Transcript | Ep. 132: How to Write Cookbooks

Julia: I am just so happy to be a home cook who writes for other home cooks. Because I just know how much goes into putting a meal on a kitchen table. Like when I think about it, I'm like, this is like this is a big deal.

[theme music]

Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Caroline.

Cristen: I’m Cristen. We are talking about cookbooks today, and I realized I didn't know how many I own. So. Would you like to guess how many I counted up?

Caroline: Oh, uh … six?

Cristen: Two.

Caroline: Oh!

Cristen: I only have two cookbooks - one of which is The Joy of Cooking. The other of which is Instant Pot Miracles. Like, do not tell my mother this, like… I grew up with cookbooks, I’m not afraid of them, and yet somehow I am overly reliant on Instant Pot Miracles, I’m just gonna say it. But, Caroline, I know that you are a book lover. But what about cookbooks? How cookbook literate are you?

Caroline: OK, well I have one. Yeah, it’s actually by today’s guest. Yeah, we’re talking today to cookbook author Julia Turshen. And I own her most recent cookbook called Simply Julia, and it came out earlier this year - it’s fantastic. Julia really appreciates — and I can appreciate this — what an accomplishment it is just to feed ourselves at the end of the day.

Caroline: Plus, her cookbooks weave together those kind of simple, accessible recipes with a big dose of realness — stories about cooking for her wife; revelations about body image; she has one entire book centered around food as fuel for activism. Like, she is kinda the Unladylike epitome of a cookbook author

Julia: Sometimes I think of my cookbooks as getting to be these places where I get to be sort of like a Trojan horse, like to talk about things not only like my queer identity, but to talk about many other things in something that feels like a welcome mat, you know, that is so friendly, and so that feels great.

Cristen: That Trojan horse gallops all over the gendered assumptions that cookbooks have historically taken for granted: specifically, that women do the home cooking and men do the eating.

Caroline: So this episode, we’re mixing it up with Julia to find out how she got into home cooking, recipe writing and why cookbooks are about way more than food.

[stinger]

Julia: You know, I think that my earliest memories are memories about food and about cookbooks. And that was very much because both of my parents worked in publishing, they worked in the magazine business, and they also both worked in freelance book design, and they designed quite a few cookbooks.

Cristen: Growing up in New York with book designer parents, it's not surprising that young Julia had pretty elevated taste in cookbooks

Julia: So the ones that I loved the most as a kid - I still have the copies from when I was growing up - are a bunch of books by an author named Lee Bailey. who is no longer alive. And I think if you were kind of like an adult in, like the creative New York scene in like the 80s, you probably know who Lee Bailey was.

Caroline: Julia describes Lee Bailey as "the original food and lifestyle guru.” Lee Bailey was like a 1980s Ina Garten of Manhattan's media scene who taught Nora Ephron how to properly throw a dinner party.

Julia: I feel like he was like an influencer before that was a term. And he was the first person to do cookbooks that were kind of lifestyle cookbooks, by which I mean there was a context for the food, the images were photographed in the place where he was describing the meal, where it was going to happen. He was this sort of like influential gay man in the 80s. And I was a young child in the 80s who loved this man's books. For me, what I loved about flipping through Lee Bailey's books and books like his, what I continue to love about books like his, is that you're looking at a storybook. You know, you're looking at like a magazine feature. You're looking at this idea of something, and you're getting to see it.

Cristen: Julia wasn’t just flipping through Lee Bailey’s recipes in the kitchen. As soon as she could read, those cookbooks became her bedtime stories.

Julia: You know I feel like as a kid who loved cooking and specifically loved cookbooks and just like inhaled them, I feel like I got to go to so many places without ever leaving my bedroom, which was you know wonderful. And I think a lot of kids find that through novels and fiction and fantasy stuff and movies and that kind of thing. And I found it through cookbooks.

Caroline: What did you find in them that kept you coming back to them like they were like fantasy novels or movies?

