489: Julia Turshen Writes Charts, Not Recipes

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Because cookbooks are welcomed in people's homes. Like, I always have this, it's not a good joke, but this joke that, like, oh, a cookbook is a book, like, you know it's always going to end well. Like, nothing bad's going to happen. Like, it's this, like, safe, happy thing. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Julia Tershin is the author of four cookbooks, including the great new release, What Goes With What? 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities. It's a comprehensive guide to demystifying how to build cooking intuition and transform odds and ends into a meal. And we had a great conversation live at Rizzoli Bookstore all about making the book come to life. plus things like body acceptance and what constitutes queer food. We'll hope you enjoy listening.

1:33Hi, everyone. Welcome to Rizzoli Bookstore. Thank you all so much for being here to celebrate What Goes With What by bestselling cookbook author and James Beard Award winner, Julia Tershin.

1:49And she's joined tonight by Eliza Abarbanel, writer, co-founder of Cake Zine, and contributing editor at Taste. And we are recording this live for the Taste podcast as part of our ongoing event series, This Is Taste. So thanks so much to them, and thanks to Eliza. We're very lucky to have them here tonight. They'll be in conversation for about 40 minutes with some time at the end for audience questions. Please join me in welcoming Julia and Eliza.

2:17checking if the phone is silent yeah i just checked that's good to do it's the first thing we do when we start a podcast um my name is eliza barbanel i'm a contributing editor at taste and one of the hosts of the podcast this is taste which we are recording live tonight through these mics with the assistance of our lovely producer clayton the guy with the headphones so thank you to Clayton for making this possible and Rizzoli for having us here again for another great live conversation it's so fun to get to be here and to get to talk with Julia who is really one of my favorite cookbook authors I cook your food a lot it's so like cozy and warming and I think it'll be really fun to talk about everything today and I guess to start I just want to hear a little bit about what cooking is like in your life right now you live in upstate New York.

3:07How are the Leafs? Are they at peak leaf yet? Yeah, the Leaf Peepers have arrived. I am said Leaf Peeper. I'm going to come. We welcome them. Yeah, first I'll just say thanks to all of you for coming. This is so nice to be in such a beautiful bookstore, a place dedicated to this work that I love. Thanks for doing this. And yeah, I've got some friends and family here, so I really appreciate it. And to answer your question, what's cooking looking like? Yeah, what's cooking looking like? And I am actually invested in how the Leafs are doing. Yes, yes. Yeah, they are starting to fall. They're starting to change colors.

3:46They're not at like the deepest yellow, orange, red, but it's not like this. But yeah, it's all happening. And, you know, the thing I'll answer your question about cooking, but the thing that I love to do maybe as much as cooking is mowing the lawn. And what happens this time of year is I get to mow over the leaves because they just act as mulch, which is really cool. So I don't know how I ended up talking about this in the first five minutes. You're like saying this to a New York audience also. Like mowing, I don't know what that is. It's really, it's just great. If anyone wants to come on my riding lawnmower, just call me.

4:23Yeah, I have to ask, do you have the kind you can like sit on and oh yeah yeah yeah that's what makes it worthwhile yeah and I've got um headphones I listen to Beyonce and I drink Michelob Ultra while I do it uh so that's really my life and cooking I do when I'm not mowing so I cook um I cook pretty much every day but I cook very very simply and I think a lot of people when I tell people how frequently I cook or when someone talks to my spouse Grace and they're like oh you're married to a cookbook author must be like gourmet meals all the time and that's just not the case. We eat a lot of very simple food.

5:01Yeah, we do live in a place that's close by to a lot of farms and I pretend to work at one of them. I worked at a farm for a season. I still spend a lot of time there and I bring home vegetables from there. So that's kind of what I base all my cooking around is whatever vegetables I have to use up. But yeah, things are pretty simple. And when I say I cook every day, I'm not doing anything elaborate. It's a lot of air fryer moments. I love my air fryer if you want to talk about it. It's quickly sauteing or stir frying something. It's making like some spaghetti, like it's nothing fancy. Everyday food.

5:39Yes. I want to talk more about the fact that you got to work on this vegetable farm that you had a CSA at. I think that's a dream that a lot of people have maybe when especially people who get a CSA to work at that farm and you actually went and did it. I'm curious like if you view vegetables or cooking differently after having that experience um yeah seven months right yeah it was seven it was the full growing season it was like um April through Thanksgiving I after my last cookbook Simply Julia came out I had um my I guess version of a midlife crisis and I went and worked at the farm and I just wanted a change of pace I've been working on cookbooks forever and it was an extraordinary experience it was really hard it was like physically hard.

