty: The way I’ve thought about salads is a formula: I always start with the hero vegetable, and then there is some element to make it feel more hefty — that could be noodles, that could be rice, that could be a grain, a legume, sometimes it could be two of those things. And then there's some sort of lighter element, like something leafy, to provide freshness. And then there's herbs, which bring a lot of liveliness to the dish. I think if people could test what a dish tastes like with the herb and without, they'll be shocked by how much difference that herb makes.

And then there's the textural elements at the top: the nuts or the seeds or things like crispy fried onions crispy chickpeas. As a vegetarian, I've come to realize that the difference between having one bite and wanting to go back for the second bite is often texture.

Joe: Absolutely. That's so helpful. Well, let's talk about this dish that I made, which is the squash, kale, and fregola. What do you think squash brings to a salad?

Hetty: It's hearty, for one. And you can do lots of things to squash. It's naturally a very warming vegetable, but you can add sort of lots of warming spices to it, and it brings so much great color. Color is a very big thing in all the salads in this book. And that's why they look so good on the table. That's why you don't need flowers and you don't need decoration. You only need these salads.

Joe: I also love that the kale here is cooked. I mean, I love a kale Caesar as much as the next vegetarian. But, you know, it sort of got a little bit overdone there for a while, and some people got tired of it. So here I love the blanching of the kale then using it in two different ways.

Hetty: I think my body craves it. So I'm always looking for different ways. I, too, love the massaged kale salad. But cooking it just brings a little bit of softness to it, and it actually draws out a bit more of that bitterness, the green flavor of the kale, which is really pleasing. So I take half of it and blend it into a sauce that coats the fregola. It’s so garlicky. And you could use pearl couscous or other small pasta for this.

Joe: That little chewy touch to the fregola is really great.

I want to revisit something we’ve talked about before, aAnd that is how you write that seasonal eating “can be a gatekeeper of joy.”

Hetty: What is most important is that you eat vegetables. People are very fixated on connecting vegetables to seasonality, like that’s the only way. People will say, I can’t eat a tomato right now because they’re from cold storage. But I don’t want to demonize supermarket vegetables because for much of the population, that's what people rely on. And I really want people to feel that eating what their body wants is also important. It can be snobbery to say that you can only eat from CSAs and green markets and all of that. If you're lucky to live in an area where you can get all of that stuff, great.

But if you can't, it's still okay to go to a supermarket and eat a tomato in the winter if you feel like it. You can slow roast supermarket tomatoes, and your house is going to smell incredible. And you're not going to do that to summer tomatoes because most of the time you’re eating them fresh.

Joe: The elitism — and I’ve been guilty of it myself — is especially stark when we're seeing these lines at food pantries, and food assistance has been cut, and people are not getting their food stamp payments. To tell people that they need to know their farmer before they eat a tomato is just insulting.

Hetty: And it's not how the real world actually works. In migrant families, you eat certain foods all year round. I just feel like there's a lot of barriers put up to eating vegetables that don’t exist with meat. I'm trying to break down those barriers and say, just eat vegetables all year round. It doesn't matter where you get them from. They don’t have to even be organic.

Joe: To paraphrase that old Oleta Adams song, “I don’t care how you get them, just get them if you can.”

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