Julia: For me it was the fantasy of my adult life. It was this idea of who I could become when I grew up. And I wanted to be someone who threw dinner parties and attended them. Like that was my goal. I wanted good friends that I could cook for. And I wanted those friends to also invite me over to make a meal for me, like when I was like in middle school and high school, I had this cardboard box in my closet in my bedroom. On the outside, like in Sharpie, I wrote “for my apartment.” And I would like put things in this box that I thought I would need when I was an adult with her own apartment. I cannot really remember what I put into this box. I just remember having it. And I feel like I spent a lot of my childhood preparing to be an adult, which I guess that's for me and my therapist to talk about. But it's for me, cookbooks were a big part of this fantasy. And it, you know, looking through them made me feel like there was there is a life for me out there that I could almost touch. And I think that is something about cookbooks, too. It makes things feel very tangible.

Caroline: Julia’s love of cookbooks inspired her to teach herself how to cook. Her process involved a lot of repetition, weekend after weekend.

Julia: Like I went through this big hash brown phase where I would like one Saturday morning I would you know grate raw potatoes and make hash browns with those. And then sometimes Friday after school, I would bake potatoes and then let them cool down and the next morning, make hash browns with the leftover baked potatoes, like I tried them all of these different ways. So that started early on without me really having, like, the vocabulary to really even understand what I was doing. I just enjoyed it. You know, I felt like I was experimenting.

Cristen: Julia’s experimentation in the kitchen eventually evolved past potatoes and into a profession. She first got a gig as an assistant on a PBS food show, and then as cookbook co-author. She worked with celebs like Gwyneth Paltrow and famous food-world figures like Mario Batali... back before his serial sexual misconduct came to light.

Caroline: Julia’s also now reached that fantasy status she dreamed about as a kid: cooking for friends and hosting dinner parties. She especially loves cooking for her wife, Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney — whose book In the Company of Women is currently on my coffee table, btw.

Julia: My life, my marriage is like, incredibly normal and in many ways, quite boring, like Grace and I go to bed at like 9 o'clock, we watch Bravo, we eat our toast. Like there's nothing extraordinary happening here. But to me, it's extraordinary because I'm getting to live this very wonderful life with the person I love. And that feels extraordinary and fantastic and worth sharing.

Cristen: As she’s settled into herself and her life, Julia’s perspective on her cookbook hero Lee Bailey has grown up, too.

Julia: I look at his books now and, you know, I am a very openly, proudly gay woman. And I know that me being so out in my work, writing a lot about my wife and, you know, our our home and our life together because that comes into my work so much. You know, I write about what I cook at home, you know, is in some ways very much indebted to people like Lee Bailey who were gay authors at a time when it may not have been you know as you know comfortable or safe to be so out in their work. And I also feel frustrated that I didn't hear more about that in his work. You know, I crave that. I wish that had been more of a part of it, because I can only imagine how much it would have meant to me as a young person to read that and see that, and I wish I had gotten to like kind of see more of, like, the queer community in his books in a way that was like spelled out and not just in between the lines.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, we’ll dive into the history of cookbooks - and how Julia’s contributions are part of an unsung tradition of queer cookbookery.

Caroline: Stick around, y’all!

Cristen: And yes, “cookbookery is a word” - I’m pretty sure it’s a word. Is it a word?

Caroline: We’re makin’ it a word!

[stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with cookbook author Julia Turshen.

Caroline: Before she was a full-time cookbook author, Julia worked as a private chef, cooking for birthday parties or weddings. Each time, she’d try out different recipes or put spins on old ones and make a note of what she’d cooked. Those notes became the recipes in her first cookbook Small Victories: Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs, published in 2016.

Julia: I will say recipe development in general is a really interesting thing. You know, you can copyright a cookbook, but you cannot copyright a recipe. And that is because I really believe there's only like a handful of actual recipes in the world, like I write recipes for things like, I don't know, chocolate cake and Caesar salad and roast chicken and coffeecake and stuff like this. You know I didn't come up with any of these dishes. Like what I have ownership of is not the dish, but, you know, the way I am sharing it with you, like the way I am offering instruction and the story I'm attaching to it. And what to me is so cool about cookbooks. It's that sense of ownership is shared with the reader, because the whole point is for you to make it, you know, like it's it's about the author, sure. But it's also just as much, if not more, about the reader and about you taking this thing and making it yours.