6:23But I would say, I don't know that I learned, I mean, I learned so much. I mean, just the vocabulary of farming, the physical labor of farming, the teamwork of it. But yeah, I don't know that I learned so much new about vegetables. I think what I learned is just firsthand how much labor goes into making the food that we all eat. And obviously, I like knew that. But to have that like embodied experience of doing that, I just, I don't know, like shelled fresh peas should cost like$300. Like it's so much work. I think I had a similar realization when I started baking bread at home for the first time.

7:00And even though it's not active time, the fact that it takes at least two days to make a loaf of bread, I was like, oh, there should be more money than I'm paying probably. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, yeah, an appreciation for the labor, the energy, seeing how hard my farmer friends work for very little money. Yeah. And seeing just the consideration that goes into what it is to, you know, turn the ground into food. I really could talk about soil all day, but I want to talk about your new book. What Goes With What, which is your fourth book. And I'm curious about how the idea for this book first kind of started germinating in your mind.

7:37Sure. Oh, I like how you use germinating.

7:43So this book, I would say, was born on Substack. It was born in my newsletter. So I started a newsletter, I don't know, a couple of years ago. And it was, yeah, after my last book came out, which I really felt like was my last cookbook. I felt like I did it, like I had said all the things I could think of. And I thought I would just be a farmer. and then I started my newsletter and I started doing these charts just as a way to explain whatever topic I was talking about so one of the first ones was for soups and I was writing this whole thing about soups and I just thought, yeah, I would offer the chart as a way to show how I think about cooking how I think about food and I got such a wonderful and enthusiastic response and it honestly surprised me because I thought, oh, doesn't everyone think like this?

8:36Like I didn't realize not everyone does. And I kept hearing the feedback that this was the seeing this chart. And I'll explain what it is, because this might be confusing if you don't know what I'm talking about. But seeing the chart for a lot of people help them understand cooking in a way it hadn't before. And that was really exciting for me. So the charts, there's 20 of them in the book, I still do them in my newsletter all the time they give you essentially like a formula for how to make something. So like soups, it's, you know, I think you kind of, you saute something, you add some liquid, maybe you throw something else in, you know, put some herbs on top and like you have a great soup.

9:15So presenting that formula then examples for it, I think it just hopefully makes cooking seem a lot less overwhelming. I think a lot of my fellow home cooks feel very overwhelmed and feel like, wait, there's so many soups, how am I ever going to learn to make them all or, you know, whatever it is. And I think when you realize they're all following basically the same formula, it just feels a lot more manageable. And I feel very invested in making home cooking feel manageable. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really kind of heartened to hear that they started in the newsletter because I subscribed to your newsletter and I started reading the charts and I thought it was just such a brilliant way to be teaching like a cook's intuition, which is, I think, hard for people to learn because there is a framework technique basically of how to make a pasta, how to make a stuffed vegetable, all of these things that you have charts for.

10:07And the charts are kind of an intermediary between saying like any liquid, any fill in. And these are five different kind of jumping off points that you have. And I'm curious, you know, there's 20 charts in the book and then five recipes that kind of correspond with each category did you decide to make the charts first and then make the recipes or was it kind of a flow between the two yeah that's a great question um the charts came first I really wanted it to be um like what is the best example of this kind of formula this infrastructure that I can give you as opposed to trying to make a formula out of something like trying to make that fit into it.

10:48So yeah, the charts were my priority, I guess. And yeah, it was really fun to just brainstorm all of this and to have the opportunity to think of more than one at a time. And then I started to think about the charts in terms of like, what do people turn to cookbooks for? What do people need help with? You know, also, since my last book, in addition to the newsletter, I started teaching these online cooking classes. And I just feel between those two things, I'm just in this like constant conversation with the people who, you know, feel pulled towards my work. And so I'm just asking them all the time, like, what are you looking for?

11:28What would make this easier? What's feeling overwhelming? What feels stressful? And I just try to do my best to listen. So a lot of the charts are in response to those kinds of things like feeling like, you know, I want to bake more, but I just like, do I need to buy a mixer? Like this all feels like so much. How many different types of flour do I need to have? These kinds of questions. And, you know, so there's a chart of, what did I call them? One bowl batters, which are just, you know, you make the batter in one bowl. You don't need a whole equipment thing. And, you know, that's how I like to bake.

