Julia Turshen Is Doing It for the Home Cooks

Julia Turshen is the home cook’s home cook. It’s a badge the The New York Times bestselling cookbook author wears with pride. Whether you’re reading her newsletter, listening to her IACP-nominated podcast, or taking one of her Sunday-afternoon cooking classes, Turshen is encouraging and thoughtful, and wants you to walk away feeling calm and empowered—never shamed or overwhelmed.

Her newest cookbook, “What Goes With What,” is abundantly inviting—and her most personal yet. There are recipes—100 of them!—but you’ll also find 20 hand-drawn charts that function more like templates than directives, along with photos of every single recipe in the book, all taken by Turshen herself. It’s a fresh approach to culinary instruction and a charming invitation to break away from the world of structured recipes.

In a recent conversation over Zoom, we sat down to discuss the making of the book, the relentless daily labor of feeding oneself, and what makes the perfect sandwich.

Why did you start making the charts?

I started making them for my newsletter, and then I would share them on Instagram. And there was no light bulb moment. It's just how I think about food and cooking and recipes. When I first started doing them, I heard from a lot of people [who were] like, “Now I finally understand how to think about this stuff. It feels less overwhelming.” My initial reaction was like, “Wait, doesn't everyone think like this?” I thought it was all sort of obvious. Finding out that it might not be, I feel very grateful to have landed on a way for me to express how I think about food and cooking that seems to be easily understandable for other people.

What do the charts give people that a recipe doesn't provide?

I always use the salad dressing one as an easy example. People are like, “There's so many different kinds of salad dressing! How do I know how to make them all?” And once you realize they all pretty much follow the same formula—it’s a mixture of acid and fat and some seasoning—it all becomes a lot easier to navigate. I think they differ because it gives you this framework and it allows you to see the infrastructure of the recipe—like a template—so you can take it and riff away and have just that sense of empowerment like, “Oh, I understand how this works so I can turn it into something else.”

I think they can also give you a way to wrap your mind around cooking in general. So much of cooking is just making decisions, whether it's what to make for dinner tonight, or what side dish to serve with the chicken, or what to make for this person who has a dietary restriction, or what to buy at the grocery store or at the farmer's market. It's just decision after decision. I think we all just face so much decision fatigue in general, especially when it comes to cooking, and I think that’s one of the big things that leads to people feeling overwhelmed and burnt out when it comes to cooking.

I'm a lifelong home cook. I'm in it for the long haul. So I'm always looking for ways to make this relentless daily labor of feeding yourself more enjoyable, more sustainable. I think one of the ways to do that is to really understand these frameworks so that you're just less overwhelmed by choice.

How does a cookbook or recipe written by someone who's home cook-focused differ from one that is restaurant-focused?

I think there's plenty of room for both, but I definitely think of myself as a home cook who writes for other home cooks, and for me that means understanding that it's just one person. There's no prep team. There's no dishwashing team. There's not a crew of people who are going to bring a dish to life. When it comes to home cooking, the cooking is like this much [pinches fingers] of the whole picture. There's the planning, the budgeting, the grocery shopping, the cleaning of vegetables and just getting things ready. The prep, the making the dinner itself, but then the cleaning up and the storing of leftovers and figuring out what to do with those leftovers and keeping everyone you're cooking for—keeping their really random wants and desires and dietary restrictions and all that stuff in mind. It's just so much work. So I write every recipe with all of that labor in mind. And I think when people cook it's such an investment of time and money and energy and I just don't want anyone to waste any of those very precious resources.

So I want to be very clear in my instructions; I don't want anyone to ever be confused. In this new book, there's a picture of every single recipe, which I've never been able to do in a book. I just want people to see what it looks like. I took all the photos. I'm not a professional photographer, they're not professionally food styled or prop styled. I made the dish in my kitchen, took a picture, here it is. So it's very much from my kitchen to yours so you can see what it looks like, not what it looks like when there's—again—a team of people behind it.

I want to use ingredients that are very accessible, very affordable. I live in a very rural, kind of random place. If I can't get an ingredient close to my house, I either won't include it in my recipe or I'll tell you where you can get it online, and I'll tell you what you can do with the rest of the tub of whatever it might be. I'm not going to leave you hanging. And I think the difference between recipes I write for home cooks versus more restaurant recipes is the attention, not just to ingredients, but to the amount of dishes.

Because again, the cleaning up is—I think—the hardest part of cooking. If you can use one bowl for something, I'm never going to tell you to use two because I absolutely do not want to wash two mixing bowls in my kitchen sink. And if you need to [use two bowls], I'll explain why it's important. But for the most part, I just want you to get in and out and be happy and have it be not stressful.

Why do you think it's important for someone to have the visual of what the final product looks like?

