SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
During a gray New York winter, during the height of the pandemic, Tanya Bush was depressed. The present, the future, everything felt bleak. At the time she was in her early 20s, unemployed and living in Brooklyn with no idea what to do next. She barely had enough motivation to get out of bed, let alone plan her life. So Bush turned to something that had made her feel good when she was a kid - baking, even though she hadn't baked anything in years.
TANYA BUSH: I was just sort of desperate. Anything that I could possibly make, I wanted to make, and I turned to the kitchen. I tried to make this almond cake, and it doesn't go exactly as planned. It goes awry. And I think that's kind of rare in cookbooks to see, you know, the first instance of baking turn out to be, you know, this sort of humiliation, this massive failure.
DETROW: You wrote it in such a succinct way - I deem it a failure. I feel like a failure. It thumps like lead as I slide it into the trash.
BUSH: (Laughter) I can still feel it all these years later.
DETROW: In her new cookbook, "Will This Make You Happy," Tanya Bush writes about her experiences and recipes during a year of baking and self-discovery that eventually led to her current position as pastry chef at Little Egg in Brooklyn. I asked her how she learned to deal with all those failures.
BUSH: A lot of the cookbooks that I was, you know, consuming while I was teaching myself how to bake were these beautiful, glossy tomes that are really offering this, like, perfect finished product, and that was just so different than the experience that I was having. And I think that one of the things I really learned, you know, in both sort writing and in baking, the first version is rarely the right one, and it takes work to make anything, you know, meaningful and to really teach yourself a new skill. And I think that I wanted to articulate in this book that it's not going to be this, like, easy linear journey, you know? And I think that's, you know, true of life - right? - that the cake might crater in the center, or the madeleines will have weird pockmarks, and, you know, that's OK. And there are ways to think about rescuing a mistaken pastry, and you can always try again.
DETROW: I'm probably not alone in this - I'm sure lots of people say this to you - but, like, I love cooking. Like, I have a very hard-to-quiet mind, and I find it to be a relaxing thing to do 'cause there's so much motion. But baking intimidates me, and I just look at a baking recipe, and I'm paralyzed by the exactness of it and the complexity of it. What do you say to people who kind of have that paralysis feeling when they're like, I love the idea of eating a creme brulee, but making it seems terrifying?
BUSH: I do think that there's this anxiety that, like, baking is all chemistry and science. And if you don't adhere to the recipe exactly right, it's going to fail. And, you know, my experience is that there are, of course, you know, technical demands and certain rules to adhere to, right? You know, we know what it looks like to, like, you know, beat your butter and sugar together until it's fluffy, or, you know, what does dairy look like when it's simmering? But within the margins, I think there's a lot of room for play and experimentation. There are a lot of ways to insert your own palate into a pastry recipe that already exists.
DETROW: When it comes to embracing the failure, I want to talk about one particular part of the book that I'm sure was not really fun to live through...
BUSH: (Laughter).
DETROW: ...But is a really entertaining read. This is when you go to Italy for this internship that you're at first really excited about. This seems like an opportunity, especially during the pandemic, to get out in the world, to start testing and learning and maybe, you know, begin your journey to becoming a professional baker. And that is not quite what happens. Tell us about this experience.
BUSH: Yeah, it was sort of a misguided attempt to have my own "Eat Pray Love" experience, and it went awry (laughter). I - yeah, I was, like, very hungry to learn in a professional setting. You know, before I started working in bakeries in New York, you know, I wanted to travel. I wanted to be steeped in the tradition of Italian pastry. And it turned out to be, you know, very different than what I had anticipated. It was a agriturismo in Italy that was very much sort of serving a torus (ph) palate. It was very persnickety, tweezered fare. And unfortunately, I had sort of a little bit of a failure at the beginning of the internship, and they really were not interested in having me bake.
And it was actually really a formative experience for me because it taught me a lot about the kinds of pastry that I didn't want. I was less interested in this sort of 10-component, fastidious, you know, little perfect pavlova. I realized that I loved the slightly messier and the more informal and the things that are, like, delicious and hearty and homey but are not, you know, meant to be served on a, like, fine china platter.
DETROW: Tweezered fare is such a specific insult. I really appreciate it.
BUSH: (Laughter).
DETROW: To that end, can you tell me how you think about when you're professionally baking and when you're baking at home for joy and how both of those things ideally should influence each other a little bit more, what you take from one to the other when everything's going well?
BUSH: Yeah, so I'm the pastry chef at Little Egg, which is the community restaurant in Prospect Heights. And, you know, there I'm thinking a lot about scaling things up for production, and, you know, we're making hundreds of crullers a week and cinnamon rolls and brioche buns. But it is - you know, it's institutionalized baking, right? It's - everything should look the same. Everything should be consistent and taste the same.
But when I'm baking at home for myself, I'm really getting in touch with what I'm hungry for. And I think that, you know, the reality is that I bake a lot less at home because I have, you know, made baking my job, right? And it has fundamentally changed my relationship to the nature of pleasure in baking. And so when I do feel hungry to get into my own kitchen, I'm really thinking about, like, simple things that come together pretty quickly. I'm thinking about what I want to bring to people who I love and who I'm in community with - you know, a simple spoon cake, a delicious, sort of, like, shortcake moment with a quick whipped cream. I'm not going to spend a ton of time. I just want something, like, easy and delicious that's going to make other people happy.
DETROW: Writing a book like this is a little bit like mental time travel. What would you tell your 2020, 2021 self if you could reach through time and get a message to 2021 you trying to figure out how to bake and trying to figure out what to do with your life from this vantage point, given all this success?
BUSH: I would tell her to keep playing and to trust her own instincts. I think that there was a lot of moaning and groaning and worrying and wishing. And I think at a lot of junctures, I wondered if I was on the right path. And I think now, I can say in retrospect, you know, there was no one, linear right path, but just applying yourself to something, trying to learn something new is in and of itself a success. And, you know, I hope that that ethos sort of comes through in the book and more generally comes through in living and in life. You have no idea how things are going to unfurl, and you've got to make some mistakes along the way in order to actualize it and trust yourself. Trust your own curiosity and interest.
DETROW: That is Tanya Bush, author of the new cookbook and memoir "Will This Make You Happy." Thank you so much for talking to us.
BUSH: Thank you so much for having me.
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