12:00And so, yeah, so the charts came out of conversations like that. Yeah, you mentioned these cooking classes that you do over Zoom, which I believe you started in 2021 when your last book came out. And that was kind of the way that a lot of cookbook authors were interacting with people. But you are special in that you've kept them going ever since. And I'm curious how you've kind of adapted the art of the online cooking class. Like, do people get the recipe ahead of time? And what do you find rewarding about that kind of structure um yeah i love it has anyone here been to one of them my parents are here and they've been to all of them we have some hands thanks guys jordan's been to some so yeah so if you haven't been to them the way it works is i post it and then people sign up and immediately when they sign up they get um recipes for whatever we're making in class i write a grocery list that's organized by section of the grocery store which i love doing um any notes for like anything they need to do ahead of time, which is usually nothing.

13:00And yeah, then we get together. It's all on Zoom. And I joined from my home kitchen and other people joined from theirs. And I would say we have a lot of fun. I spend a lot of time laughing. My mom takes these incredible illustrated notes while I'm cooking that I like to share on Instagram. They're even like better in person. But what I think is so amazing about it is that instead of me doing like a demonstration, and someone is watching me do the thing, they're doing it along with me. And I am someone who learns by doing, like if you told me all the things that a farmer does, I can listen and imagine it.

13:42But if I go to the farm and actually do it, you know, that's a lived experience. It's an embodied experience. So I think that kind of thing happens in my classes because I hear from a lot of people who are like, oh, I wouldn't have made this if I didn't do it in the class. So I I love that kind of thing. And it makes me a much better teacher, too, because people are asking me questions in real time while they're doing it. And, you know, maybe I'm using a pan, I don't know, like a certain size cake pan or something. And then someone's like, well, I don't have that. I have this. Like, what do I do?

14:11And so we talk about it, like, in the moment. I also am, like, a human doing it. So I mess things up all the time. I drop things. I forget things. I forget ingredients. And those are just, like, honest, real moments. and I think it's useful to explain to everyone what is my thinking during this moment like how am I um answering this question and it's nice too because it also invites everyone else to offer their lived experience um you know because I am not the expert or authority on all of this and I mean Jordan you're not to put you on the spot but um my pal Jordan is here who also has a great substack?

14:52What is it's a slice of save me a slice. Yeah. Jordan's an incredible baker. And like, there's times when like, if I'm baking something in class, and someone has a question. I mean, Jordan's a professional baker, you're more equipped to answer that than I am. So I love to open it up. And, you know, if someone has celiac, and so they spend all their time figuring out the best way to make gluten free versions of things, you know, I can give you my best educated guest, but I would much rather have someone who has the day-to-day experience kind of chiming in. So it becomes this kind of hive mind thing that's really cool.

15:27And yeah, it's mostly just like a lot of fun. Yeah, it seems like a lot of fun. And I think it's also interesting because a lot of cookbook authors have more of like a one-way direction interaction with their audience. Like maybe people will DM you on Instagram. You can have that back and forth, but it doesn't, it's not the same as like sharing space, even if that's kind of metaphorical space. And I'm curious if you had any questions or interactions that you found kind of helped you think about what are home cooks looking for when you were working on this book specifically? I mean, I think a few things, but the first thing that's jumping to my head, and no one has directly asked me for this, but something I feel home cooks deserve.

16:11I don't know if they want this. I don't even know if they know they can want this. I just think they deserve more acknowledgement. And I think home cooking is this really important thing that so many of us do. And it's so much work. And it's often very unacknowledged work. And I am in this weird position of getting a lot of acknowledgement for my home cooking. You know, I write books about it. People come to a bookstore in Manhattan to listen to me talk about it. Like, this is weird. Most people are just making meals all the time and not getting the thanks and the recognition they deserve. So that's something I try to do a lot, whether, you know, through all different forms, whether it's sort of like in person, but removed in my classes, or, you know, in my writing or whatever it is.

17:01And, you know, know I just think that home cooking makes a really big difference in our day-to-day lives and it's it's an activity I've done my whole life my parents can confirm that um it's made a huge difference in my life and yeah and it is so much work because home cooks don't just make dinner like I feel like anyone who chose to be here is probably someone who enjoys cooking at home I'm assuming and like yeah you all do so much like you're grocery shopping you're planning you're budgeting you're remembering the like half a frozen chicken in the freezer you're keeping track of how many jars of I don't know tahini you have because you keep thinking you run out but you haven't so now what do you do with all those tahini and then you're keeping track of like oh this week this person in my house isn't eating this and even though they did last week and it's confusing there's a birthday coming up yeah we need a cake yeah and then you make the meal and then guess what then you have to clean up and you have to do it's so much work so I think there's a lot of power in just saying like look at you go like this is amazing what you're doing is amazing you're sustaining yourself your household whoever it might be your family um and it's and what you're doing is important and I just think it's important to say that I don't know if that answered your question but no I think it's my soapbox it's a great answer and like we're on a literal soapbox right now so perfect for it.

