In the fourth season of “Better Things,” Pamela Adlon’s semi-autobiographical FX comedy about a working actor raising three adolescent children on her own in L.A., Adlon’s character, Sam Fox, gets accidentally stoned. A physician has recommended that she medicate wrist pain by vaping marijuana, and the drugs are stronger than she’d expected. Her youngest daughter, Duke (Olivia Edward), chastises her. “Mom, I don’t like that you smoked weed,” Duke says. “It’s rude and hypocritical.” Later, Sam’s nonbinary middle child, Frankie (Hannah Riley), takes advantage of their mother’s woozy state to confess that they recently lost their virginity. Learning this, Sam instantly springs into mama-bear mode (“Are you O.K.? Can I take you to see the nurse practitioner?”) and then, succumbing to the munchies, admits that she is craving “peppermint Christmas” ice cream. So Frankie and Sam trundle to their kitchen and, while Sam sits at the counter wrapped in a yoga blanket, Frankie plops a big glop of vanilla ice cream into a large glass bowl. They wrap a handful of dinner mints in a napkin and smash them into shards with a meat tenderizer. They add the candy pieces to the bowl, plus agave and cocoa powder, and, with a wooden spoon, fold the toppings into the ice cream, Cold Stone Creamery-style. Then the two head out onto the patio and dig into the bowl as the sun comes up.
The scene is notable for its nearly wordless choreography, and for the tenderness with which it depicts a spontaneous late-night bonding activity between mother and child. It’s also, by my lights, one of the great onscreen food scenes in recent memory. As the camera lingers on the mint bits falling into the bowl or the syrup glugging out of the jar, Sam’s eyes linger on her child. She seems equally awed that Frankie knows how to take care of her and mournful that Frankie is growing up and needs her less.
Sam, like Adlon, is husky voiced and foulmouthed, with a penchant for wearing weathered Chelsea boots and a swipe of kohl around her eyes. She talks to her children like they are her peers, and the shaggy narrative of “Better Things” moves according to the rhythms of real life. Some of the show’s best scenes involve Sam waking up and sitting quietly in bed, or fixing a broken toilet, or watering plants. Many feature her cooking a meal from start to finish. Sam makes morning smoothies with bananas and honey and vodka spritzers with a bounty of fresh lemons and limes. She chops tomatoes to make Frankie’s favorite chili, labors over risotto for a stressful dinner party, and makes a wobbly Yorkshire pudding as a treat for her judgmental British mother. Cooking on the show is both a daily chore and a casual pleasure, just as “Better Things” is a show about the bittersweet banalities of single motherhood.
The kitchen on the “Better Things” set doesn’t have a working oven, but it does have a functional stove and sink. “The water has to be potable,” Adlon told me recently, via Zoom. “The stove has to be able to ignite. You have to see steam and smoke coming out of the food.” In one scene from the fifth and final season, which premièred in late February, Sam makes a platter of sloppy joes, planning to watch a show with her children over a TV dinner. During filming, Adlon sliced open her finger while peeling garlic, and decided to write the injury into the scene. “I was, like, ‘f*cking roll on this, roll on this, right now!’ ” she said. In the finished sequence, she washes out the cut and slaps on a couple of Band-Aids, then resumes her symphonic multitasking: sizzling beef, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder, organizing her old baseball-card collection at the dining-room table, piping out sticky profiterole pastry (yes, she also makes profiteroles), and navigating the two scruffy rescue dogs that circle her feet. The vibe is harried but not bothered, until it comes time for dinner and none of her kids show. What better metaphor for motherhood than bleeding over a plate of uneaten sloppy joes?
Adlon learned how to cook in part from her mother, a British Anglican who married an American Jew and raised a family between New York and Los Angeles. “We were the only ones who ever had salad with every meal,” Adlon told me. “And I would be, like, why salad? Can you ever make me a Rice Krispie treat like the other moms of the seventies? But my mother was liver and onions, fish, all of that stuff from the palate of a sixties housewife.” Adlon started cooking as a teen-ager, making sheet-pan cookies, grilled Cheshire cheese sandwiches, and coddled eggs. She recalled that the last meal she cooked for her father, a TV writer who died in 1994, was a giant pot roast. “He was really tickled by that,” she said, adding, “I don’t like to just eat for fuel. I remember the best meals of my life.” During the writing phase of “Better Things,” Adlon would make sure to be home on time to cook dinner for her kids. “I would leave every day at three or four,” she said. “And I would go to the store. I kept that up, because when I’m in production I’m a ghost.” By now, though, her daughters are in their teens and twenties, and she’s not the only cook in the family. She said, “I come home to bruschetta, and I’m, like, how the f*ck did you do this?”
