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If you’ve ever stood in front of your fridge despairing over how to make a meal out of stray leftovers and random produce, author and chef Julia Turshen’s new cookbook, What Goes With What—a 100-recipe behemoth that boasts a series of carefully compiled, visually pleasing charts breaking down exactly how to put together the optimal, say, BLT—is most definitely for you.
Turshen has authored five cookbooks solo prior to this one and contributed to projects featuring food-world luminaries from Jody Williams to Hawa Hassan to Gwyneth Paltrow, but her latest effort is perhaps her most ambitious and comprehensive yet. From Turshen’s autumnal, easy-to-execute recipe for chocolate pumpkin bread to her suggestions for how to concoct what she calls “brothy soups,” the food ideas on the page in What Goes With What feel tailor-made for fall’s abundant harvest. This week, Vogue spoke to Turshen about sandwich-making flow charts, taking on the cookbook photography process solo, healing mother-daughter food wounds, and the joy of connecting with readers via her newsletter.
Vogue: What was the process of putting together this cookbook like, compared to previous projects?
Julia Turshen: It felt really different for a few reasons. One was I was not planning to do another book, and I started doing these charts in my newsletter because I feel like they’re the best way to show how I think about food. I was doing a newsletter about soup, so I made a chart because I was like, “Oh, this shows you what I’m thinking,” and they got such a great response. I heard from so many people who were like, “This was the first time cooking made sense.” It was honestly a little surprising to me. I was like, Wait, doesn’t everyone think this way? I didn’t know that that was so unusual for people to see, and I just felt like, There’s a book here. I landed on these charts and fell in love with them and decided to see if I could make a book out of them. The process itself started differently from my other books, but the process of making it was also really different. I have always been very hands-on for my books, but for this one I was more than ever at every stage of it. This was my first time I didn’t work with an agent and just went directly to my former editor. I took nearly all the photos myself. I’ve never done that.
What was it like to take all those photos?
It’s not something I’ve done a lot. I promised myself that if I was going to go through the process of making another book, I wanted to identify the places in the process that have always been really stressful for me, and producing a big cookbook photo shoot does not bring out the best in me. It’s just so stressful because making photos for a cookbook is incredibly expensive; you’re normally paying a lot of people who are really good at their jobs, so they cost a lot of money, and you’re trying to shoot so much food in such a short period of time. The logistics of producing that much food, preparing it, setting it up, cleaning up after—it’s just so much. Taking the photos myself meant I could slow that process down and just take one photo at a time—test a recipe, take a picture of it, and that was it. I didn’t have to do it all at once, so I got to really work it into my day-to-day life. Also, I could afford to have a photo of every single recipe, which I’ve never been able to do before. A lot of us are visual learners, so there are photos of everything but also the charts, the writing around the recipes, the recipes themselves. All of these elements are tools.
I loved that you included a conversation with your mom (a former Self magazine editor!) about body image. What was it like to initiate that chat?
We spoke when my last book Simply Julia came out, which had that essay about the worthiness of our bodies in it. I was open about, like, yes, I’ve had a career making cookbooks, but I’ve done it at the same time that I’ve had a raging eating disorder, and that has been tricky. Like, what do I mean by the word healthy? This conversation with my mom in What Goes With What feels like a continuation of that. In terms of my eating-disorder recovery, so much has come from it, including a more relaxed recipe-writing style. Another thing that’s come from it is a recalibration of my relationship with my mom.
In order to initiate a lot of my healing, I had to set a really firm boundary with my mom about not talking about this stuff with her, because my stuff was so wound up in her stuff and her stuff was wound up in my stuff. I was just like, “I need a wall here.” Then I got to a place where I wanted to invite my mom back into that part of my life. I felt ready for that. She and I have had some really hard but really incredible conversations that have been so healing for me, and I feel like when I talk to other people who have an eating disorder or body-image issues—which is basically everyone…anyone living in a body has probably had a hard time being in their body at some point—most people talk about stuff having a lot to do with their moms. I read a lot of anti-diet stuff, and I just hadn’t seen a conversation between a mother and daughter that kind of acknowledged all that. It’s been so healing for me, and I think healing for my mom too. I asked her if she’d be willing to have this conversation a little bit more publicly, and she was so game, to her credit. I feel so unbelievably supported by her, and it feels like such a joy to get to share that and also share it with honesty and acknowledgment of everything that came before.
What has been the most fun or exciting aspect of releasing this cookbook?
One thing that’s been cool is that I’ve never put out a book while also having the newsletter. I started my Substack a couple years ago, and I’ve gotten to share so much of the process of making this book. I don’t think this book would exist without having my newsletter because I was making the charts for my newsletter people, and they love them, and that’s why I ended up doing this. It’s been really exciting for me to have this place I’ve never had before where I feel so connected with the people who enjoy my work, to get to talk to them directly and tell them about making it. I wrote a whole thing about taking the photos and about my parents designing the book, and it’s nice to have an outlet for all that kind of stuff. Another thing that feels small but very meaningful is that I’m on a group text with my three best friends, and we all live in totally different places—I’m in New York, one’s in LA, one’s in Texas, one’s in London—and they text me photos of what they’re making from the book for their kids. That just makes me feel so good.