18:25And I think it kind of ties into another thing I really noticed when I was reading this book, which is the essays that you have in it. I think there are all kinds of cookbooks out there, but I found it kind of unusual and beautiful to read an essay from you about like the merits of Better Than Bouillon, which I agree is awesome. And then to also read an essay that's actually a conversation between you and your mom talking about body image, which actually was excerpted in Self Magazine this week, where your mom was an editor-in-chief of the publication in the 90s, which was, you know, unfortunately a big era for diet culture.

18:57And I just find it really honest. And I'm curious about what makes you want to include essays like that in a cookbook. Yeah. So Julie Will, who's my editor, who's unfortunately not here tonight, she wasn't feeling well, but Julie, Julie was my editor on Simply Julia as well. And And she was very, I just feel very supported by her. And she really encouraged me to include more writing in my cookbook. So I started doing more of that, like in Simply Julia, adding these essays and stuff. Yeah, which I've continued in What Goes With What. And I just think, I think cookbooks are just a cool thing. and I think that they're like a underrated vehicle for having conversations like the ones I just literally like the one with my mom like that we put in because cookbooks are welcomed in people's homes I think unlike any other form of media and I think that's very powerful like they're just seen as very friendly and welcoming like I always have this it's not a good joke but this joke that like oh you a cookbook is a book like you know it's always going to end well like nothing bad's gonna happen like it's this like safe happy thing which is powerful and I think it's good to take advantage of like the type of attention people give when they're in a cookbook for things that are yes about food but about all the things that come with food because food touches you know every single part of our lives and so that's some of my answer I guess and I guess the other is that I just feel that getting to create books and publish them is just a huge privilege and I think the best way I know how to honor that I think is to like just show up as my full self and I think there's a lot of representation that can be had in something like a cookbook and you know I grew up surrounded by print media I'm just going to keep shouting out my parents because they're here.

20:58But yeah, they both worked in magazines and in designing books. And they designed this book, which was really cool with the help of Steve, who's my unrelated brother. And so, you know, I was surrounded by all this stuff. And I definitely felt like I saw a path for myself in making things like cookbooks. But yeah, I never like was reading cookbooks as a young kid written by like an openly queer woman who was like, writing about like, what she cooks for her spouse and all this stuff. And to get to do that in, again, a form as casual and as welcoming as a cookbook, I just feel like it's important.

21:36And yeah, I feel really grateful to do it. Yeah, definitely. And I really liked the essay on queer food that you had in this book as well. I also am queer. And I think in food media, like that's a term that's talked about all of the time with not a lot of like good, I think, digging into what that means and the varieties of things that it can mean. And when I was reading this essay, you said that it was the queerest book you've ever written, not because you're talking about your amazing spouse, but because of the charts. And I love that. And I'm wondering if you could talk about why you think charts are queer.

22:06Yes. Yes. I'm so glad you asked. All right. So yeah, I just basically think that living life as a queer person is awesome. And I think that, and I can only speak from my own experience, but it means that I'm someone who has had opportunities in my life to pause and just be like, do I want to do this the way it seems like everyone else is doing this? Like, are there other options here? And that is how I go through life. And with the charts, and just stay with me, I just think they're so queer because it's like you can make this all these different ways like you can do it this way or that way or whatever like all the ways are great and I think just the idea of queering food of asking like oh is there more than one right way to do something um it's just something that makes me feel like a very relaxed home cook a very confident home cook I don't feel kind of stuck in following any norms.

23:14And, you know, I think it's a nice way to cook. I think it's a great way to live. I don't know. I'm all for it. Yeah, I think charts definitely use all pronouns. Can I ask you that question? Because you're a queer person in food media. What makes food queer? Yeah. Or what do you think when people talk about queer food? I have like a whole group chat where we talk about this. Can I get in on it? Yeah, yeah. I'll add you after this. Well, I really like what you say about how technique can have queer values. I think that hasn't something I've been thinking about. I think I've thought a lot about how it's the people who make it in the context that it's in.

23:50Like, actually, I wasn't going to say this, but one of your soup recipes from Simply Julia I made for my friend when they had top surgery earlier this year. And it was like a perfect thing because they didn't need utensils. And it was really like nourishing and cozy. And in that moment, that felt very queer to me because it was community care and it was a recipe made by a queer person, cooked by a queer person for a queer person. And I think restaurants can be queer. But I think that like I don't know if like there's a version of a bagel that's queer. Maybe it's rainbow, but like that's not what queer is.

