Comfort Food

When we meet to begin our conversation online, it’s 10am on a sunny Saturday morning and Ruby Tandoh is beaming. “You know when you do a silly admin chore early [in the morning] and then you're like, I've done it for the day? I feel fantastic for not having procrastinated,” she smiles. Ruby’s enthusiasm is infectious and frankly, unsurprising. As a writer, Ruby is known for her focus on the pleasure and joys of food and appetite, which today is a radical way of approaching eating even as our anxieties around it increase wildly. But that process wasn’t always simple for her.

A former Great British Bake Off finalist, and now an author and journalist, Ruby’s trajectory with food has been well catalogued online – including her own relationship with eating – and in her 2018 book Eat Up!. Writing that book, she says, was “a way of working through a lot of that. Now, I have come to take my own appetite less personally, and see it less as a reflection of a deep part of who I am.”

A part of her seems firmly embedded in the city of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, where she grew up, which she characterises as “a deeply unexceptional town” holding something “very languid about it”. And even as she talks about the city’s pathos that she has come to internalise, there is no doubt about the joyous influence that food has had on her growing up there. In Eat Up!, she begins with an evocative chapter about visiting her grandmother in a “sleepy Essex suburb” and picking “bright purple blackberries” in all their glory, a few hundred yards from her grandmother’s garden and then tossing it with apple segments into a crumble. She remembers nothing about what the crumble tasted like, but what she can recall is “the sting of those blackberry thorns, the herbal smell of dirt, juice and sap on my fingertips…”

There is a certain romance behind her words, as well as comfort and care. But even so, Ruby admits that she has felt an ambivalence in writing about food and being a part of the food media ecosystem. It certainly doesn’t come from nothing – in her early twenties, Ruby applied to be a part of the Great British Bake Off at a time when she was living alone in “a horrible flat share with strangers. And I really liked baking. I played around with making cookies and cheesecakes [...] baking things you love rather than necessarily for the craft of it.”

Part of this comfort ritual was watching Bake Off alone in her room, which gave her the idea to simply be a part of it. “I applied myself to it with this fanatical energy. It was one of those things where I was just quite lonely at the time, and so what better way to fill my time and then eventually meet people than doing this? I could’ve arguably gone to a local club or something, but I did things in my own way; it's definitely led me to where I am now.”

Today, Ruby is awaiting the launch of her new book All Consuming, which she categorises as an “observational text; it resists being useful, but I hope [it] embraces being interesting and kind of thought provoking.” It’s what her written work has been doing, whether it’s her earlier cookbooks (Crumb and Flavour) or the much more recent, inclusive, and boundary-pushing Cook As You Are that’s as perceptive as it is warm; or her pieces for the New Yorker and Vittles. Her work straddles the line between sincere and fun, whether it’s writing about cheesemaking and resurrection or about the beautiful possibilities of pocket pastry.

Ruby tells me that she thinks of her work as part of the lineage of food writing that takes a “more considered, often [a] compassionate stance rather than the hard line, analytical way of looking at food and culture or the really scathing, supposedly comedic way of seeing.” This consideration, she says, was natural for Eat Up! But for All Consuming she had to think about the shape it would take. “There could be a food book that takes down, say, the proliferation of highly craveable recipes on Instagram or Tiktok critics and writes ‘this is populist, this is lazy, this is the death of true criticism’ and so on. But I didn't want to do that. I did want to come at all these pop cultural phenomena from a point of genuine curiosity, inquiry, sometimes a degree of scepticism, but to treat all of these things with as much care as I would treat a cookbook. And coming at these things from a position of baseline respect allowed me to see a huge amount of promise in the food system right now. I don't see it all as a problem to be solved. I see it as something that we need to engage with critically, but also with a certain amount of excitement and curiosity.”

It is a highly potent idea that Ruby hits upon at a time when food culture has become mass culture, when our relationship to food and media is intertwined and confusing. When we’re witnessing extractive consumption in real time through mindless trends in food, and when caring about food and what we eat is seen as elitist and out of touch. Where does our relationship to food go from here? “It’s the paradox of plenty; the more choices we have the more we’re thinking ‘what do I do with all of this?’ But we don’t have to get caught in the trend cycle in an agonised way. Once you take that step back, there will always be something new but you will start to see bigger overtures emerge from that. And once you can see the slightly bigger picture, a lot of the anxiety sheds away and you engage with the world as it is before [you] without constantly conceptualising and trying to reach for the right answer, which, of course, doesn't exist.”

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh is available now.

Ruby wears the Cotton Wool Herringbone Jacket, Cotton Wool Herringbone Pleat Front Trousers and Wool Cashmere Crew Neck Sweater.

Words by Apoorva Sripathi.

Photography by Sophie Davidson.