Julia Turshen’s New Cookbook Redefines ‘Health Food’ in a Body-Positive—And Delicious—Way

Julia Turshens New Cookbook Redefines Health Food in a BodyPositiveAnd DeliciousWay
Photo: Courtesy of Julia Turshen

When it comes to food, the concept of "health" has become an increasingly fraught one; for proof, all you need to do is look at the many eating plans that market themselves as revolutionary new ways of making you feel good about yourself, when really, they're just...diets, which have been shown to be ineffective as a long-term means of keeping off weight. That's why cook, writer and all-around food expert Julia Turshen's new cookbook Simply Julia: 110 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food feels so revolutionary; along with powerful essays, childhood memories, and love letters to her wife Grace, Turshen's book contains recipes that prioritize taste and accessibility, not weight loss.

In a recent excerpt from the book published by Bon Appetit, Turshen described her long-running quest to leave diet culture behind and feel good in her body, writing, "For as long as I’ve always loved food, I’ve also been as conﬂicted about consuming it." (Incidentally, Turshen's story inspired me to quit dieting after a lifelong battle with disordered eating, something I divulged during our call in a shameless moment of TMI that Turshen was, nonetheless, extremely gracious about.) Below, find a conversation with Turshen about Simply Julia, COVID-19, food, queerness, body peace and much more:

The experience of reading Simply Julia feels so organic, as though you just jotted things down as you thought of them, but obviously so much work went into it; about how long were you working on the book in total?

It's been two years between when I started on it and talking about it now. I basically turned in the first draft in February 2020, so that means I had not only written all the recipes, but they had all been tested and I had written all the intros. What was different for me with this book, as opposed to previous books, is that my wife was a big part of the recipe testing. My book schedule kind of coincided with her closing her business, so she dove into that process with me, which was actually really amazing and helped me to be a better teacher in this book than I've been before. I was planning to shoot all the photos in March 2020—you know, a team of people turning my house into Camp Cookbook for a week, which is what I've done on my previous books and has been a great experience. That plan went out the window [with COVID-19], but then I remembered I had the phone number for this amazing woman Melina Hammer, who lives ten minutes from me. She's a super-talented food photographer and stylist, so I reached out to her and was like, "Maybe we could figure out a safe way to do this, if you're interested and available." We basically shot the entire book over the course of a month—just the two of us, no other assistance, although we both have very supportive spouses who were very helpful. And we were never in the same room.

Wow! How did that work?

I would prep whatever we were shooting that day and put it in various containers with tons of labels and notes, I planned out each shot with reference photos, and I would pack all this stuff up in a box and send it to Melina; sometimes I would slip in something funny like a ceramic my wife made at summer camp, or my grandmother's dish, things that were small but important to me. I would drop it all off at Melina's doorstep, drive home, and then we would just text all day. She would set up the shot and send me a picture, and, you know, I'd ask her to move something a little bit this way or that way. That's how we made all the photos. I'm so hands-on with every aspect of my work, down to the design and everything, and I just wasn't in the room, so I had to let go a little bit. That was a really good exercise. Then I got to edit my book as the pandemic progressed.

Speaking of the pandemic, did you intend for the book to be sort of calming to the reader in a stressful time?

There are a few things I was trying to accomplish with the book, and one was to help readers feel exactly what you just described. I'm very anxious about everything except cooking at home—it's the place where I feel my most calm and confident and resourceful—but I feel like cooking at home stresses so many people out. I just feel like if I can help alleviate some of that stress and give us some calm, I want to do that, because I can't imagine how bad my anxiety would be if I didn't have cooking in my life.

It's been such a hard year for the queer food world; how have you and your wife stayed connected to that side of life?

Well, my married life looks very different than my single life, and has involved moving out of Brooklyn. [Laughs.] I feel so grateful for the life we have, but in terms of like food and the queer community, I really miss going to other people's houses for meals. When I was like in my twenties in Manhattan, and then briefly in Brooklyn with my wife, I spent a lot of time basically at Cubbyhole

It's still open, thank God! Although we did lose Ginger's...

It's so hard, because the lesbian bar scene in general was already dwindling. In some cases, that's leading to more inclusive spaces, but I also wonder if I'm the problem, because I just stay home with my wife and make dinner.

I would call that 'the dream', not 'the problem'!

[Laughs] Maybe! Simply Julia is really special to me, though, because I've written about my wife before in other cookbooks and recipes, but I love doing it in a way that feels totally relaxed. There's no disclaimer about my same-sex marriage, because it doesn't require a disclaimer! It feels so natural to me to do, but it also feels like incredibly important, because I think cookbooks have an amazing power to normalize things that have been othered. They're very friendly, warm things we keep in our homes. I consumed so much food media when I was growing up, and I wonder all the time: What would it have been like if I'd been 13 or 14, flipping through a cookbook at home, and it was full of love letters between women?

Your Bon Appetit excerpt essay meant so much to me, and many other readers also struggling with diet culture and body image, I'm sure. How are you feeling about food and body stuff these days?

Having a peaceful relationship with my body is, to me, just like home cooking—it's a daily practice. It's something I pay attention to, and work on, and learn about every day. Just yesterday, I put on a pair of pants that fit me but used to be looser, and I had a really hard time with that. It's funny that we were just talking about queerness, because talking about my body in this very public way has felt to me almost like a coming-out of sorts. I had felt so closeted and shameful about the topic! I've always felt good about cooking, but I haven't always felt that way about eating, and that has been really confusing for me because when I think about food, I feel so positive about making it, but I have felt so fraught and guilty and scared and just isolated when it comes to eating that food. That has been incredibly confusing. In this book, I wanted to be just totally honest and talk about how I've gotten to a place where I am trying to feel as much joy and freedom when it comes to eating as I do cooking.