This Cookbook Will Soothe You

Cooking is a soothing practice. There’s something calming about gathering different ingredients to make something new. Creativity in the different moving parts—building flavor in a soup, brining a turkey, searing a delicate fish—soothes anxieties, at least for a time. When I read Julia Turshen’s cookbooks, I can tell she gets that. She also understands that for some people, figuring out what to cook can cause anxiety, and she wants to rectify that.

Her latest, What Goes With What helps home cooks more easily decide what to make. In her introduction, Turshen describes her thought process of wanting her new cookbook to be a resource to help people decide what to cook. The whole structure of the book is structured around guiding people to delicious combinations of ingredients that make for great dishes.

The book includes charts of different combinations for salads, sandwiches, grain bowls, soups, and more. These charts give home cooks ideas, yes, but they also teach the reader what kinds of ingredients work well together. For example, the roasted vegetable includes spaces for the vegetable, salt, and an oil of some kind to coat them, and something nice and acidic to go on them when they’re done roasting.

In between sections of the cookbook, Julia includes mini-essays about how she uses boullion, her reflections on teaching, or how she dipped a toe into farming. These little glimpses into her life help readers get to know the person behind the recipes. She’s a home cook, too, and she wants her readers to know that she’s in the weeds with us.

And of course, the recipes—oh my goodness, they are so good! Honestly, I’ve rarely seen a salad recipe that has made me instantly hungry like this. The instructions are simple, with places for easy substitutions. The food photography is STUNNING.
For days now, I’ve kept What Goes With What close by, picking it up throughout the day and browsing through it in spare moments between tasks. I’m not sure if it’s too early to say, but I think I may love this one even more than Simply Julia. It’s just that good.