Ruby Tandoh is an author, journalist, and former finalist on The Great British Bake Off. She has written three cookbooks and one book about the pleasures of eating. Her newest book, All Consuming, out this month from Knopf, is a deep dive into the cookbook industry, the democratization of restaurant criticism, the rise of hype food, and the myriad ways food culture has become mainstream culture. We recently spoke to Tandoh about the book and her ambivalence about the future of food media; here, an excerpt from the book’s first chapter. — Bettina Makalintal
Another day, it’ll be an unsolicited close-up of a chicken thigh, fresh out of the pan, with tortoiseshell caramelized skin. “They’re crunchy, they’re juicy,” Jordon Ezra King — the cook — says on the voiceover. “Gonna do it with herby rice, and some nice pickle-y fresh crunchy salad.” Or how about those few weeks when my For You Page was hacked by an Instagram-famous sausage and gochujang rigatoni? You crumble and fry sausage meat until it’s lightly browned, in pieces the size of granola clusters, then add gochujang, cream, shallot, Parmesan, breadcrumbs, and a few other things. You can tell it’s going to be as aggressively as a McDonald’s double cheeseburger. The recipe developer, Xiengni Zhou, narrates the video. “It’s quick, creamy, and kind of spicy,” she says, and the dish looks so good that you don’t even care that you’re getting déjà vu. The video has tens of thousands of likes.
Over the last few years, Mob — which was started by Ben Lebus in 2016 — has become one of Britain’s most successful cooking sites online. It has released eight cookbooks, has 3 million followers on Instagram, 1.4 million on TikTok, and over 100,000 people who pay for their recipes. Mob is one part of a massive transformation in how we cook. On Instagram, TikTok, and Substack, you’ll find searchable, compound-noun recipes like “sheet-pan miso maple mustard chicken” or adjective-savvy numbers that are “crispy” or “chewy” or “crunchy.” You know these flavors, you can anticipate how this particular assault of umami, salt, and sweet will make you feel. They use a weirdly placeless pantry of ingredients, everything from Sriracha to miso and cumin. And then there are the visuals — the photos and videos that seem to have been engineered to bypass rational thinking and go straight to the pleasure centers of the brain.
In the last 15 years, we’ve seen entire cooking dynasties built on recipes like this. Recipe developers like Alison Roman and Yotam Ottolenghi, who puts his name to Five-Spice Butternut Squash in Cheesy Custard. Even The New York Times, which used to have buttoned-up, if technically flawless, recipes for things like chicken chasseur, has shifted toward craveable, sucker-punch recipes. Do you want the 1988 Hunter’s Chicken, with a photo of a French country-kitchen-style table, with crystal wine glasses and produce in the background? Or would you in fact prefer Roasted Chicken Thighs with Hot Honey and Lime, which is illustrated with a close-crop photo of the plump, chiaroscuro-rendered chicken thighs, visibly juicy, with lime wedges wrung out alongside? It’s about how you market a recipe.
I’ve just seen a new feature on the New York Times site: “44 Creamy, Dreamy White Bean Recipes.” They’ve got Miso Leeks with White Beans, Refried White Beans with Chile-Fried Eggs, Lemony White Beans with Anchovy and Parmesan. I don’t know if these are the best recipes in the world, but they are unbelievably popular. But maybe, in an age where most of us get most of our recipes from the internet, the best ones are precisely the favored few that actually grab your attention.
Right now there are more recipes available to a person than at any other point in history — a number that’s increasing every minute despite the fact that most of us will cycle through the same couple of dozen recipes for the rest of our lives. To beat the competition, everything has to evolve along increasingly weird vectors to one-up the recipe that came before. And so “spaghetti and meatballs” eventually turns into “creamy linguine alla vodka with crispy cheesy meatball bites,” plus a soft-porn video of balls getting rolled through a slick of buttery sauce. In a world of seemingly infinite choice, the message is no longer just “this thing is possible,” or “practical,” “authentic,” or even “delicious.” It has to be: “This thing will make you see god.”
In 2002, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, along with a few business partners, opened a deli in London inspired by the flavors of the eastern Mediterranean. They called it Ottolenghi, and in 2008 this also became the title of their first book. Recipes were lively and self-consciously modern, not beholden to tradition — least of all the English tradition of meat and two plain veg. To a certain extent, they drew on their upbringings in Jerusalem (Ottolenghi is Israeli, Tamimi is Palestinian), but they resisted simplistic readings of the kind of food they cooked. “Food has no boundaries” — this was the party line. And so there were Portobello Mushrooms with Pearl Barley and Preserved Lemon and Cauliflower and Cumin Fritters with Lime Yogurt. “I want drama in the mouth,” as Ottolenghi put it in one interview. And so they concentrated on high-impact recipes where contrast was prioritized: crunchy toppings, hot drizzles, yogurt dips, and kaleidoscopic salads.
These days, this approach is so ubiquitous that you’d think recipes have always worked this way — that you run through permutations and combinations of ingredients, remixing familiar flavors until you settle on something that feels new. It seems obvious to us that a recipe writer is also a recipe developer. But this is not how recipes have always worked. Chefs have been coming up with conspicuously inventive new menus forever, and home cooks have always improvised. But when it came to cookbooks, few had ever done this mix-and-match methodology with the singular dedication of the Ottolenghi syndicate.
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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In the Ottolenghi universe, cooking is modular and iterative. This was the charm in those early days, and the reason those books shaped the outlook of an entire generation of recipe writers: because people were reminded that you could play with food. Fusion is crucial. Ottolenghi and Tamimi started with a few flavors loosely drawn from the Levant and twisted them with other ingredients. Today, in what writer Navneet Alang calls “the age of the global pantry,” all base units of food vocabulary are fair game — you can mix miso with British black currants, harissa with lasagne. This is great news for cooks, but even better news for recipe developers, who are finding that the number of possible recipe formulations has exponentially increased.
The most successful recipe developers now are testing the limits of the methods Ottolenghi popularized. When I spoke to Lebus — the founder of Mob — he compared the process to making music. There are countless ways of reconfiguring the notes, most of them exciting. Subscribe to Caroline Chambers’s newsletter, “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking,” and you’ll get recipes like Sheet-Pan Miso Maple Mustard Chicken with Sweet Potato and Sprouts. Right now, it’s the most popular food newsletter on Substack.
What countless internet-based recipe developers understand is that a recipe works not just if it works, but if it sells. You used to buy a one-size-fits-all cookbook, chosen based on how you feel about the author and their authority: maybe Freda DeKnight’s The Ebony Cookbook, or Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course. You could get more or less everything you needed from a book like this — a basic puff pastry explainer, a fail-safe recipe for roast turkey, chocolate cake, baked Alaska — everything a pre-digital cook could conceivably need, and a few extras thrown in for luck. But even in the biggest book, and some of them were literally called bibles or encyclopedias, the choice was finite. For the most part, you would have to take what you were given. A brownie was a brownie. If it was a mind-blowing brownie… well, that’s a perk.
The power of cookbooks is relational. It’s about how the recipes are arranged, which things are included, which things conspicuously aren’t, the shape and substance of a foreword and how it relates to the text, who wrote it, and who they wrote it for. I have cookbooks that map out an entire cuisine, and other ones that are more like memoirs, and some that are just compendia of plausibly helpful kitchen trivia, but in any case, they add up to more than the sum of the recipes inside them. But when a recipe breaks free on the internet, everything...