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 one 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 for me 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, because 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, “Oh, there’s a book here.” I kind of 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?