when you want, where you want.
Ruby Tandoh Wants Justice for Toad-in-the-Hole
Illustration: Ryan Inzana
After placing second on The Great British Bake Off in 2013, Ruby Tandoh — then the show’s youngest-ever contestant — experienced what she calls the “Bake Off catapult effect.” Still in college, she was very suddenly thrown into the nascent bubble of food media, writing a baking column for The Guardian and eventually becoming a regular contributor to the London-based food magazine Vittles; over the past decade, she has also written four cookbooks. More recently, she’s become interested in how a new age of food media has shaped the way people actually eat. “I was looking at this particular type of online recipe — the crispy, crunchy, creamy, chewy, or whatever it is,” she says. “I was desperate to figure out, Well, why is this happening?” That question led to her forthcoming book, All Consuming, a cultural history of our changing appetites. Tandoh’s appetite is still mostly animated by baking, though. Over the past week in London, she made a delectably rumpled toad-in-the-hole, a slightly regrettable apricot tart, and an Ishiguro-inspired seed cake. “When I cook, it tends to be because I’m interested in something,” she says. “And usually, that means baking.”
Wednesday, August 20
Yesterday, my friend Oliver, a baker, presented me with a crag of nut-brown soda bread. Soda bread is a simple art — no yeast, no waiting around, just the instant and violent reaction of baking soda and acid. The result is a tenderhearted brute of a loaf: forbidding crust around a soft, sweet-smelling crumb. In a world of micromanaged sourdoughs and brioche buns, it has gravitas. This is how it came to be that this morning, I have the first good breakfast I’ve had in weeks. Instead of the punitive granola that I never should have bought in the first place, I tear a fist-size chunk out of this loaf and warm it in the oven, then pry it open and daub it with salted butter and raspberry jam. Emboldened, I decide to roll with this “enjoying breakfast” thing and follow this up with a bowl of yogurt and half a grapefruit.
This is not, I need to stress, how I usually live. I’m having a few days off work and I’m feeling a little prissy. Midmorning, I make a smoothie with mango and apple and enough ginger that it hurts. My approach to health basically adheres to the more-is-more principle: I resent making sacrifices, so I just eat everything I like and then if I want to please my body, I just throw in a few extras for luck — a smoothie or a bowl of granola tacked onto days of toasted sandwiches and chocolate bars.
Because I’m having these remedial few days of rest, I go to the baths midafternoon — an intense sauna-and-steam-room complex in an unprepossessing building in an East London industrial estate. My partner, Jonathan, told me they served food there, which I was glad to hear, until he told me the food was kippers. Not the time-honored Russian snack roulette — not a rosette of pickled herring, not blini, not a little bit of cured meat or some vodka but kippers. All this is to say that I do not eat there.
For dinner, I have the leftovers of yesterday’s toad-in-the-hole, a staple of British comfort food that I have been trying and failing to explain to Americans for pretty much the entirety of my career in food. Think popovers but with the batter cooked in a beef dripping or lard in a big roasting dish. Into this, you put half a dozen fat pink sausages (you do not want an artisan sausage here). When it cooks, the batter rises suddenly, setting in the seductive undulations of a freshly rumpled bed. I cannot tell you why it’s called toad-in-the-hole. I had it with gravy and cabbage and potatoes mashed with an immoderate amount of butter. It was perfect.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I start making an apricot frangipane tart at 9 p.m., which means that I am still washing up deep into the night. Nobody asked me to do this. I make an unworkably crumbly shortcrust base because I messed up the measurements, but the filling is good: a sweet, spongy almond frangipane under brown-sugar apricot halves. Naturally, I’m too tired to eat it.
Thursday, August 21
I always start my day with instant coffee, mainly because it’s easier. While Jonathan sets up the test tubes and beakers for whatever insane specialist coffee he’s going to have that morning, all I have to do is scoop and go. I can’t go in for all that. Not before midday. Besides, Elizabeth David — the Julia Child of postwar British cookery — always drank instant coffee. Boeuf en daube, stuffed little songbirds, chicken stuffed with olives … and a teaspoon and a half of Kenco. I have some of last night’s apricot tart for breakfast and realize that it was not perhaps good enough to justify being sleep-deprived today.
I go to the ice rink near me and spend an hour trying to figure out how to stay upright. I am terrible at it, and I love it. Afterward, exhausted from the stress if not the actual exertion, I walk up the road to Wimpy. Wimpy is, for the uninitiated, Britain’s oldest and most out-of-touch burger-bar chain. Imagine an American diner but with the mannerisms of a British greasy-spoon café: There are knives and forks with which to eat your cheeseburger; there’s malt vinegar on the table for your chips; people in here are variously eating burgers, grill plates, and hot dogs, but all are pairing these with a mug of English tea. Wimpy reminds me of those drawings of lions by medieval scribes who had never seen one in their lives. It is British Americana at its best. I get the Fish in a Bun, an analogue of the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, and it is genuinely excellent. Naturally, I also order tea.
I have big plans for a bag of carrots that I bought on my way home, but then I get waylaid by work until way too late in the evening. Cooking presents a challenge — these days, I have a somewhat whimsical psychological block that makes it difficult to cook anything that I actually need, only things like apricot frangipane tarts. And so the gravel granola returns. I also pour a small ice-frosted glass of Chartreuse. I get a little rush when it strikes me that I am most likely the first person in the history of mankind to have this particular combo for dinner.
