Ruby Tandoh’s Latest Cookbook Is an Accessible and Stylish Ode to Real-Life Cooking

Ruby Tandohs Latest Cookbook Is an Accessible and Stylish Ode to RealLife Cooking
Photo: Courtesy of Ruby Tandoh

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If you’ve logged your requisite man-hours staring fixedly at Great British Bake-Off reruns, you’ll need no introduction to Ruby Tandoh, the British baker and writer who was runner-up on the show’s fourth season. Since her time on Bake-Off, Tandoh has made a career of challenging long-held preconceptions within the food industry, writing about everything from sugar to fictional cooking with energy and depth. 

Her fourth book, Cook as You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks, and Messy Kitchens, was recently published in the U.S., and it’s as incisive and warm as its predecessors. Vogue spoke to Tandoh about the importance of meeting home cooks where they are, how the pandemic shifted her cooking habits, and why she gravitates toward cookbooks that feature illustrations rather than photos. Read the full interview below.

Vogue: Everything in this book looks delicious, but what recipe is speaking to you most right now?

Ruby Tandoh: Oh, God, I’ll be honest, it’s hard when you’re the one who’s written the thing, because it all just doesn’t seem as shiny after you’ve done all the recipe-testing and everything. I’m aware, however, that I need to deliver a convincing answer, so I will say that one recipe I’ve cooked repeatedly—despite being disillusioned with work in general—is this gnocchi with chili crisp. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, and in a sense, I guess it is ridiculous, but it does not taste ridiculous; it tastes very, very good. That recipe still gets me excited and takes about five minutes to put together, so I can manage to pull it together even in a chaotic state.

How did it feel getting this book ready to go out, compared to other projects?

It was weird. I did the recipe-testing and everything during the first lockdown, and ordinarily, you’d kind of hope that with a cookbook, you’d be testing recipes on friends and getting second opinions and seeing how recipes fit into the rhythms of daily life. I didn’t have that perspective on this one because I was just kind of indoors all the time, basically just cooking for myself. So it’s a really different way of doing things. I found that process challenging but also quite freeing, because I could really focus on the format of the recipe, not just the kind of ethos or trying to impress people with cooking or anything like that. It was just: What is the recipe? What are the demands that life places on how we cook these recipes? Even things like going into a supermarket became an ordeal during lockdown, so I was kind of more attuned than usual to the various ways that cooking might become fraught or the various anxieties that might get heaped onto it. It was a really illuminating process, and difficult at times, but also very exciting. It felt really exciting to think hard about what a cookbook could do that might be different from what I’ve done before.

Do you feel like the pandemic changed your relationship to cooking?

Yeah, I think it did. I think in some respects, it made me more resourceful and less silly and frivolous and flighty; like, I’m very guilty of having some stuff in the fridge or in the cupboards and being like, Oh, I can’t see a meal here, I can’t be bothered to put in the work, so I’m going to go to the shop and get some more stuff to pad it out. In the middle of the pretty intense lockdown, though, you couldn’t just go into a shop willy-nilly; you had to be slightly more thoughtful about these things, slightly more creative. I think that’s what it brought out of me, just the desire to look at a half stocked-kitchen and see potential in it rather than just dead ends.

This book’s focus on accessibility for all cooks, including those living with illness and disability or struggling to prepare fresh-tasting meals on a budget, really struck me. Is that something you hope to see more of in the food world?

Well, it’s tricky, because I’m not the first person to be doing this by any stretch. I think there are loads of cookbooks that are written with specific disabilities, health issues—sometimes specific—or emotional needs, even, in mind, so you can find something for more or less anyone if you search hard enough. That said, I think there is a lack of that kind of range in mainstream cookbook publishing. A general cookbook that you might find in a supermarket or just in a normal bookshop often presumes a certain level of ability and a certain skill set, maybe a certain culinary knowledge and confidence. It presumes a lot, and I think sometimes that’s useful stylistically, and in terms of making the most of a cookbook’s aesthetics and its form and its ability to be like a literary document as well, because it means you can cut to the chase. It means you can make beautiful things and you can communicate that in a way that’s quite concise to a reader. But where it falls down is that, obviously, not everyone has the prior knowledge or the ability to do whatever it is, and so lots of people were left behind by that. So, I wanted to try and bridge that gap a little bit between the kind of “specialist” cookbooks and the general interest cookbooks, and to just do something that took those accessibility requirements seriously and didn’t assume that all cooks—or all kitchens, or all ways of making a meal—are the same.

Were there any beloved cookbooks you turned to in the process of writing this one?

In terms of inspiration, I would say probably the Moosewood cookbooks. They’re highly dated, I wouldn’t argue on that point, but I found the lack of photos highly interesting. I guess this connects to [Samin Nosrat’s] Salt Fat Acid Heat as well, because it also uses illustrations rather than photos. Sometimes it’s hard if I can’t see exactly what something is supposed to look like, but I think within that uncertainty, there’s also a lot of freedom. Because you don’t have this end goal that you’re striving towards, you actually have a little bit more freedom to enjoy the process of cooking, or to decide for yourself when something looks like it’s good enough. When you’re writing a cookbook and it’s getting published, there is the issue of getting photographed, which is obviously what usually happens; what will happen is that you’ll hire a set kitchen, which is ordinarily a kitchen in a beautiful house that gets hired out for photographers, and the case is that that beautiful space is not your real kitchen. Nine times out of 10, you will have nice props brought in, like beautiful crockery and cutlery and all of these things. It gives a really narrow vision of what the domestic space can look like, and what a kitchen should look like. And I find that that can kind of cut down on people’s ability to imagine themselves within the culinary world, whereas if you do illustrations like we did in this book, it kind of opens you up. Sinae Park, who did the illustrations, did so many different kitchens; there are big kitchens, small kitchens, kitchens with cat hair on the floor, kitchens with children’s drawings pinned up on the cabinets, and it just gives this plurality of worlds into which people can insert themselves. I think that’s kind of a nice thing.

What’s the best thing you’ve eaten recently?

Recently, at a Turkish restaurant in London called Kofteci Metin, I had semolina helva—or Irmik Helvasi—and it was unbelievably good. The attention to detail—orange peel very, very, finely julienned; pine nuts toasted exactly right–made me want to get in the kitchen and cook. It was a galvanizing, mobilizing kind of excitement, which I think is the power of really good cooking.