Eater - The magic of a simple weekday lunch

Meghan McCarron's quick and creamy tomato soup and grilled cheese | Meghan McCarron/Eater

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

It’s finally reliably chilly in Los Angeles — yes, by “chilly” I mean the high is 65 instead of 75, but the difference is enough to make me crave something warm and comforting. Recently, I wanted a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup, but had no can of Campbell’s on hand. To my rescue came one of my favorite new cookbooks this year, Cook As You Are by Ruby Tandoh, which includes a recipe for 15-minute cream of tomato soup. Unlike most recipes whose titles include time estimates, I really was able to whip it up during my lunch break, using ingredients already in my pantry or my fridge. The trickiest aspect was achieving the level of saltiness I craved for a hearty Campbell’s dupe. But in this, as in every aspect of cooking through the recipe, Tandoh had my back. “Add sugar and salt to taste and don’t be shy: tomatoes need it,” she writes.

I’ve been a fan of Tandoh’s writing for a long time. Before I was a reporter here at Eater, I was a features editor, and I had the pleasure of editing her wide-ranging, provocative, and thoughtful feature on sugar’s immensely complicated role in our culture. It left me oddly giddy to encounter that same generous and provocative approach in her cookbook. The tomato soup’s headnote explains that she’s not aiming to “gentrify” the iconic taste of a Campbell’s condensed tomato, or to suggest that the homemade version is somehow better. Instead, she writes that this scratch recipe for a popular packaged favorite is intended to serve as a reminder to home cooks that they can, “when it comes to it, magic something from nothing.” And that was how I felt — like I’d worked a little bit of weekday magic.

My favorite cookbooks teach me a whole different way of thinking about food. Tandoh’s project pushes the boundaries of the genre in all sorts of fascinating ways that also make it more helpful to cook from, which is an especially neat trick. I’m looking forward to continuing to cook my way through the book, including tackling some of the bigger projects in the “For the Love of It” section. But if I find myself largely eddying in the “More Food, Less Work,” section, I’ll meet myself with the generosity Tandoh extends. And keep that tomato soup recipe in my back pocket.

— Meghan McCarron

Follow Meghan on Instagram at @meghanmccarron

More reading:

For Eater’s fall preview, James Hansen profiled Tandoh and how Cook As You Are fulfills her quest to write a more inclusive cookbook
In her always delightful newsletter The Veggie, Tejal Rao of the New York Times recommends Tandoh’s cookbook as especially vegetarian-friendly
A favorite recent essay: Tandoh in Vittles on the siren song of soft serve (paywalled)
And if you haven’t yet read it, please do spend some time with her Eater feature Sugartime, which was reprinted in Best American Food Writing 2019

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