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“I felt a little bit nervous about doing this because my cooking has been so chaotic,” Ruby Tandoh tells me when we sit down to talk about her grocery shopping habits. Ten years after her debut on the Great British Baking Show as a 21-year-old, the prolific writer and author has just recently moved from a rural home in Yorkshire to London, and her well-established cooking and shopping routine has “gone out the window,” as she puts it. “I don’t know if I can tell you truthfully how I shop. I can only tell you the fragments of my improvised day-to-day.”
Thankfully, London is full of mesmerizing freezer aisles, and Tandoh has a way of fine-tuning her cooking style to the mood she’s in, without feeling obligated to make it look easier or more glamorous than it is. As she writes in the intro of her latest cookbook, Cook As You Are, “Much of the time, we’re so stuck striving that we lose sight of the good stuff already right here in front of us: the way onions cook in butter, the fun of a corner-store snack haul, the guidance of our own gut feelings.” We caught up about what’s been on her mind (and on her grocery list) the most lately.
What kind of cooking mood have you been in lately?
Generally, this winter, when I have cooked, it has been either absolutely absurd, completely unnecessary stuff divorced from any sense of sustenance and day-to-day life, or on the other end of the spectrum, it’s been the easiest conceivable things. To give you an example of this, I’ve been cooking a lot of gnocchi because it literally doesn’t even take 3 minutes to cook, compared to pasta, which takes 10 (which feels overwhelming—I don’t know why). But on the flip side, I made a croquembouche in the last month, which is one of the stupidest things someone could make.
Has moving to London changed your shopping?
When I was living in Yorkshire, I was in a village where I had to walk down an extremely long, extremely steep hill to get to the one shop that had actual ingredients. So I was very organized. I could usually get most of what I wanted in town, but it needed a bit of preplanning. But now I can be as lawless and as improvisational as I want to be, because I can step out of the door at any time, and there are about 30 grocery shops within a 10-minute walk that I can choose from. So it’s amazing to have that freedom in a way. But I think I have leaned into that a little bit too much, because now I have so much choice, and I think I get maybe slightly overwhelmed by that choice.
Tell me about some items that are currently on your grocery list.
If there’s something I always have, it’s some kind of gnocchi. I know it’s divisive—some people don’t like how stodgy and heavy gnocchi is. I love that—I love something that has physical weight. And it’s so quick, and even when I’m having the worst conceivable day in terms of life’s little challenges. I know that I can cook gnocchi in some form, and usually I’ll cook it with chili crisp and capers and Parmesan, which I know sounds absolutely unhinged, but it’s really good, and it takes literal minutes.
One fun thing I’ve done recently is that I went to Iceland—I don’t know if you have an equivalent—it’s a British chain supermarket that just does frozen foods more or less. But you can find highly unconventional things in those freezer cabinets. So I recently got a Snickers bar ice cream cake, and it’s designed to be a celebratory thing, and I’ve got no occasion for it, and no need for it. I think one of the joys of shopping is, if you can, just going on a whim and buying something that you really, really don’t need but that will probably delight you.
Any other ingredients?
Something I’m often buying and using is peanut butter, honestly, which I think we undervalue as an ingredient (obviously we value it plenty as a thing that you put on bread), but as an ingredient in cooking proper. Maybe it’s because we align peanuts with nuts, so it’s a garnish, or it’s something extra, or it’s something that maybe spiritually doesn’t align with sustenance. But really they’re closer to legumes biologically, and I like using them like that—I like using them in West African cooking, like in a groundnut soup, which is one of my favorite things to cook.
Do you go into a store with a really specific, structured list?
I think I tend to compartmentalize my shopping trips. I have a running list on the Notes app on my phone, which I top off with extremely boring stuff—milk and butter—or whatever I need to buy. So I do those trips semi-regularly, a couple times a week maybe. But when I end up really going off-piece and getting different groceries and finding shopping exciting, it’s when I just dip into a shop. When I allow myself to be a bit more open and to diverge from the list is when I have the most fun. So my list style is both very rigid and completely nonexistent at the same time.
What’s something you’re really good at cooking even when you’re running low on groceries?
Nigella Lawson has a recipe that she says she got from Anna Del Conte, who is a verified Italian, so I think that’s her defense, but it’s for Marmite pasta. And it’s delicious. It’s just pasta and butter and Marmite, which is obviously so salty and savory and rich that it makes this bare-bones, store-cupboard dinner actually feel like some kind of consideration went into it. So that’s probably my most regular desperation meal—only it doesn’t taste like desperation, it tastes really nice.
What’s something you really want to learn how to cook?
The croquembouche had been a very silly, vain, ambitious cooking goal. But honestly, I think the thing I would really like to do over the next few months is get back into a routine. I’m really not overstating it when I say that it’s pure chaos reigning at the moment in my eating habits. So I’d love to get into a routine. I’d love to go to the shops without polarizing within myself—but to go with a list and ambition at the same time—to hold them both gently, and to shop with some kind of excitement.
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