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Ruby Tandoh Biography

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“Jane Grigson joined the Observer magazine in the summer of 1968. Her first column was about strawberries. She wrote a recipe for strawberry barquettes-- small pastry boats filled with fruit and lacquered with redcurrant jam so that they looked like jewels. There was another for strawberry brulée in a sweet sablé shell, and coeur à la crème-- a cream pudding set in a heart-shaped mould and encircled with fruit. 'In Venice, in the season of Alpine strawberries...' she wrote, and it didn't really matter what she said next, because you were already in. In most recipes, the introduction serves the recipes. Jane's was the other way around. She wrote about the hybridized origins of modern strawberries in French market gardens, and how they feature in the mythology of the fertility goddess Frigg. After a few lines on the demanding anatomy of strawberry plants, she devoured into Jane Austen, talking about the agro-cosplay fruit-picking of the Regency ball-gown set. She refused to be complacent, especially about the things her readers already thought they knew. 'Strawberries, sugar and cream. The combination allows no improvement, you think?' Well, you're wrong. None of this would've counted for much if the recipes weren't great, but they really were. One week she'd give you smart alternatives to traditional Christmas cake-- rounds of meringue stacked with coffee cream, or Grasmere shortcake with preserved ginger. Another week it'd be the unimpeachable precision of carrot salad, celery soup or a recipe for ice cream flavored with cooked, puréed apples. The cooking was pantheistic and it dealt with everything from kippers to apples, parsley, prunes and fennel with the same care, even love. We get smug these days about how broad our tastes are, and to an extent we're right. But a newspaper now would never run a double-page spread of recipes for tripe. The magic of Jane Grigson is that though she was a smart cook, she was really a skilled purveyor of daydreams-- even if those daydreams were granular and exactingly researched. 'I sometimes think that the charm of a country's cookery lies not so much in its classic dishes as in its quirks and fancies,' she wrote. This included the esoterica of regional pies and rare apple cultivars. Something could be worthwhile without being useful. 'Walk into the yard of Château Mouton Rothschild,' began Jane's recipe for jellied rabbit, 'and you see a scatter of small fires. Some flare into the sky, others smoke as they are fed faggots of vine prunings.' Noisettes de porc aux pruneaux de Tours, crépinettes with chestnuts, carottes à la Vichy, angel's hair charlotte. She drew from the culinary canon as far back as Gervase Markham's seventeenth-century The English Huswife.”

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“All we can really do is to take the revolution a meal at a time. Be the first woman in the office to take a biscuit from the communal tin; be the person brave enough to take the last one, too. In the company of people you feel comfortable with and safe around, eat your heart out. Practise ordering greedily on dates. Be the only person at the table to get a dessert. When it arrives, don't share it. Try out speaking your mind when you're alone -- talk to yourself in the mirror, saying things like 'I would like you to go down on me, and I want the last slice of the strudel.' No doubt some people, probably guys, will be thrown off balance by your forthrightness. Who cares. Eat their leftovers. If they carry on judging you, eat them, too.”

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“A while ago, I went to a food festival in South London, where-- in a smoky, concrete atrium between two runs of railway arches-- about a dozen barbecue stalls were set up. You can find barbecue and grill cooking easily enough in Peckham. There is suya, South African braii, skewers of chicken kofte, all of which use direct heat in a way that Britain hasn't done properly since the suckling-pig era. The barbecue festival was different. Instead of barbecuing-- a verb, a way of cooking-- it felt like people were doing barbecue, in the same way that your uncle will do Sean Connery when he's taking impression requests. Of the dozen or so vendors, most were doing nonspecific, seemingly American-inspired barbecue: slow-cooked brisket piled into burgers, burnt ends, actually burnt ends, cheeseburger wings, beef sliders, ribs and ribs and ribs, Texas-inspired massaman curry. Even when the flavors were global, the foundations cleaved to certain barbecue methods, and the basic units of North American culinary vocab. 'Cherry smoked char siu glazed kurobuta pork belly taco.' 'House brined & cherry smoked short rib pastrami slider.' 'Hickory smoked brisket.' 'Crack pork'-- in a pork-crackling 'taco.”

