They say that if you can make a cake, you can make a bomb. Food writer and former Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh was never much bothered about making her sugar icing perfect – and good for her – so I might not trust her in munitions. But she has written a hand grenade of a book.
What I love most about Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want is all of the books that it isn’t. It isn’t a recipe collection full of soft-focus food pornography, the author lifting something glistening to her perfect lips, alone in an immaculate kitchen. It isn’t a manual for how to save your soul by way of micronutrient-inflected mortification of the flesh. It is not a memoir of one young woman’s emotional journey, served rare with a side of gawking and a comforting, sweet finish. Like Tandoh, it refuses to be anything but what it is: a strange, special, occasionally repetitive book that is somehow so much more than it was meant to be.
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