For Julia Turshen, the Goal Isn't to Follow Her Recipes Exactly. It's to Feel Free.
Written by Stacey Lindsay
“I think cookbooks are a place where we can have these kinds of conversations.”
It wasn’t until I picked up Julia Turshen’s Small Victories in late 2016 that I realized how cathartic it could be to spend an afternoon with a cookbook. There is no proselytizing in Julia’s words. No shoulds or musts in her recipes. Julia is just plain real on her pages. She shows us that cooking can be the ultimate metaphor. It’s about knowing some basics and then letting it rip—the “it” being yourself and all the potential for learning, opening, and creating that can happen in the kitchen.
Small Victories is Julia’s first cookbook—and she’s followed it since with four more. When it comes to food, she knows her stuff: She’d co-authored numerous cookbooks before her first and worked in the private and public kitchens of giant names. But I’m especially drawn to her radically inclusive, honest approach to living that comes through in her writing. Life is hard; society, brutal. Amidst all of it, Julia’s words are an invitation to be kinder and gentler to ourselves. I’ve felt this mostly in her essays weaved throughout her cookbooks, one of which is “On the Worthiness of Our Bodies,” a piece she included in her last book, Simply Julia, in which she tells of her journey freeing herself from diet culture induced shame around her body. “I hid my scale in a closet,” she writes, “and then one day when I finally felt ready, I threw it away.”
Now Julia is out with a new book, What Goes With What, in which she again beautifully weaves in cooking wisdom, nourishing recipes, and a warmth and insight only she can imbue. In our conversation, which we had on an intense day when the news was extra heavy (as it is these days), we covered a lot in little time: finding pockets of security, creativity in cooking, and how finding safety and assuredness in our kitchens can be a metaphor for doing the same in our lives.
Chatting with Julia Turshen
I'd love to start by asking you about the introduction to your new book. I pulled this line, "It's setting an intention, making a gesture to myself that my tools are ready and my kitchen is safe." That word safe is how I've always felt in the company of your books. In this context, what does safe mean to you?
I'm very touched to hear that that's the feeling you get when you're with my work. That means a lot. That's really my ultimate goal. So, in this context of cooking at home, I think feeling safe means feeling relaxed. I think it means feeling confident. And I think it feels like you've got it. And I don't mean whether or not something works out perfectly. What I mean is that you feel like you can figure it out and pivot if needed. If you have someone over, and then they're running half an hour late, and you've already put the lasagna in the oven, you're okay.
That feeling of you've got it, and being more trusting and relaxed in the kitchen extends to other aspects of our lives. Do you feel there are metaphors here?
I hope so. I was just reading the news before we got on, and I just feel like the world feels increasingly… unstable. I don't even know the right word. So where we can find these pockets of security, it's really valuable. Having that experience in the kitchen I find extra valuable because when we're cooking, we're having this embodied experience. It's a physical thing to cook. The other thing about feeling safe that I'm just thinking about is that it's about feeling like you can take good care of yourself and other people. Wherever we can find that feeling, it's really valuable, especially if we can do it in a way where we can have a literal muscle memory of it. That carries over, and I think we can bring that into other parts of our lives.
All your cookbooks offer many foundations and formulas that feed the big picture of cooking and making a dish. I think of your "Five Things" lists in Simply Julia. Would you just talk to me about the approach to your new book and how it allows for flexibility and creativity?
I'm so glad to hear that came through. I feel like in all my work, I've always tried to send the message that I'm providing recipes as a kind of scaffolding. They're here for you if you want to follow them to the letter. But I've always encouraged people to riff on things, and I've offered substitutions and variations and many lists of ideas in all of my work. For this book, this was the first time I've offered charts. These charts are what I think make this book special and kind of sets it apart. You have to see them to fully get it, but the best way I can describe it is that each chart gives you the formula for a dish, and then it gives you examples to see how that formula can be used, and then all the recipes that follow are the examples from the chart. My hope is that you've got this collection of charts and recipes; there are 20 charts, each with five examples. So you have this collection of 100 recipes that are absolutely there for you. And I hope the experience of making them and seeing that formula and action encourages people to then riff on it and make their own versions of things; to make versions of the recipes that use ingredients they already have that can be flexible and adaptable. What happens when you're able to do that, when you're able to be an intuitive, resourceful cook, is that you have that feeling of safety and security and confidence.
You've written a handful of cookbooks now. Did you envision these charts being the book's anchor from the start?
The charts are actually why I decided to try doing another book. When Simply Julia came out, when we last spoke, I had such a great experience making that book. I had so many meaningful conversations after it came out, like the one we had, and I felt pretty done. It just felt like my well was kind of empty. Then, I started doing these charts in my Substack newsletter, which I started after Simply Julia came out to have an outlet for ideas. And when I started doing the charts, they got such a positive, enthusiastic response that I thought it would be cool to do a book of them. So, that's how they were born; the charts were central to the conception.
Speaking of Simply Julia, I'd love to go back to the essay you included, "On the Worthiness of Our Bodies." You include a powerful conversation with your mother in your new book that has stayed with me. It's also about our relationship to our bodies. I, of course, can't speak for all people who are socialized as women, but I can say for myself and my friends that this topic goes deep. Now that this is out in the world, how do you feel about it?
I feel so glad you brought it up because it's a part of the book that I'm just so happy it is there. I also love that conversations like these get to exist within a cookbook because I think cookbooks are a place where we can have these kinds of conversations. But how do I feel about the conversation being out there? I feel proud of my mom. That's my overwhelming feeling. I feel really grateful that she was open to having that conversation with me privately and very open to sharing it. And I think that takes a lot of courage to be that vulnerable. And I just feel really, really grateful for and proud of my mom.
That came through. It is powerful how she responds, "That is a provocative question" at one point. I thought of my own mother, who is from the same generation as your mom, and the various ways they and their generation have maybe conformed to society in ways and carried a lot. The personal acknowledgment of this is so beautiful and so powerful.
It is. I'll tell her that this came up today. She'll be so happy to hear that.
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Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author who also writes a weekly newsletter and teaches cooking classes. Julia hosts and produces the IACP-nominated podcast called ‘Keep Calm & Cook On’ and is the founder of Equity at the Table, an inclusive digital directory. Learn more and order her new book at juliaturshen.com.
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