Mix-and-match recipes are top cookbook author’s secret sauce

Your salad needs a "crunchy thing," says cookbook author Julia Turshen. AMY SOWDER PHOTOS

By AMY SOWDER

You open your fridge’s vegetable drawer, and your heart sinks. The parsley’s all wilted. It’s 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, and you’ve already started this dinner recipe that calls for parsley. What do you do?

If you understand the purpose of the parsley in the dish, you can substitute it with something else you have in your kitchen.

Bestselling cookbook author Julia Turshen wants home cooks to understand the scaffolding of her recipes enough to feel confident about switching the meal’s materials. Her recipes can be frameworks where flexibility is encouraged. After all, she wants cooking to be relaxing.

That’s why her latest book, “What Goes With What,” published in 2024 by Flatiron Books, has 20 easy-to-understand charts that explain the components of a dish and enable mixing and matching.

Turshen visited the Katonah Reading Room to talk about her book — cooking, writing, publishing and the food industry. Her Westchester-based parents, Rochelle Udell and Doug Turshen, attended the book signing and talk.

“What Goes With What” has 100proachable and appealing recipes to exemplify how the charts can work. In Turshen’s handwriting with her own photography, the book is organized into six sections: salads and sandwiches; soups, stews and braises; rice, more grains, and pasta; vegetables; mains; and baked goods. Turshen writes a personal essay for each chapter, ranging from a conversation about body image and fat phobia with her mother, and cooking shortcuts that make life easier — to her family history with baking and the joy she finds in the queer cooking community.

“The way I cook day-to-day in my own home with Grace is so simple, sometimes I think everyone knows how to do that; that’s not worth giving attention to,” says Turshen, who also teaches online cooking classes from the home kitchen she shares with her wife in Ulster County. “I’ve been learning in this ongoing dialogue that nothing is too simple. I love the simple. That’s why I make the simple stuff.”

When her recipe calls for an onion, any color onion will do. When it calls for honey, she suggests maple syrup if that’s what you have. The charts offer a variety of options for each component category, like in the meatball chart, there’s a row for meat, binding, seasoning and sauce or glaze. In the “salads with lettuce” chart, the categories are “base, crunchy thing, rich thing, dressing.”

Simplicity works. Turshen has authored and co-authored 16 cookbooks, such as “Simply Julia,” and has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine and Saveur. Epicurious called her one of the “100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time,” and The New York Times described her “at the forefront of the new generation of authentic, approachable authors.” She’s on the Kitchen Cabinet advisory board for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, is a member of God’s Love We Deliver Culinary Council, and is the founder of Equity at the Table, an inclusive digital directory of women and nonbinary individuals in food.

“I thought I was done writing cookbooks,” Turshen says, mentioning that she enjoyed the relative peace of working at her friend’s vegetable farm, Long Season Farm, when she felt burned-out in her career. “But I missed having an outlet, so I started doing a newsletter, and I started doing these charts in my newsletter … With these charts, I feel like it’s the first time I’ve been able to show, rather than tell, how I think about cooking.”

I tried the recipes

Writer Amy Sowder bought, read and cooked three recipes (so far) from the book and found this flexible, formulaic-yet-creative approach freeing. This is how she deviated from the recipes.

— Gingery baby bok choy: I didn’t realize I’d run out of sesame seeds, so I toasted and salted some pumpkin seeds I’d saved from jack-o-lantern carving last Halloween. It worked just fine.

— Turkey meatballs with gochujang glaze: I used the meatball chart to see which recipe suggested the most ingredients I had already. When I realized I was low on panko breadcrumbs, I just filled the gap with Italian breadcrumbs, and no one was the wiser.

— A great carrot salad: I dropped the olives because I don’t like olives, and I used rainbow carrots because that’s what my husband bought, which made the dish even prettier than the one in the book, in my not-so-humble opinion. The recipe calls for parsley or any soft, green herb, so I used cilantro because I’m diehard team cilantro.