In the first episode of the new season, Sam and her brother visit a genealogist to learn about their family history. (Among other things, they discover that their biological grandfather was actually the milkman who serviced their mother’s home.) In one of my favorite scenes, from the fifth episode, Sam makes a Ukrainian borscht as the centerpiece of a meal she’s planned as a nod to the family’s Eastern European heritage. To a soundtrack of rowdy klezmer music, we see her browning meat, shaving beets, chopping carrots and potatoes, losing a rogue garlic clove and bending down to scoop it up off the kitchen floor. At dinnertime, she lugs the hot pot across the street to her mother’s house, but once again her efforts go unappreciated. Her mother brings out a plate of chicken wings and, when Sam protests, says, “Don’t be so sensitive, darling. Chicken goes well with bowls of roughage.” The mood goes downhill from there, and Sam ultimately takes her bowl of borscht and storms back to her own front stoop to eat alone. But her youngest daughter, Duke, speaks up in her defense. “Gran, sorry to say this, but the only reason any of us came today is because mom forced us,” she says.
Adlon began her career as a child actor, playing roles in “Grease 2,” “Night Court,” and “The Facts of Life.” “I used to always eat when we would have scenes that were meals, because it would drive me crazy when cold, loveless food would sit on a plate,” she said. “I just felt like that was a missed opportunity.” On the set of “Better Things,” most onscreen cooking scenes end with an actual dish that can be distributed to the cast and crew. The borscht scene was filmed months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the show’s dedicated food stylist, Eleanor Nieuwenhuis, recalled that the dish still elicited strong emotions. One of the camera operators, a young Russian woman, said that the soup reminded her of her grandmother, who had recently died. To Nieuwenhuis’s horror, though, neither the camera operator nor the rest of the staff got to taste the borscht: Nieuwenhuis mistook the pot of soup for a “prop” batch that had been sitting out for hours and threw it all away. “I’ll never forget that soup, because it was the best we’ve ever made, and also because of that heart-wrenching mistake,” she said.
“Better Things” Borscht
By Pamela Adlon and Eleanor Nieuwenhuis.
Ingredients
- 3-4 beef shanks, cubed (optional)
- ½ stick whole-fat butter
- 4 cups beets, peeled and cubed, plus 1 beet, grated
- 2 yellow onions, diced
- 1 head of celery, diced
- 1 medium head of green cabbage, chopped into bite-size pieces
- 2 carrots, sliced into ¼-in. coins
- 1 grated carrot
- 8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
- 1 can diced tomatoes
- 1 Tbsp. tomato paste (optional)
- ¼ cup red vinegar
- ¼ cup red table wine
- 6 qt. beef (or vegetable) stock
- 4 branches fresh oregano
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 Tbsp. dill seeds
- 5 small white potatoes, quartered (optional)
- Maldon salt, to taste
- Coarse black pepper, to taste
- Fresh dill, chopped (optional, to serve)
- Sour cream (optional, to serve)
Directions
1. In a large soup pot, brown beef shanks in butter. Get them very golden brown all over.
2. Remove shanks. Take most of the liquid fat out of the pan, leaving just a little.
3. Add beets, onion, celery, cabbage, carrots, garlic, canned diced tomatoes, and tomato paste (if using) to the pot.
4. Sauté the vegetables until they begin to brown.
5. Add beef shanks back to the pot. Gingerly give everything a stir, but don’t stir it too hard—you want the shanks to keep their shape while they’re simmering.
6. Add red vinegar and red wine and stir them in until a little evaporation happens to the liquid.
7. Pour in beef or vegetable stock, and add oregano, bay leaves, and dill seeds.
8. Bring the mixture to a boil. Once it starts to boil, turn it down to a simmer.
9. Let it simmer for 2-3 hours. If using potatoes, add them halfway through the simmering process.
10. When it’s done, test your meat—it should be fork-tender and fall right off the shank bone.
11. Season soup at the end with Maldon salt and coarse black pepper to taste.
12. To serve, dress with fresh dill and a dollop of sour cream.
An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of the actress portraying Frankie.