Caroline: That's far cry from what cookbooks started out as, centuries ago. The Western cookbook tradition began as a way of showing off rather than sharing. And hey, that was before a whole bunch of gender nonsense got baked in!

Cristen: Sounds like a recipe for some claptrap, Caroline! For listeners unfamiliar, the claptrap is our unladylike nickname for finding out why things are the way they are. So strap on your aprons, and let's dig in

[MUX - Claptrap]

Cristen: Now, the earliest European cookbooks were status symbols, meant to showcase what chefs were serving in royal palaces — like, “oh! look at all the pheasant we can prepare!” And even the first non-royal cookbooks were still intended for aristocrats.

Caroline: Given this culinary classism, it's kind of ironic that cookbook authoring was seen as second-rate writing. In 1871, one critic warned popular author Marion Harland that she was ruining her reputation by publishing a cookbook. This guy said that anything Marion wrote “after this preposterous new departure would be tainted … with the odor of the kitchen.”

Cristen: That guy just sounds like he needs to clean his kitchen, honestly. Now, Marion’s reputation weathered the cookbook controversy just fine. She was one of a growing number of women getting into lifestyle and cooking guides in the 19th century. But still, a lot of the women authoring these books — and making money doing it — were walking a fine line. They worked hard to present themselves as domestic mavens, not professional chefs.

Caroline: Instead, you had some women cookbook authors adopting fictional spinster personas — like, someone non-threatening who of course had nothing better to do than share her domestic knowledge!

Cristen: But spinsterhood wasn’t the only thing some of these cookbook authors were faking. White women liberally compiled the recipes that Black cooks and domestic workers came up with and published them as their own. And in some cases, they went for full-blown culinary blackface. In 1937, for instance, a white lady named Blanche Elbert Moncure published a collection of recipes from her domestic cook Emma Jane, annnnd Blanche wrote it in Emma Jane’s “voice”

Caroline: Oh god.

Cristen: Yeah it was bad. So bad that I’m not even gonna quote it, it was just horribly racist.

Caroline: Well, the big reason that most of these white ladies were even able to break into cookbookery in the first place was the assumption that women were writing explicitly for other women. Like Marion Harland, for instance, addressed her readers as “sisters.” And the subtext can be boiled down to gendered tropes: A woman’s place is in the kitchen. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

Cristen: And you really see the strength of those expectations in the way they were used against a lot of women. So you’ve got opponents of women’s voting rights constantly ragging on suffragists as terrible cooks who would just like, abandon the kitchen altogether if they got their way.

Caroline: Meanwhile, a lack of interest in cooking was considered something only lesbians had in common. This is not a bit, y’all! One 1907 paper we found described the average lesbian as knowing “little about cookery and does not like to make use of what little she does know.”

Cristen: Rude. But women have also used cookbooks to subvert the stereotypes and claim their own space in the kitchen. For example, many suffrage organizations published their own cookbooks to fundraise and bust the myth that politics and home cooking don't mix. And decades later, second-wave feminist organizations did the same.

Caroline: Through cookbooks, queer women also brought an even more radical idea to the table. That cooking could be an act of love between women. That feeding your family doesn't necessarily involve husbands and 2.5 children.

Cristen: A groundbreaking example of this is The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, published in 1954. One of the first literary cookbooks of its kind, it weaves recipes together with memoir about Alice’s love of her life, poet Gertrude Stein. Funnily enough, though, it wasn't the same-sex relationship that made the cookbook so famous. It was Alice' recipe inside for hashish fudge, aka pot brownies.

Caroline: Nice, Alice. All right. Well, in the early 1980s, openly queer women really began making their mark in cookbooks. The first were written explicitly for other queer women. And they had to contend to with the stale old stereotype that “lesbian home cook” was an oxymoron. Hence... the title of one often-cited 1983 cookbook, Whoever Said Dykes Can't Cook?

Cristen: It’s just like Julia said: Cookbooks are total Trojan Horses for ideas about relationships, gender, class, politics. Julia published a cookbook right after the 2016 election, for instance, called Feed the Resistance. It features a diverse array of chefs and centers around the idea of bringing activists together over food.