24:24Is that an answer? Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, I think it's I think it can be whatever we want it to be. But yeah, I think it's a term. I think this term queer food is used a lot in a way that sometimes just doesn't really mean anything. So it's nice to just pause and be like, what do we mean? Yeah, I think it's a really expansive way of thinking, which I think is hopefully what queerness and food also can be for people. And also in that essay you talk about, I think it's called Full Fridge Club. Can you say more about that? I think this is really cool. Oh, sure. Yeah. So Full Fridge Club is this very wonderful, super queer thing that I'm part of.

25:02So my friend Emmett has he's a private chef. They've also got just this amazing, small but incredible commercial kitchen that he built out in Kingston, New York, which is the big city near where I live. And it's not a big city. and so Emmett cooks for all these private clients and for a long time wanted to offer something at like a lower price point that could just help more people in the community have an easier time just having you know food around in their week-to-week life so I started it with him because I this was post-farm and I wanted to continue to be doing something physical something with community with other people you know because being a writer is mostly being at home by yourself with your computer um and I like doing things in person um this is really nice and so yeah I joined Emmett and I also have always done a lot of uh things in my community to like cook for people in my community in various ways and I was looking for a new way to do that so um we built in this mutual aid part of it so basically what it looks like that's kind of how it started and what it looks like is every monday um we make a completely new menu we change the menu every week uh we have help by way of steven who helps us cook we have a variety of people who help us with dishes which is really important um timmy is our like client person she makes a she's in touch with everyone which is great and yeah we make um six different dishes every week it's all vegetarian, but one is an optional meat thing.

26:40And we have a bunch of clients and they come and pick up the food. And I feel like the best way to describe it is like we put excellent leftovers in your fridge and then you can do whatever you want. And then for every client we have, we put at least one meal, but it's usually more than that, but at least one meal into one of the free community fridges in Kingston. And I think it's just a really cool business. And I think watching how Emmett has figured out a way to cook professionally that does not come at the expense of his or his team's physical or mental health is amazing and having it be like financially sustainable and like all these things that like the restaurant industry just makes really hard but what I I guess the two things that I love about it the most is one is just how much food we've been able to give to our community we've put in two years we've put over 2 ,000 meals in the community fridge which for this tiny little kitchen is I think really cool um and I work with all queer and trans people and it's like this beautiful place to go where that's just the the norm and like and sometimes we talk about the stuff and sometimes we just don't we just like exist together and talk about music and which I know nothing about yeah I was gonna ask what y 'all are listening to while you're cooking oh my gosh You should ask Emmett because I am always like, what is this music?

28:02What is this? I don't know. I don't. I love music. Sorry, Michelle. My friend Michelle's here. She works in music. I love music so much. I just don't know anything about it, which is, I think, why I enjoy so much. You're along for the vibe. Emmett is our DJ and Emmett is so knowledgeable about this. And I just, yeah, I like when he puts on Dolly. I want to bring it back to the charts once more because there was a sandwich chart which I love and I'm curious if you could tell me the difference between like a decent sandwich and a really good sandwich yeah um sure because I love sandwiches so the sandwich chart is actually a chart I reference often when people ask me about this book uh because I think it's just it's a great illustration of the charts because the sandwich that inspired the chart is the BLT, which I feel like we're all familiar with whether or not you eat bacon.

28:58And I think it's, you know, it's a classic for a reason, because it's just, I think it's a perfect sandwich. It's so good. And I think when you look at all the parts of a BLT, you get the formula for a great sandwich. So it's like, you've got the bread, of course, that's important. Then you have like the main thing, the bacon, but you know that could be whatever you have a creamy thing because I think BLTs need a lot of mayo you have a crunchy thing and lettuce and then the real kicker is like having like a sort of extra thing that's a little acidic so in a BLT it's the tomato I feel like you take out any part of the BLT and it's like fine but it's not amazing so I think if you want an amazing sandwich I think you just need all those parts and they can come in so many different forms but I think it just that sandwich gives you the framework for all great sandwiches.

29:46So I just feel like, I think the thing that's missing for most sandwiches is that like extra thing that doesn't necessarily need to be there. And it's a little acidic. So it could be like a pickle or like a pepperoncini pepper or something like just something a little briny and acidic and just great. My dad makes the best sandwiches. He should answer this. Sauerkraut. Sauerkraut. Good answer, Doug. Yeah. I have to tell you about the best BLT that I made this summer, which was, this is what I want to know, this idea of like, um, a lote mayo. Oh, so just like boiled corn, cut it off the cob, mix it in with the mayo.