In this cultural moment of clean eating,
wellness and inluencers, Ruby Tandoh has
stepped up as a gutsy, radical advocate for eating
whatever you want, writesNADIA BAILEY.
“Food cannot
give you a
glow. Food
cannot solve
your ailments.
Food is food.”T
he Great British Bake Offis a strange sort of
reality TV show, trading in nostalgia at its most
twee and food porn at its most sugar-coated.
The contestants are earnest. The hosts hover.
What little rivalry there is has about as much
bite as a Bakewell tart. In other words,Bake Off
is an escapist fantasy – and an unlikely launching pad, perhaps,
for a young, queer, mixed-race woman who’s concerned with
putting her politics firmly centre-plate.
Ruby Tandoh was, by her own account, “a nervous and
shy and insecure person” when she competed on series four of
The Great British Bake Offin 2013. Then 21, she applied for the
show simply because she was bored and needed a project.
“Even applying forBake Offwas out of character for me,”
she says. “I know this is a really backwards way of doing it, but
I thought, ‘If I apply for this competition, then I’ll learn to bake’.”
In the tent, Tandoh distinguished herself as
a talented baker and a brutal perfectionist. She
exhibited a dislike of fussiness and an emotional,
rather than technical, approach to cooking.
Other contestants measured their bakes against
the criteria set by judges Mary Berry and Paul
Hollywood; Tandoh seemed to set herself against
an impossibly high internal standard that she
could never hope to reach. She was prone to
crying in frustration when a bake went sideways,
or when she received anything less than glowing
feedback. This, along with her long limbs and
telegenic looks, rubbed many viewers of the show the wrong
way.Bake Offmay trade in old-fashioned British civility, but
the same can’t be said of its audience.
“It forced me to learn lots of life lessons very quickly,” says
Tandoh of dealing with the pitfalls of sudden fame. She came
to terms with the fact that people would see her–ayoung
woman with the nerve to express her emotions – and they
would pass judgement. She got all the way through to the
finals, where she baked a passable three-tier Victoria sponge
wedding cake (“Quite often a wedding is just an exercise in
narcissism,” she observed on camera at the time. “I can’t be
bothered”) – but lost to the contestant who created edible floral
confetti out of dehydrated fruit.
These days, away from the fuss and bunting ofBake Off,
Tandoh is free to cook – and eat – exactly as she pleases. She
lives in Sheffield with her fiancée, Leah Pritchard, and now tends
to lean away from complicated recipes and specialist ingredients
in favour of food that nourishes her on a different level.
“I made some Greek food last night,” she says. “I’d been all
the way down to London and I was exhausted, but we had thisfillo pastry in the fridge, so I made a spinach
and feta pie, and butter beans cooked with
garlic and tomato for the side.” Outside
it was snowing, but what they ate tasted like
summer. It was, she says, utterly wonderful.
This meal encapsulates much of what
Tandoh’s way of cooking has come to represent:
expressive, flavour-focused, nourishing in
the sense that it feeds an emotional need as well as a bodily
one. AfterBake Offwas over, she began writing columns for
The Guardian,ElleUK and other publications, which forced
her to define what kind of food person she wanted to be.
“It was a very quick evolution, trying to figure out what
I stood for in the kitchen,” she says. “When you’re writing
a recipe column for a newspaper, you have to be working
towards originality and doing something that’s not going to
be overfamiliar to a ‘foodie’ readership. So sometimes I had
to use techniques or ingredients that were more obscure or
more expensive than what I’d employ in my day-to-day.”
She wrote columns in defence ofcheap white bread,
celebrity cookbooks and high-street Christmas drinks. She
reviewed fast-food chains with the serious attention and
rapt enjoyment food critics typically reserve for fine-dining
establishments. She wrote deeply researched essays skewering
clean eating and its advocates (Deliciously Ella,the
Hemsley sisters et al). Two cookbooks followed:
Crumb: A Baking Book, about the joys of simple
baking, andFlavour: Eat What You Love,which
encouraged readers to stop thinking in terms
of calories, prestige, health or fashion, and
to focus on the pleasures of how food tastes.
Her third book, an uncategorisable memoir/
polemic/cookbook, is the culmination of
everything she’s learned. InEat Up! Food,
Appetite And Eating What You Want, Tandoh
favours accessible ingredients and practical
outcomes; she’s interested in heartiness over lightness, comfort
over virtue, emotional pay-off over finicky aesthetics. Her
tastes run towards recipes that deliver a sense of abundance:
a Ghanaian groundnut soup, a nod to her heritage, is nutty,
substantial and loaded with Scotch bonnet chilli. Gingerbread
cake is infused with whiskey over three days until it transforms
into a squishy, boozy joy. Dumplings occur often.
The book elucidates, across 11 freewheeling chapters, what
she stands for in the kitchen. It covers topics as broad as the
Black Panther Party’s social outreach and why she adores model
Chrissy Teigen. The topic of colonialism comes up the same
number of times as Cadbury Creme Eggs. It’s also deeply
personal, touching on love and identity, bodies and sexuality.
Rather than it fitting into a neat category, Tandoh characterises
the book as a series of essays about how she relates to food.
“Some of them are about my relationship with food, because
I can’t talk about food without delving into my personal➤GOURMET TRAVELLER 83PHOTOGRAPHY ILKA & FRANZ FOR
THE GUARDIAN