…Hi! I have a few more readers than I thought I’d have. But that is quite nice.
When people asked me what my book of the year was last year, they probably weren’t expecting Cook As You Are, an illustrated, chill cookbook about being yourself, but sometimes when I talk about Cook As You Are I feel a bit teary-eyed about it! When I met the editor, who isn’t a cookbook editor in general, I think I was a bit weird about it to be honest. I just love this book a lot because I think it makes life practically better while not being an asshole, and cookbooks don’t actually do that as often as I’d like.
You probably know Ruby Tandoh, who started her public life on Bake-Off. She is the author of the iconic coming-out tweet “p.s. for those who thought I fancied Paul Hollywood or that I’d ever bang him to get ahead – JOKE’S ON YOU, YOU MASSIVE S****ING MISOGYNISTS” and she went to to have a serious and brilliant career in food writing. She has written lots of great books, do buy all of them. Cook As You Are is her most recent one, published by Profile, available literally everywhere.
Cookbooks are usually about trying to make a cookbook buyer feel less than good, I sometimes worry. If you buy this book, you can be this sort of person, they say, and this person is a little bit better than you and maybe you’ll improve a bit, we think you might, give it a go. Maybe you can be a young professional woman with lots of friends and a nice fringe in an oatmeal apron, maybe you can live in a house in France with baskets of broad beans on the floor of your tiled kitchen, maybe you can master the art of the Laksa in your own home or throw together a lunch in an orchard or be a capable housewife in the literally 20 seconds between your job, your children coming home from school and everyone bursting into tears. I obviously am all of the above in my mind at regular intervals and I love and buy all of these books so, no shade. But life, man. Life is hard sometimes, and sometimes cooking is just about feeding yourself and other people, like, the best you can.
Cook As You are knows this. Ruby gets it. These are recipes for how you’re doing. What you can manage. The pictures are not there to make you feel morose about yourself. They are inclusive - different shapes of family, different kinds of people. People alone, people caring for other people. And the recipes are not hard, they are not expensive. What they are, are fucking delicious. The beetroot chilli. The cod in lentils. I cook them alone, and for other people, and everyone loves them.
Also, cookery writing is all stealing all the time and at the end of each chapter of Cook As You Are there is a list of other cookbooks. Not just books the recipes borrow from but books Ruby thinks are relevant and good for the situation. How baller, to come right out and properly tip your hat to your peers within the text. Ruby, I tip my hat to you! Cook As You Are really was my book of 2021. It is a kind, thoughtful, generous and quality piece of work and honestly, for me it changed the game, which is something people do say, I suppose!
(To be quite honest with you, I started this letter and wrote about 10 lines about the impending reversal of Roe vs Wade and my own reproductive history and necessary abortion and thought I might be able to shoehorn together a “when life absolutely mullers your human rights and traps women in a cycle of poverty and subjugation, then buy this cookbook” sort of bloggy vibe but you know what, I think not. Jane’s Due Process is a Texas organisation that helps teens gain access to safe, legal abortion and birth control and I know they are good. You can donate here:)
https://janesdueprocess.org/donate/
Lots of love! Dxxx