Addressing The Bear in the Room: A Review of Soups, Salads, Sandwiches by Matty Matheson
Every Canadian I know, myself included, keeps a strong mental rolodex of all famous Canadians. If you consume any kind of media with a Canadian you will know by the end of it who is/was/will be/is related to a Canadian. Even if everyone in the room is Canadian, there’s a strong chance it’ll be mentioned: “You know he’s from Scarborough, eh?”1 Collective nods.
This is the reason why I knew Matty Matheson was Canadian. I knew very little about him apart from that fact. I came across it one day, filed it away, and proceeded to relay it to anyone who watched The Bear with me.
In fact, I knew so little, I actually thought he was from Montreal all this time, but he’s not. He’s from the Niagara region of Ontario, and he lives there to this day.
All of this is to say, I was very excited to receive his new cookbook, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches, and write an unabashedly glowing review. (Thanks Ten Speed Press for the free copy!) Matty, after all, is incredibly accomplished and well loved—restaurants, and producer credits, and a huge social media following. His cookbooks are favorably reviewed and top sellers. And obviously I like The Bear because I have a soul.
I was pumped to get to know him and his recipes. I was cracking my knuckles, ready to put my thumb on the scale.
The Book, in General
The book itself is beautiful. I’m not great at describing photography, but it’s filled with kind of moody, retro, disposable-camera-looking photos of Matty and his family on heavy matte paper. It’s fun to feel and to flip through.
It’s also organized as expected: one section on soup, one on salads, one on sandwiches. It’s 127 recipes in total, according to Eat Your Books, divided more or less evenly.
A thorough read through, however, made me realize that this book was a bit strange and wily. My first reaction was, this book is not really for me. Cooking, for Matty, does not seem to be about getting food on the table every night. That’s not his thing. And that’s fine; that doesn’t make a bad book.
But my second thought was, I actually have no idea who this book is for or really even what cooking is for Matty.
He starts out his book by saying that it is for the home cook. "These are just at-home recipes that are easy and fun," he promises, "Just open the book, pick a recipe, cook it, close it, and put it back on the shelf.”
Sounds great, count me in!
After reading and cooking from it, though, I have to disagree. Some of the recipes are wildly complex, with involved preparation methods and long processes (prep time: 2-12 days!), and others are ridiculously simple, like a grilled cheese made with Kraft Singles.
Hard-to-find ingredients abound, but never the same hard-to-find ingredient, so that if you cooked from the book you'd have random spices and condiments from which you've used one teaspoon. One day, you might be chasing around hamachi fillets and honeycomb, the next doubanjiang and Kimmelweck rolls. So you can’t just open it and cook from it most of the time. Even if you live in the most well-provisioned of cities, it would be a huge ask.
And if you don’t live in such a city? Well, I don’t think I have to tell you that my local grocers carried none of these things. Did they carry Kraft Singles? Yes, but how interested are you in knowing how good Matty’s Kraft Singles grilled cheese recipe is? Yeah, me neither.
Actually, I don’t even like Kraft Singles (sorry). And this is another thing I found frustrating about the book. Matty implores you to buy the best ingredients, except for when he instructs you to buy Kraft Singles or bacon bits. Honestly, the weird gatekeeping of what lowbrow foods are acceptable lowbrow foods and when you should absolutely talk to your butcher kind of bugs me.
Cooking with Matty
That being said, there were some recipes I managed to cook living without access to specialty ingredients and with limited time. First up the Canadian Donair with Onion, Tomato, and Donair Sauce. I’ve actually wanted to try a Donair since one very homesick Halifax-transplant of a math teacher spoke about them in great detail every day of the ninth grade so I bookmarked this one immediately. And I liked it. It had a very unique and strong flavor profile. The sauce was basically just sweetened condensed milk, vinegar, and garlic powder, and it tasted exactly how it sounds. The whole thing was super spicy, unique, good, and not hard.
The Broiled and Burnt Roasted Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Crostini Thing [sic] was okay. The soup was both overwhelmingly spicy and bit bland, and there was definitely not enough crostini for the amount of soup. I’m talking something like ten servings of soup to a generous four servings of crostini. Not a repeat soup for me.
The Broccoli Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette Dressing, Fried Egg, and Gorgonzola was quite good and not too challenging for a weeknight, kind of like a broccoli spin on a wedge salad. Good salad. No complaints.
The Black Beans with Cotija, Cilantro, Red Onion, Crumbled Pork Rinds, Oregano, and Salsa Macha was solid, but not particularly special. The friends I served it to really liked it, but it didn’t feel worth the effort. The flavors were fairly muddled, and the pork rind garnish quickly turned mushy.
On top of that, it calls for guajillo chile powder, ancho chile powder, and Mexican oregano. I can actually find all those near me, so that’s not an issue. My frustration is that I believe this is the only—or close to it—recipe in the book that uses any of these ingredients. If you have to do that for every recipe, things get expensive fast, and pantries get full. It points to a lack of cohesion in the book that got under my skin. What am I supposed to do with all this stuff after this one single recipe? (To be fair, Matty never promised cohesion, nor is it his brand as far as I can tell.)
Final Thoughts
Matty has a very popular online presence and is incredibly successful, but I'm not sure it quite translates for the home cook. The book is a bit disjointed, and the writing is all over the place. If you're used to Matty's voice, however, and want to cook what you see him make on YouTube by devoting an entire day or night to it, this is the book. If you're interested in exploring a wide variety of tastes and techniques, this might also be appealing to you. But I struggle to imagine who the person is who could make good use of this book. It would be someone with lots of time time and access to ingredients and a large budget and ample pantry space.
Even then, however, the recipes I tried hinted that the time could possibly be spent in vain. I get the sense Matty is a bit of an instinctual and intuitive chef with a real natural talent, and I'm not sure that always comes across on the page.
You know he’s from Fort Erie, though, eh?
If you immediately thought Mike Myers, congratulations.
Reading this brought two main issues to mind with modern cookbooks. First, many seem to be more like picture books—visual projects rather than practical cooking guides. Second, about half of all cookbooks share similar flaws, and I think this stems from the publishing industry itself. The problem appears once someone becomes popular enough to guarantee sales of at least 10,000 books based on their social media following. At that point, publishers seem to invest less effort in ensuring the book is cohesive and actually helpful to home cooks. Instead, they focus on aesthetics—photography and design—rather than crucial aspects like thorough recipe testing or verifying that ingredients are readily available to readers. Thanks, loved reading!
I wonder whether the single-use condiment issue is something the book’s editor noticed and mentioned and got pushed back on, or if nobody noticed at all during the editing process.