Between recipes of hojicha tiramisu, brown butter buckwheat madeleines, and a plum-drizzled cardamom cruller, Tanya Bush traces her personal coming of age. The narrative cookbook Will This Make You Glad (Chronicle Books) takes place throughout one flour-flecked 12 months within the Brooklyn-based author and pastry chef’s life. At 23 years outdated—depressed, unsure, and in a stalling relationship—she takes up baking and finds it an act of transformation, through which sugar and butter turn into one other sort of sustenance.
An urge for food for all times grows as she goes from her personal tiny galley kitchen to a Tuscan agriturismo and a Brooklyn bakery. Succeeding in small, candy thrives—like mastering a meringue—parallels our narrator’s self-discovery, the guide’s 50-something recipes getting extra technical as we progress by way of her story and pursuit of happiness.
Now 29, Bush is a co-editor and co-founder of Cake Zine (alongside Aliza Abarbanel)—a print journal that makes use of meals as a lens on human conduct and tradition. Between that work, her meals writing, and her function as pastry chef at New York’s neighborhood restaurant Little Egg, she’s cultivated a voice that’s confident, lyrical, and trustworthy. Will This Make You Glad proposes that failure—within the kitchen or in any other case—may be scrumptious.
Beneath, Bush talks with Vogue concerning the candy and saucy narrative arc of Will This Make You Glad, discovering consolation and chaos within the kitchen, and desserts she will be able to’t cease occupied with.
Vogue: You’ve simply completed off Steak Zine, a one-off, non-dessert-led version of Cake Zine. How has it been to maneuver from desserts to carnivorous territory?
Tanya Bush: We’ve acquired an incredible line-up of contributors. We assigned 5 fiction writers we admire to put in writing items from the attitude of a server, bartender, prepare dinner, or a maître d’ on the platonic ultimate of a steakhouse. Brooks Headley, the chef at Superiority Burger, wrote about what it’s prefer to personal a lacto-vegetarian restaurant in a meat-hungry city. His cookbook Fancy Desserts was very formative for me. Steak Zine additionally has a marbled cowl and is… formed like a steak!
When did you begin asking your self the query, Will this make me glad? And the way did that evolve into the guide?
I began baking within the early days of the pandemic. I used to be unmoored, depressed, and unemployed. The broader cultural sensibility was that baking banana bread might quell our existential malaise; I initially lambasted the thought. On a slew of SSRIs, I didn’t assume it might make me glad.
Then I began having fun with the method of creating one thing. I had an nameless Instagram account referred to as Will This Make Me Glad, and for years I earnestly looked for the reply. I encountered shiny cookbooks presenting the right completed product—they weren’t articulating the mess, humiliation, failure, and rejection that felt indelible to the method. A lot later, I wished to put in writing a cookbook with a story element that encapsulated reworking the self by way of the kitchen. I need the reader to expertise what this fumbling younger lady goes by way of, and for the recipes to develop together with her rising self-assuredness.
Did the construction all the time current so naturally?
I wished it to happen over the course of a 12 months, which imposed constraints. One of many causes I really like baking is that there’s room for experimentation and to play inside guidelines.
To me, a cookbook is a snapshot of a second in time. I wished the recipes to reflect that with seasonality. Additionally they get more and more troublesome because the narrator—a youthful model of myself—will get higher. We begin with cookies, scones, and fundamentals like pastry cream and browning butter. By the tip, we’re making multi-component pavlovas. It’s a coming-of-age story, chronicling time by way of meals.