I think there's so many reasons. I think we all learn really differently. Something I've thought a lot about with the charts—I promise to get back to the photos—but when I started putting them out in my newsletter and on Instagram and stuff, I heard from so many people who are either neurodivergent or autistic or somewhere on the spectrum. They told me, “Oh, I never understood it until I saw a chart like this.” That was so interesting to me. It definitely invited me to observe more of how my brain works.

We become confident at doing things through different means of instruction. I think about that with the charts, but I also think about that with photos because so many of us are very visual learners. You can read something descriptive about a recipe. You can hear about the ingredients, how they're combined together, but seeing a photo does so much heavy lifting that words just can't do. I just feel very committed to giving home cooks as many tools as possible. So I put photos under that category. Having a photo is just another tool. It's another means of instruction and information.

And your parents worked with you on this book, right?

They designed the book. My parents have worked in print media for a long time. They both worked in magazines for decades and my dad also for decades has run his own book design studio, but he mostly works on interior decorating books. My parents met working together in a magazine art department, so they're not writers and they're not food people. We do kind of different things but we have a lot of overlap and I've been lucky to get their advice and guidance on past books, but I've never been able to work with them.

All of my books have been designed by in-house designers who are all fantastic. This new book, “What Goes With What,” is with an editor I've worked with before, but a publisher I haven't worked with before. And they hire out for book design, or at least they did for my book. They asked me if there's anyone in particular I might want to work with and I thought, “I would love to work with my parents.” And it was so wonderful. They were so into it and pay so much attention to detail. And we really had so much fun.

I feel like every book I write, each one gets more and more personal. And this one, between getting to do all the food photos myself, getting to do the charts in my handwriting, getting to work with my parents on the layout—I showed my best friend an early digital copy and she was like, “This book really feels like you,” and I was like, “Yeah, that's because my parents did the design and they know how to translate that kind of thing and they know me so well.”

How many cookbooks have you written?

I've done a few of my own but I've created with a lot of other people. I've co-authored. I've assisted. Of all the cookbooks I've worked on, I think this was number 15 or 16.

My last cookbook, “Simply Julia,” came out in March 2021, and April of that year I went and started work full-time on the crew of my friend's vegetable farm and I spent a full farming season working there. Tuesday through Saturday was their schedule. I was just pretty burnt out and wanted to do something really different. I wanted to do something physical. I wanted to still kind of be in touch with food but in a different way. I guess like actually in touch with it in a more tangible way. I wanted to work on a team. My work is very quiet and solo and I wanted to be in a place where I was absolutely not the authority. I was not the decision maker. I also was not the most knowledgeable person. And all that was possible at the farm and it was such a wonderful experience.

I actually just came from the farm. I spend Thursday mornings there. The farm's like 10 minutes from my house and I love everyone who works there and I love the vegetables they grow and I like still being a very small part of it. So I think it changed my work in that I really thought I was not going to do another cookbook. And working on the farm reminded me that I can do different things. I had made my life about cookbook after cookbook and just being so immersed in food media. I needed to step away for a bit to remind myself that I'm a person outside of that. It allowed me to actually enter doing another cookbook with a much different feeling and a much different perspective and I just fell in love with doing these charts.

Do you have a favorite chart?

Oh my gosh, that's such a hard question. I just love the meatball chart. I love meatballs. If you eat meat, everyone wants a meatball. And I like showing this sort of formula and infrastructure thing for meatballs, because I think it allows you to realize you can put anything in a meatball. But I'm so happy that there are so many vegetable charts. There's stovetop vegetables, roasted vegetables and stuffed vegetables. There's multiple salad charts and soups—there's just a lot of vegetables in the book. And I think that reflects how I cook and eat. I feel like my home kitchen is just full of vegetables. And I eat everything. There's meat and dairy and gluten and everything in the book. I've been someone who's definitely struggled with body image and eating disorder stuff. And having any restriction is not great for me. So I eat everything.

What's your overall sandwich philosophy?

I'm so glad you're bringing up this chart because I love sandwiches. I pretty much eat some kind of a sandwich every day, whether it's a breakfast sandwich or whatever. I think it is harder to make a good one than most people realize, but I also think it's hard to make a truly bad one. A sandwich is going to be great in general.

I'm not the first person to say this and I don't know who to attribute it to, but I've heard a million people say the best sandwich is one someone else makes for you. I think it's very true. My sense of that is usually people put more fat on a sandwich for someone else than they will for themselves. They'll put more mayo, more cheese, more oil and vinegar—you know all the things that make it really good. I think the sandwich chart shows you what I think makes a good sandwich, which is having a variety of textures and flavors, and just having the right amount of stuff—not too skimpy but not so huge, and the right mixtures of things so you really get a good punch, like something acidic, a tomato-y moment.

