For Peter Som, cooking has been an ideal accompaniment for his career as a fashion designer.
“Coming from fashion where I was doing runway shows and collections four times a year and sort of cranking things out, this was a completely different process,” says Som, reflecting on the fast-paced industry where he established his career. “For me, cooking was always the counterbalance to [that]. Coming home, being able to go in the kitchen, cook something — have a beginning, a middle, an end, which hopefully was something delicious — that was what centered me during my fashion years. When I stopped my runway collections, cooking really became much more central to my life and what I love to do.”
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The cookbook speaks to the importance of family, “whether blood or chosen, and how so many of those memories are centered around sitting around a table and breaking bread together,” says Som. “Or in our case, eating rice. We always have rice for every meal. These are universal themes.”
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While Som has been sharing recipes and food-based content online as part of his lifestyle brand for several years, he was inspired to put together his own cookbook after discovering a handwritten and annotated recipe notebook kept by his late maternal grandmother. “This really sparked a journey for me to discover who she was through her cooking,” says Som, who grew up in the Bay Area seeing his grandmother every week. “Family Style” serves as a record of Som’s family legacy told through food. “It’s an immigrant story. It’s a story about the American dream,” says Som. “And this is my family’s version of it.”
The cookbook was an opportunity to revisit memories from his childhood, from sitting around a table making wontons with his grandmother all afternoon to beloved dishes that he’d forgotten about, like the spicy cucumbers that “were always on Grandma’s dining table” when he was growing up.
“The cookbook ended up being called ‘Family Style’ because that’s how we ate growing up. Traditionally, Chinese food, a lot of family meals are big plates of food in the center of the table, and everyone grabs it and eats,” he adds. “The style part refers to my fashion background and my love of making things look beautiful. But it really ended up being about a book honoring the story of my grandmother and my mom through their food.”
The book features around 100 recipes, grouped in playful categories like “this and that,” “have you eaten your vegetables?” and “use yer noodle,” along with a selection of rice bowls, main dishes, and desserts. Som’s personal go-tos in the book include a radicchio and fennel salad and creamy miso maple dressing — “it’s winter outside, so I love a bright, crunchy salad,” he says — his grandmother’s “quick pickled cukes,” crispy tofu with charred scallion pesto, and sole meunière. “My mom grew up loving French food, so there’s a lot of riffs on French food in [the book]. My take on the sole meunière involves lime instead of lemon and a few other Asian ingredients,” he says.
There’s an emphasis on accessible dishes, a concept that Som relates back to his career in fashion.
“I love food that really leans on the pantry staples and things you can make on a Tuesday for an easy dinner,” says Som. “There’s that term in fashion called the ‘front of closet clothes’: clothes you pick again and again and you want to wear,” he adds. “I approached recipes like that. I wanted these to be recipes that you would want to make again and again, not just a one-and-done, that was so hard, I never want to make that again.”
“At the end of the day, I hope these are recipes that are ‘front of closet,’ and that are delicious and fun to eat.”