In her new cookbook Will This Make You Happy (Chronicle, out now), pastry chef and writer Tanya Bush takes an unconventional approach. Alongside recipes for pavlovas and panna cotta, she also narrates her unusual career path, complete with messy coming-of-age stories and the experience of teaching herself to bake in her early twenties.
With gorgeous illustrations by Forsyth Harmon, Bush recounts all the mistakes she made while frosting cakes and baking cookies and her dissatisfaction with her long-term relationship while nursing a crush on a dancer. The cookbook-memoir feels like a natural expansion of Bush’s penchant for melding food and literature, which is also on full display in Cake Zine, the literary mag that she founded. (The next issue, she says, will focus on steak, as her editorial ambitions go beyond “the pastry case.”)
PW talked with Bush about food writing, embracing imperfection, and the pleasures of baking.
Why did you decide to do this hybrid cookbook-memoir instead of something more traditional?
I always knew I wanted to write a narrative cookbook, which is a marriage of both food education and narrative where both parts are equally constituted to the project. I'm a self-taught baker, so over the course of a year, my experience was failure, humiliation, and exhilaration. I was interested in this idea that baking emphasizes transformation, and this is a book about trying to transform the self. I wanted a reader to immerse themselves in the story. When I'm reading something, it can galvanize me into action. I was hoping that a reader might recognize themselves in their early existential twenties and then it might galvanize them into the kitchen.
Forsyth is such an incredible writer and artist. When I was learning how to bake, I was encountering all of these blockbuster cookbooks with glossy, gorgeous pictures. And that's actually not entirely akin to the experience that I was having. It felt really important to just have this lived in, messy, honest approach to the visuals of the cookbook.
Aside from the illustrations, that visual sentiment shows in the photos of some of the recipes too.
I was really clear that I did not want photos for every recipe, because that creates this ideal that someone who's following the recipe has to try and replicate. For the photos, we shot them entirely in my apartment over the course of four days. We really wanted them to feel lived in. There was movement and play and things that are not typically a part of an aspirational cookbook—there's this beautiful shot of dishes in the sink.
Was there any type of specific food writing that inspired you while you were putting this book together?
There’s this amazing, robust history of people playing with form and genre and expanding what the bounds of food writing can be. Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking is the north star. I love how smart and incisive and hilarious she is and her anti-perfectionism ethos. There’s this book called Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again by Daniel Licht that is this philosophical treatise on cooking with recipes to immerse yourself into. It's such a smart organization—you make a roast chicken, then you make stock with the bones, and then with the stock you make a risotto. It really has this beautiful elliptical flow. There were so many books I took a lot of inspiration from, and so many wonderful food writers—Ruby Tandoh, Rebecca May Johnson, John Birdsall—these incredible writers who are thinking about food and living and that helped me make sense of my own appetite.
How was it reflecting back on this period of your life while writing this? It’s the beginning of your career but also tumultuous for your personal life as well.
It’s very strange to be both the subject and the perspective. This is very much a version of myself where I think of her as a narrator in the same way that one might think of communing with their younger self in therapy. This narrator is so hungry for connective creativity and a sense of fulfillment and purpose. At some point I planted a lot of different seeds and hoped some of them would come to fruition. And I feel really lucky now that I get to write about pastry freelance, and run a magazine that is about dessert. I'm baking professionally in a restaurant and I worked on a book that's about that.
In a certain way I think I maybe actualized what I was hungry for, but it changes the nature of your relationship to the thing. After this book comes out and I have time to contend with everything that has happened, I'm going to be able to reconstitute my relationship with [baking] and really get back to embodied pleasures that I loved at the beginning.