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“In Taiwan, where bubble tea was invented, people have been drinking Chinese tea styles with milk since Dutch colonization in the seventeenth century. But milk tea-- specifically, Indian black teas where milkiness is as important as the tea-- arrived late, some time around the Second World War. As the story goes, a former bartender, Chang Fan Shu, thought to serve it cold, and shake it like you would a cocktail. When he did this, the fats and proteins in the milk allowed it to form a foam, and he made what people started to call bubble tea. Some shops started serving iced versions, shaken like a cocktail. And then in the eighties, in a Taiwanese tea shop-- and nobody can agree which one-- someone had the idea of adding chewy pearls of tapioca starch to the bubble tea, making bubble tea-squared. New variants quickly appeared. Earl Grey boba tea. Milkless jasmine green tea or osmanthus versions. A lot of the time the tea was lost completely, most notably in the crystalline pop fruit flavors such as lychee or mulberry, although also in milkshake-like blends like lilac taro.”

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“If Jane was a romantic, Margaret was more high-impact-- if she wasn't throwing feasts at the flat, she was at the Ivy down the road. After working as a critic for Gourmet and the Good Food Guide, she opened a restaurant, Lacy's, which closed down after a karmic run of bad reviews. Food writers still haven't learned their lesson on this particular count, and I'd like to clear things up: it is much easier to go from restaurateur to cookbook author then the other way around. At home, though, Margaret was a great cook. She also had the gift of being a great shopper. She frontloaded the effort so that when she got into the kitchen, she could focus on the basics of the cooking itself. You could say she wrote a template for bougie cooking culture today, where it's about the produce stores you go to, as much as what you do with the ingredients at the end. One of her columns was all about black pepper, mustard and salt. Good pepper steak will have the aromatics of cathedral incense-- a warm anchor note, a resinous edge, harmonic iterations of spice and musk, and a more piquant heat laid over the top. If you're going to cook, you need to consider the geometry of Maldon salt and learn how to deploy French mustard correctly in lapin moutarde. The average British cook at the time was probably using pre-ground pepper and a reflexive pinch of salt. Nobody did an opening gambit like her. 'No self-respecting sardine would dream of being seen more than twenty miles north of Cherbourg,' she'd write. 'There has been a ridiculous rumor around for some years that puddings are out of fashion and likely to stay so,' she wrote. 'Nothing could be further from the truth. It is simply wishful thinking on the part of housewives and slimmers.”

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“For any recipe writer, the mark of success isn't teaching people how to cook well, it's showing them how to think well about food, of which 90 per cent is just about having the confidence to disagree. Margaret got into the history of things, explaining that flummery-- a jellied fruit cream-- used to be set with the shavings of the horn of a young deer, and then was made using the gelatinous powers of simmered calves' foot, and then with isinglass-- a collagen derived from the swim bladder of a fish. In the end, she gave you a more down-to-earth raspberry syllabub recipe with Sauternes, rosewater and cream. Margaret could give a detailed appraisal of tinned foods or she could convince you-- like she convinced me-- that a cheese soufflé isn't just a reasonable proposition but in fact an easy midweek lunch. 'Why should people enjoy cooking?' Margaret would say, because she knew it was her job to put forward a case.”

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“Margaret and Jane didn't really get non-European food, even at a time when cooking from former and contemporary colonies-- India, Hong Kong at the time, Jamaica, Trinidad-- was working deeper into the canon. And they could be out of touch-- Margaret's bon viveur lifestyle, Jane's cottagecore cave house in rural France. Like a lot of food writers, Jane was interested in a fantasy kind of peasantry, but not the actual realities of shopping in a Tesco now.”

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“Even the colors are strategized. Take that sausage and gochujang pasta-- when I asked Lebus why he thought it did so well, he just said: 'Orange.' As is traditional in the culture of tech start-ups, he's been listening to pop psychology podcasts. 'Orange is the color that makes people hungry,' he explained. 'It's why the McDonald's logo is yellow and red.' He added that blue doesn't occur naturally in food-- even blueberries are a kind of dusky, purple bruise-- which is why it's often used in diet company branding. If you scroll through Mob recipes, the palette is mostly the same shades of sunset, yolk, terracotta, mahogany, vermilion and tar that you'd find in a New York-style cheese slice.”

