Ruby Tandoh - Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Serpents Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A 7JQ

www.serpentstail.com

Copyright Ruby Tandoh, 2021

Cover design: Steve Panton

Book design: Evelin Kasikov

Illustrations: Sinae Park

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed and bound in Italy by L.E.G.O. Spa

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 7529

eISBN 978 1 78283 8258

Audio ISBN 978 1 78283 9354

No two people cook alike. Some of you might fry plantain at 2 a.m. in your flatshare kitchen. Others will spend languorous hours making stew for the family on a Sunday afternoon. You might be a master of microwave cooking, or assemble towering, legendary birthday cakes, or stand anxious watch over the jollof rice while it cooks. Maybe you cook with curiosity, plucking ingredients from outside your comfort zone to get a taste of something good and new. Or perhaps you cook in a fugue state, just getting some easy nutrition in before your shift starts. Some cooks move with their appetite; others work methodically through the basics. There are cooks in gleaming kitchens and those toiling over a two-ring portable stove. Some of you will hardly cook at all, perhaps preferring to immerse yourself in cookbook daydreams while eating a ready meal. Thats fine too. Our ways of cooking are as diverse as us, reflecting every conceivable taste, talent, culture, body, ability (or disability), kitchen, mindset and skill set. I think thats something to be grateful for.

Too often when we cook, we turn the old clich inside out: instead of you are what you eat, it becomes you eat what you want to be how you think you should be, what you believe you deserve. We cook and eat as a way of travelling up or down in society, in the esteem of our friends and in our own self-worth. We try to cook ourselves better somehow maybe into a different body or a bigger kitchen or a more accomplished persona instead of meeting our hungers here and now, as we are. Sometimes these aspirations can push us outside our comfort zones and lead us towards new experiences. But much of the time, were so stuck in striving that we lose sight of the good stuff already right here in front of us: the way onions cook in butter, the fun of a corner-shop snack haul, the guidance of our own gut feelings.

So, when I ask you to cook as you are, its a vague direction, and one that could lead you along any of countless different paths. The aim of this book with six chapters, from everyday dinners in Feed me now to low-effort cooking in More food, less work and immersive cooking projects in For the love of it is to afford you the space to discover what kind of cooking works for you. Youll find that a lot of the recipes here (especially in Hidden in plain sight ) repurpose store cupboard staples, showing familiar and often cheap ingredients in a new light. Theres a focus on flexible daily cooking, with variation and substitution ideas giving you the freedom to adapt recipes to your needs. There are special-occasion meals in Wild appetites , or cooking ideas to furnish the everyday in Normal perfect moments . At every step, its about encouraging you to see the goodness in your kitchen, your food and yourself that might ordinarily go unnoticed.

To be clear, Im not claiming that this cookbook will accurately capture every aspect of every readers life. Im a cook like you, with my own likes and dislikes, cultural reference points, strengths and weaknesses. Everything that I am and that I have been through informs, in one way or another, how I cook and eat. So, in this book, youll see my heritage come through in the West African recipes. Between the lines of junk food recipes, youll read a little of my upbringing. Youll probably gather from the number of vegetarian and vegan recipes that I dont eat much meat. No matter what some may claim, a cookbook can never be an objective thing: at best, it is an act of curation, spinning together many food stories into one instructive document. But, as you cook from this book, I really hope youll see enough of yourself and your life in it to be inspired. My dream is that, instead of taking these recipes as gospel, youll rehash them to suit you and create your own kitchen folklore.

In case you havent already realised, this cookbook doesnt have photos. I know how useful photos can be, especially if youre a visual learner or if youre not a confident reader. Photos can give us something to aim for, or a standard to hold our cooking attempts up against to judge how well weve done. If you absolutely need photos, Id encourage you to find a cookbook that will deliver on that front there are many to choose from. But for most cooks I dont believe things are that black and white.

When we look through cookbooks at the photos (and believe me, I love doing this as much as you do), were not just gleaning clues about what the food is and how to prepare it. Were also absorbing cues about lifestyle, class and background, from everything from the silverware on the table to the (usually) white hands stirring the pot. This can be a beautiful thing, allowing author, photographer, stylist and home economist to evoke a sense of place and time, setting the dishes in an appropriate cultural context or simply showing the food in the best possible light. But it can also be limiting: by photographing a cookbook in one kitchen, with one cook, Id be capturing only one very narrow vision of what cooking looks like and who these recipes are for. Such photos can also end up feeling aspirational, drawing us towards the often-unattainable shiny and new.

With Cook As You Are, I knew the focus had to be different. I wanted a book that would show food being made in many different kitchens, by many different people some of whom may remind you of yourself as you already are. The focus of the imagery here is less on the food itself than on the places, hungers and cultures from which that food is born. Food needs cooks and eaters: without those human elements, its just stuff.

I know that this may be daunting if youre used to the gloss and promise of photography, but I wont leave you in the lurch. Sinae Park, the illustrator of this book, has created dozens of beautiful images that capture particularly important parts of the cooking process, from how to fold flatbreads to the easiest way to fill pierogi. And from me you can expect extra help with sensory cues so you know what to look out for when cooking, as well as descriptions of what kind of dish something is and how it might look. Ive been deliberately thorough in my instructions in the hope that youll find comfort in my words. A photo might speak a thousand words, but it cant tell you what something should smell like, or explain the texture of kneaded bread dough, or reassure you that its all going to work out fine.