ALL CONSUMING

British baker and cookbook author Tandoh dives into the world of food and predilection.

Most of us live in a world of abundance, and there’s a problem there, writes Tandoh, in the paradox of plenty: “The more we have, the less we seem able to enjoy it.” That gives rise to diet fads, and “weird culinary nationalism,” and a certain unbending devotion to certain foods at the expense of others. That plenty comes in information as well as food, with recipes available everywhere and with food trends (one, she notes, being smashburgers) spread worldwide thanks to the internet. Even so, she adds, most home cooks will tend to “cycle through the same couple of dozen recipes for the rest of our lives.” Part of Tandoh’s evident purpose is to shake those cooks out of complacency and try something new, even playful—for which she praises fellow cookbook writer Yotam Ottolenghi—and fun. One possibility: sausage and gochujang pasta, the latter being a Korean chili paste that renders an orange sauce—and orange, says one chef, “makes people hungry.” Tandoh is a great explainer with a gift for a memorable turn of phrase, as when she renders judgment on bubble tea as representing a story “about displacement, ruin and growth,” noting along the way that bubble tea is dominated by corporate chains because the machinery to produce it is expensive, lending a certain sameness to bubble tea shops. As to home entertaining, Tandoh says, smartly, “Delusional thinking transcends class,” meaning that any such gathering is likely to blow any budget and produce entirely too much food, procured from the surfeit of massive supermarkets around the globe: “So many temples, and just one god.” Tandoh’s knowing classification of the three types of cookbooks is worth the price of admission alone.

An entertaining, endlessly instructive look at why we like what we do in our “anarchic web of desire.”