Caroline: And Julia doesn’t just talk the talk here, like. She’s also an activist in the kitchen. She co-founded a searchable database called Equity at the Table. It highlights the work of marginalized folks in the food industry, with a focus on LGBTQ people and people of color. It’s also a directory that encourages those in positions of power to look beyond their normal go-tos when they’re hiring.

Cristen: And with that: we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Julia goes from political to personal in the pages of her latest cookbook.

Caroline: Stick around

[stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with cookbook author Julia Turshen. Her newest cookbook, Simply Julia, was released this past spring, and Caroline, as your one and only cookbook, I gotta know: have you been making some recipes?

Caroline: Yeah, actually the day that I got my hands on her cookbook, I cooked the first recipe, which is green pasta. It was delicious, it was super quick and simple. And honestly the thing I love most about it is that she has this accompanying essay, where she explains what inspired the recipe to begin with. I just love the way that she ties in her personal relationships with these recipes.

Julia: So I'm like a big storyteller. I write - in my latest book, Simply Julia, I added these - these short essays to the book, which is something I've never done in any of my cookbooks before. And I got to weave in just a lot of things that are really important to me. I got to talk about things like body image and anxiety and things that have a lot to do with food for me that weren't attached to a recipe but felt really important to share.

Cristen: One of those essays is called On the Worthiness of Our Bodies. Here’s Julia, with an edited excerpt.

Julia: “For so long, whenever I felt fat, or what I deemed fat, it was almost always a way to describe anything other than happy. Not only had I equated “fat” with “anything other than happy,” I had set up a tidy, miserable binary for all of my feelings to fit into. How did I get to this restricted emotional place?... I unflinchingly accepted the idea that thin is ideal, and I put myself in close proximity with people who didn’t challenge any of this. Each time I willingly step outside of the framework I grew so accustomed to, I encounter things like pain, anger, sadness, embarrassment, and fear. All of those things that fall under “anything other than happy.” But I’m also encountering more love, joy, confidence, and satisfaction than I ever knew was possible. It should not feel revolutionary to say, especially in a cookbook that’s about healthy cooking, that fat does not equal bad or unlovable. But it’s worth saying. There is nothing wrong with being fat. The only thing wrong is thinking that any person, living in any type of body, is less valuable.”

Caroline: Publishing a deeply personal examination of her relationship to her own body, in a cookbook covered with pictures of her face and handwriting, took getting vulnerable.

Caroline: There's that Trojan horsing again. Julia isn't just getting personal. She's reframing what it means to feed ourselves

Julia: I am so proud and so happy to have written a healthy cookbook that has nothing to do with weight loss and has everything to do with just having a healthy relationship to cooking and eating. And it felt really worthwhile for me to share some of those thoughts in this book, in this book that's about healthy comfort food. You know, I wanted to talk about like what what do those words mean to me? What is healthy comfort mean? I'm really curious to know how people define these things and their relationship to not only cooking, but also to eating and how that translates to how we feel about ourselves, our bodies and each other.

Cristen: And that’s part of why Julia really chafes at the pervasive attitude that cookbooks are just collections of recipes and nothing more.

Julia: I think in general, I do feel like cookbooks are not always considered in the same way a lot of other books are considered, especially from the idea of, like the quality of writing that’s in cookbooks, like I often feel like cookbook authors don't get considered as writers very often. I've had people say to me, you know, like, well one day you'll write a real book and part of me feels like like, I think when people say something like that, they think they're saying something nice, like I believe in you as a writer or something. I don't know, maybe that's just me being overly generous or something. But I think, like, on a bigger scale, like not personally, I think just even the way that cookbooks get placed in in stores, the way cookbooks get nominated or rather not nominated for certain kinds of awards and recognition- I feel like it doesn't give credit to, you know, this branch of publishing that actually is very popular. I think it’s worth recognizing them as such and I think it's also really important to recognize them for their literary worth and for the hard work they do to preserve culture and to create so much representation.

Caroline: Cookbooks are like time capsules. Their ingredients, instructions, themes — they all say something about the communities and cultures they're meant to feed.