Also I love crusty, delicious bread, but having bread that doesn't hurt your mouth when you bite into it. I eat toast pretty much every morning. I love toast. It's probably my favorite food in the world, but when it comes to a sandwich—if I'm having a sandwich, not an open-faced sandwich, I want it lightly toasted. I want to be able to just bite through a sandwich without struggling.

On Instagram, I think people want to see these huge things with all those layers or the cross-section, but if you can't eat it, if it becomes a knife and fork thing, that's fine, it's probably delicious, but it's not a sandwich.

At the very start of the book, you talk about this neat little hack of placing a wet paper towel under the cutting board.

It's the first thing I always do. It stabilizes the cutting board so you have a nice safe surface. When I was in fifth grade, I was voted safety patrol captain. I was given a certificate; I have it on my wall. And I joke that I took it as a lifelong position. So when I see people cutting things on their cutting board at home and the cutting board is moving, it just makes me so nervous. [The paper towel] secures the board, and it makes chopping a lot more safe. And I think it's this intention-setting moment of like, “Yeah, I'm about to make some stuff. I'm setting up my space so that it supports me doing this.” That makes it as safe as possible. I feel how some people feel when they put on a particular uniform or outfit for an occasion. I'm doing this thing to mark that I'm about to make a meal. It gives you this little moment to center or ground yourself in the activity.

In the book you call it a “bit of learned wisdom.” What are some other bits of wisdom you wish home cooks knew?

I think a lot of these things have been highlighted for me teaching cooking classes online. People will be like, “Woah! What did you just do?” And it’s just things I’m doing to set up myself and my space, that I just do so automatically that I don't even always realize I'm doing it. And they're things I wouldn't necessarily write down in a recipe. The cutting board thing is a good example. Another example I gave in the book is every time I pour or scoop something sticky—something like molasses or honey or maple syrup or anything like that—I always take a damp kitchen towel with hot water and wipe the edge of that jar or bottle before I put the cap back on. And that means every time I undo the cap it's not stuck to the jar and there's not sticky goo coming down the side of the jar. Take this extra little second to think about your future self in the same space and the next time you reach for a little honey you're not having to pry the jar open and fight with it.

Are there any kitchen tools that you wish more people knew about?

One I write about in the book that I'm always pushing on people—I actually just sent my best friend two of them—are small offset spatulas. I just think they're so useful. [I use them] for sandwiches, spreading mayo, Russian dressing, mustard, whatever you're putting on a sandwich. They're great for spreading cream cheese on toast. They're obviously great for frosting things like a cake. They're just handy. The other thing I use them for all the time is when I'm pan frying something like latkes. This time of year I make a lot of zucchini fritters, corn fritters and small little crispy pancake things. I find it hard to get into a small skillet with a big spatula. Actually I find flipping pancakes to be pretty difficult, and I use two small offset spatulas all the time. One I slip under the thing and one I kind of hold it on top and it allows you to hold it on both the bottom and top so you have more control. Especially if you're frying something like a latke, you don't want to get hot oil on yourself and having a little bit more control helps.

That little offset-ness—it’s not a flat spatula—it allows your hands to be slightly above the surface level. It's just such a great tool. They're great for taking cookies off of a sheet pan. I use them sometimes to do things I shouldn't do with them, like pry things open. If you're taking a loaf of banana bread out of a loaf pan or anything out of a cake pan, you can reach for a knife to do the edge but a little offset spatula is gentler on your cookware. It's just perfect.

You’re also a big fan of the immersion blender.

I think it's so underrated. I get asked a lot, “Should I get a blender or a food processor?” And I tell people to get a food processor and an immersion blender because you can get most of the things done with those two. An immersion blender is so much cheaper than a regular blender. It's so much easier to clean. If you're doing soups or stews, something where you want to thicken some of it, you can put your immersion blender in the pot and use it just for a little bit. You can also puree the whole thing.

One thing you say in the book is it's not cheating to use flavor-packed ingredients. What are some of your favorites?

Home cooks do so much, so it is absolutely not cheating. Using ingredients like kimchi and pickles and pre-made sauces. I use Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce all the time. You don't have to make everything from scratch and I think embracing these ingredients that have a lot of flavor allows you to make food that has a lot of flavor without you having to do all the work of building that flavor. I think a lot of people feel a lot of pressure when they cook at home to make everything from scratch and make everything so beautiful and make everything ready for social media and to impress and wow.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's just not a sustainable way to cook for myself and the people I love. I find a lot more enjoyment in the process when I simplify things, and one of the ways to do that is to get a little help in the form of a pre-made curry paste or ketchup. It's never gonna taste as good as Heinz so why would I [make it]?

Thank you for having the bravery to say what so many are thinking.

When I'm at a restaurant and they are like, “Oh here's your homemade ketchup,” I'm like, “That's so nice of you. Do you have Heinz?” I just don't want it.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Headshot by Natalie Chitwood.
All other photos by Julia Turshen.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.