90 JANUARY 2020
amateurish state I was in and the prowess
of the baking show, where I wanted to be. I
powered forward. I got on the show. I made
the finals. I had done it.
But this kind of dreaming has its down-
falls. I guess that’s why I’m wary of telling
the story of how I got into baking, filled as it
is with all those big dreams. When you live
like this, you’re hungry for a sense of pur-
pose that lies just out of reach. You tumble
forward, off-balance, breathless, in an-
ticipation of the moment when you finally
“succeed.” Meaning is located in the impos-
sible opera cake, or the baked
Alaska, or the meringue butter-
cream: that thing that one day
you will master. What you miss
is the here and now, the meaning
embedded in the everyday.
So, this is a recipe that resists
romanticism and glamour and ambition. It
is stubbornly brown, weighty, even ugly–not
a glistening beacon of hope and change. I
like this plainness. With recipes like this, I
have no choice but to immerse myself in
the rhythms of making: the careful chop-
ping of prunes, the sound of batter spooned
softly into the tin, the immediate reality of
eggs, sugar, and flour. I am not a shimmer-
ing haze of “if only” and “one day.” I am
concrete, finite, already complete. I am in
my kitchen, sitting quietly in front of the
oven. My hunger is just for a piece of cake,
nothing more.
THIS HUMBLE RECIPE KEEPS
ME HERE AND NOW, IN THE
FABRIC OF THE EVERYDAY.
by RUBY TANDOH
THE
BEAUTY
OF
PLAIN
I AVOID TALKING ABOUT HOW I STARTED
baking. When people ask, I throw out, “Oh,
just when I was at university,” followed by
a self-deprecating aside about how I was
eating tins of chickpeas for dinner because
I couldn’t cook worth a damn, but boy,
could I fuss over a croquembouche. These
insincerities fly out of my mouth with well-
practiced ease, and I whisk us on to the next
topic. ‘‘Did you get your sink fixed yet?” I
will ask, a little too urgently.
There is some truth to the story. Any liar
knows that a good fib knots itself together
with the truth. So when I say
that I learned to bake at univer-
sity, what I really ought to say is
that I applied for The Great Brit-
ish Bake Off barely a week into
starting coursework toward my
bachelor’s degree. I applied with-
out knowing anything about how to make a
cake rise or whisk eggs to glossy meringue. I
figured that having this external obligation—
something for which I needed to practice,
improve, and impress—would give me the
impetus I needed to learn.
It did. I made cream cheese–filled Russian
vatrushka with raspberries in the middle. I
learned to make phyllo pastry by stretching
dough again and again and again before
teasing it out to a sheet as thin as a Bible
page. I spent hours online sifting through
baking blogs for any bit of expertise that
would help me bridge the gap between the
For author and baker
Ruby Tandoh’s
Earl Grey Tea Bread,
see recipe at right.