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“Bubble tea isn't one thing but an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don't have tea, milk, or even tapioca pearls. They can be fruit-based, or blended milk with chestnut purée, or high-concept versions made from scratch with oolong and hand-rolled pearls. You choose a base tea, add-ins, sugar and ice levels, milk types and whether or not to get a top of sweet-salty cheese cream-- a thick, plush foam head, which gives black tea the visuals of a pint of Guinness. Depending on the drink, you can choose hot or cold. The permutations are seemingly endless-- even the most seasoned off-menu Starbucks drink aficionados can get overwhelmed by up to a thousand possible routes through the menu.”

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“Some of the most viral foods in London in the last couple of years include a foot-long croissant, a brick of honey butter toast and cookies thicker than the average burger. A more-is-more principle is in effect. It has led to mash-ups like birria ramen, cheeseburger tacos, cruffins, crookies, brookies and cereal milk ice cream. When something goes viral on here, it reveals something about the things they really want. And what people want, it turns out, are easily digestible food ideas-- things they already know, like the burger, hybrids that they double know but that are also novel”

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“We have Nigel Slater to thank for some of the horniest food content. Marie Claire magazine, for which Slater was hired to write the recipes, published a cookbook in 1992. The food photographs, by Jean-Louis Bloch-Lainé and Kevin Summers, catch the food in moments of déshabillé: mussels coaxed open, crust of a cheesy gratin broken by a spoon, juices dripping down a figgy pudding. It was, as Slater put it in the introduction, 'the decision to abandon those props, those traditional scene-setters, and the avoidance of styling and tweaking the food to look good for the camera.' It was the same at the Observer, where Nigel Slater moved in the early nineties, with Kevin Summers and then Jonathan Lovekin photographing the food. Everything is burst, collapsed, juicy, swollen or sizzling, and indecently close up. This new kind of photo was composed to make the food look not beautiful, as such, but craveable. It's strange now to think that recipes weren't always supposed to be thirst traps. But the most consequential parts of food culture are often the things like this-- things that seem so obvious, so unquestionable, that it never occurs to us that they could be done another way.”

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“Whenever I go online, I can count on being confronted with a recipe that I never asked for and which, the moment I see it, I kind of want to eat. Recently it was 'Herby Chicken Caesar Schnitzel', which was accompanied by the kind of video that's carefully calibrated to stoke a craving. Here's the schnitzel being caressed by soft, amber bubbles in the pan. Here's a money shot, when a knife rasps demonstratively over the crust. Here's a green salad being twisted through a slippery dressing. It is slung on top of the schnitzel like a satin quilt on an unmade bed. 'She's crispy, saucy, cheesy and a little bit spicy,' the recipe developer, Jodie Nixon, explains in the voiceover. It was posted by Mob-- a hugely successful British recipe platform with an ensemble cast of recipe developers, popular on social media and among younger cooks. Another day, it'll be an unsolicited close-up of a chicken thigh, fresh out of the pan, with tortoiseshell caramelized skin. 'They're crunchy, they're juicy,' Jordan Ezra King-- the cook-- says on the voiceover. 'Gonna do it with herby rice, and some nice pickle-y fresh crunchy salad.' Again, it was a recipe from Mob. Or how about those few weeks when my For You pages were hacked by an Instagram-famous sausage and gochujang rigatoni? You crumble and fry sausage meat until it's lightly browned, in pieces the size of granola clusters, then add gochujang, cream, shallot, Parmesan, breadcrumbs and a few other things. You can tell it's going to be aggressively pleasing in the same way as a McDonald's double cheeseburger. The recipe developer, Xiengni Zhou, narrates the video. 'It's quick, creamy, and kind of spicy,' she says, and the dish looks so good that you don't even care that you're getting déjà vu. The video has tens of thousands of likes, and it is also, unsurprisingly, from Mob.”

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“I thought I was above being a Francophile, like it was all too obvious, but it turns out you can't know how you'll react to a French market until you're there, looking at a small, round cheese coated in dried herbs, or big bulbs of garlic stroked with lilac, or a rôtisserie chicken stall where the potatoes are basted in the dripping juices.”

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“Hines loved regional foods, breaking the monotony of roadside chicken and steak with Creole gumbo, soft shell crabs, Mississippi River catfish, Montgomery lemon pie, Nebraska corn fritters, black-eyed peas. For a time there was a Hines-branded line of Kentucky country hams. You could count on finding listings for the classics-- places like Manhattan's Delmonico's or the Brooklyn steakhouse Peter Luger-- but you were just as likely to be taken off the beaten track to Ham-That-Am-Ham, a ham specialist upstate.”

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