Friday, August 22
I don’t have breakfast this morning — I can’t let the granola humiliate me — so when I go to the supermarket, I go hungry. Instead of the sensible building blocks for a week’s worth of dinners, I come out with the following: a five-pack of sugared ring doughnuts, a pint of cookie-dough ice cream, butter, some pork-based snacks, and a nine-pack of toilet roll. The doughnuts are bad, and even though I should have expected this, I feel a little betrayed. When I was a kid and my mum went through a brief Evangelical turn, we went to a New Agey church where, after the service, they’d lay out about a hundred supermarket doughnuts on the trestle tables at the back of the room. (People needed the sugar hit after all that barefoot preaching and hand-waving.) I lived for those doughnuts. I periodically retry them now that I’m grown, but they never hit the same in the godless light of my adulthood.
I have a tin of cream-of-chicken soup for lunch, a textureless, edgeless taste experience and exactly what I need right now. And yet because of the way I started the day, I’ve entered chaos mode. I chase the soup with a log of cheddar cheese and a few cookies from a two-kilogram selection tin from Costco. When Jonathan comes home, he brings a little brown-butter canelé from a two-Michelin-star restaurant (he writes about restaurants, so this is a nice perk of the relationship). I eat this too with a mug of tea while we play Spelling Bee together on the sofa. I love these interludes, although it strikes me that my life is increasingly one of snacks and interludes. Where’s the real sustenance? Where’s the meat? I’ll figure that out later.
In the evening, we go to the cinema with a friend to watch Friendship, that newish Paul Rudd film. I smuggle in a packet of Mini Cheddars and a bag of ridged Prawn Cocktail Walkers crisps.
In the evening when we get home, we order takeout from an Indian restaurant near us and, driven by a fateful curiosity, choose something called “Dulwich butter chicken.” We knew even while we were ordering it that this was a bad idea, and did I detect the slightest curl of a smile on the guy who delivered this unbelievably poorly chosen dish? It was essentially the thinnest slices of chicken into Campbell’s cream-of-tomato soup. In fact, it may not even have been Campbell’s.
Saturday, August 23
Recently, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro — a gorgeous, tightly stylized story about a buttoned-up butler in interwar England. If you’ve read it, you will know it’s a cautionary tale about cowardice and displaced passion, but this is lost on me because it’s got me thinking about old-fashioned English baked goods. My attention has been drifting to the pies and pasties of the Redwall books, Tolkien’s breads, and the maximalist picnics of the Enid Blyton books. So I make a seed cake, a nearly extinct pound-cake-style recipe flavored with caraway seeds instead of vanilla. I use a recipe I found online from Fergus Henderson, co-founder of St. John, one of the few places in the U.K. where the cake is still served. It smells great, developing a deep gold fissure while it bakes. I sit near the oven, eating the “leftover” batter from the bowl. It is left over in the sense that I left it there, on purpose, precisely so that I could eat it.
I cut the cake into a few thick slices, then pack it into a rucksack with a stack of ham-and-mustard sandwiches, a pork pie, some green apples, and Tunnock’s caramel-wafer bars, as befits the antique English culinary mood I’ve been in. Jonathan and I extract our flat-tired bikes from their hangars and go on an adventure to Essex, eventually reaching a tiny early-medieval chapel at the very end of a long, flat peninsula on the North Sea. This place is head-spinningly old, a Saxon relic from the seventh century AD and commissioned by some guy called Sigeberht the Good. I can’t think of a better place to eat my seed cake.
By the time we get home, my ass is sore and we’re both hungry to the point of grouchiness. We order cheeseburgers and onion rings and hot-spiced fries from Meatliquor, and I pick up my audiobook just at the point where Stevens, the butler, is in a country tearoom and about to meet with his long-lost love.
Sunday, August 24
This morning, we go to Al Kareem to get my favorite breakfast in the city. We’ve invited our friend who lives not too far from here, but we’re embarrassed when it turns out that the sweetshop, which doubles as a breakfast spot on weekends, has reached unforeseen levels of hype. The queue is out the door, the mood is frantic, and our friend — whom I wanted to introduce to the magic of this place — has to wait outside for an hour for a table. The thing about this particular hype, though, is that, for once, it hasn’t come from the internet. Go around London on any given weekend and you’ll find any number of brunch places with conspicuous gaggles of people queuing for a megacroissant or some pancakes that are doing the rounds on TikTok. Al Kareem is different. The people here are families, and the hype mechanism is impassioned word of mouth.
But once we’re in there, seated by the uncle who by that point had lost almost all control of the room, all is forgiven. The food is as excellent as ever: chole and halwa with blistered, supple bhatura, fresh from the oil. Behind the counter, half a dozen guys crowd around a huge fryer, turning out puri at an astonishing rate. More stand guard over a vat of buttery, curd-flecked semolina halwa. Someone brings us sweet lassi, which comes in pint cups with a head of clotted cream.
Afterward, we walk and chat and stumble upon a street parade. We buy some tangy sour chews from a corner shop, then weave through the backstreets until we get to Udaya, a Keralan restaurant. We’re meant to be seeing a film soon, so Jonathan says he’ll just pop inside for a takeaway order. He orders chicken fry and mutton curry and rice, and we sit outside waiting for it while sipping on jeera soda and lemonade, talking about the seductions of the smell of frying curry leaves. We’re running late now; we anxiously scroll on our phones, checking how long it would take to get to the cinema, exactly which public-transport heist we might be able to pull off to get there on time. Anyway, we miss the film. But that chicken fry … everything happens for a reason.
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