Bowls used to evoke visions of Oliver Twist hold one while posing that fateful request: “Please sir, I want some more.” But Dickens’ famous waif has been pushed aside in my mind by another Brit, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who poses on the cover of her 2015 cookbook holding a stack of pristine white bowls in her hands.
“If I could, I’d eat everything out of a bowl,” Lawson writes in “Simply Nigella,” in which she gives what she calls “bowlfood” a chapter of its own. “For me ‘bowlfood’ is a simple shorthand for food that is simultaneously soothing, bolstering, undemanding, and sustaining.”
The word might also be considered shorthand for a new way of eating — as the bowl takes over the dinner plate as the meal vessel of choice in restaurants and at home, it has come to mean a category of food, with all the elements of a meal together.
“Most bowls are very component-oriented: grain, proteins, vegetables, sauce,” said Lukas Volger of Brooklyn, N.Y., author of “Bowl” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25). “It makes sense in a bowl.”