Cristen: One of Julia’s favorite cookbooks-slash-culinary-time-capsules is a 1976 cookbook called The Taste of Country Cooking.

Julia: It was written by Edna Lewis, who was just a really important person in the history of food and just the history of writing and the history of Black women in this country. And I love this book so much, and I return to it over and over because of the quality of the writing and the clarity of her voice. It is a book that could not have been written by anyone else. And when I read it and I read the description of the food and the recipes, I just, you know, I can picture it.

Cristen: The Taste of Country Cooking was farm-to-table before farm-to-table was a thing. What was even more groundbreaking was how it broke through racist culinary traditions. Like we mentioned earlier, Black women’s recipes were often co-opted by white cookbook authors AND cuisines associated with Black and brown cultures were deemed unpalatable to white American tastebuds.

Caroline: I mean, these are patterns we still see. 2020’s cookbook bestseller list featured just three titles by women of color. One was the mega-hit Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat, and two were from HGTV star Joanna Gaines.

Julia: The priority of cookbooks that are published, tends to be cookbook authors who look a lot like the people who are making the decisions, you know, so cookbook editors and publishers and agents, you know, the gatekeepers. I think that's a problem for reasons I probably don't have to explain, but I think mostly because, like, it's boring, you know, like I think that's like let's just start there, like, it's much more interesting to read books written by people who have all different experiences. And, you know, a book becomes a bestseller, not by accident. Like that happens because a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of people are invested in making it successful in that definition of success. You know, it gets promoted, it gets shared. I got to tell you a bit about what it means to me to write a healthy cookbook that's not about weight loss. And in doing so, I hope that that helps in any small way to pave the road a tiny bit more, if it can, for books written by nonwhite authors that are about healthy food and what it means to them and people who live in bodies that don't look like mine, who live in much larger bodies, who live in bodies with different levels of ability. You know, I think that's a huge, huge like gaping hole in food media is talking about disability. It's something that I really wish people put more resources into because, not only does everyone eat and a lot of people cook, there's a lot of people who cook, who live with all different types of disabilities. And I think it would be really, really obvious for a lot of people to invest more in that, I think. And it would be really valuable for all of us.

Cristen: Well, what do you wish more people understood about home cooking and/or cookbooks in general?

Julia: I think, that they both just require a lot more kind of like relentless work than might be obvious when you look at them. I think a meal cooked at home or a cookbook. These are both things that seem familiar, regular, like day to day. And I think, like, a lot of really like simple things in life, a lot of work goes into that. I would say more for home cooks than for cookbook authors, because I think just by the fact that anyone who gets to call themselves a cookbook author, our work has been valued in some way, some of us more than others. And, you know, that's an issue. But we have been, you know, acknowledged for our work in some capacity. So what I'm about to say really applies more to home cooks, which is just I think their contributions are often so unacknowledged and taken for granted. And I hope that everyone who gets to enjoy a meal made by someone else in their home appreciates it. I think it's just good to know what a gift that is.

Cristen: You can follow Julia Turshen on Instagram @turshen. And make sure you check out her beautiful, delicious cookbook, Simply Julia.

Caroline: You can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Cristen and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get our undying love and gratitude plus ad-free bonus episodes, like the one we just recorded on CGI influencers on social media, at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Cristen: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Caroline: This podcast was created by your hosts, Caroline Ervin

Cristen: And Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.

Caroline: Next week...

Amanda Montell: The word cult now can apply to a group as destructive as qAnon to a group that's kind of more old school like the Mansons to a frickin makeup brand. So this wide panoply of meanings really says something about how cultish our culture has become, especially because these sites of real spirituality and community and meaning for us are often secular. You know we’re moving away from the churches that we grew up in and we're looking toward the startups that we work at and the fitness studios where we exercise for this type of religious fulfillment. And cultishness is something that shows up in groups we might not think of as cults, and none of us are immune to it.

Caroline: We’re talking to author and linguist Amanda Montell about her new book and how everything from MLMs to Soul Cycle uses cultish language.

Cristen: You don’t want to miss this episode! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get Unladylike.