How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S12, Ep 5 How to Fail: Ruby Tandoh

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

[TW: eating disorders]Oh but how I *love* today's guest. Ruby Tandoh is the former Great British Bake Off contestant who went on to write cookery books, a manifesto for eating what you want (Eat Up), a column for the Guardian and pieces for the New Yorker, among other prestigious publications. Her new book, published next month, is called Cook As You Are and contains 100 original recipes accessible to real home cooks, no matter their age, budget, ability or background.She joins me to talk about her failures at university (dropping out of four different degree courses and counting), her failures at cooking (no, really) and her failure to 'rise above things'. Along the way, we chat about short attention spans, spontaneity, calling people out on hypocrisy, regrets and why she keeps comparing men she doesn't like to types of ham on Twitter.--Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens is out on 7th Oct and available to preorder here.--My new novel, Magpie, is out now. You can order it here.---How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social Media:Ruby Tandoh @ruby.tandohElizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. This episode of How to Fail is sponsored by Stripe and Stare. Purveyors of the most comfortable, sustainable knickers and loungewear in the world. Because it's what's underneath that counts.

Stripe and Stare make products that are kind to you and kind to the planet. And I hope it's not TMI, but I'm wearing a pair of Stripe and Stair knickers right now and I can fully condone this strap line. I wear them all the time since they started sponsoring the podcast and I absolutely agree

that they are unbelievably comfortable and there is no VPL. They don't ride up. You don't get wedgies. They're so comfortable you forget you're even wearing them. So it lets you worry about far more important things throughout the day. And they are sustainably sourced. Only 3% of the underwear market is sustainably sourced, which is pretty terrible for a product that we all wear every day. Stripe and Stair products are sustainably sourced from beechwood trees, which mean they are softer than cotton, use 95% less water in their production,

and they lie perfectly flat against the skin. You don't need to just take my word for it. They've been described as the most comfortable knickers by magazines such as Forbes and Harper's Bazaar, and their pyjamas are really amazing as well. Anyway, shop online at stripeandstare.com with a 20% discount for the next month using the code howto20. That's howto20. Stripe and Stare are also available at Selfridges, Shopbop and Revolve. And they have a knicker subscription. So you can have a new pair of knickers delivered through

the letterbox on a regular basis and you never need to think about shopping for pants again. Thank you so so much to the wonderful Stripe and Stare. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. My guest today describes herself in her Twitter bio as food writer and pain in your ass. If the latter is true, she is a very welcome pain in my ass because I count myself firmly among Ruby Tando's admirers.

She is the former Great British Bake Off contestant who became an acclaimed author and journalist, publishing three books and a myriad of articles, including a fascinating recent piece for The New Yorker about how a cheese can become extinct. Her latest book, Cook As You Are, Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens, is out next month and contains 100 original recipes accessible to real home cooks, no matter their age, budget, ability or background. There's also

an easy read version for those with certain learning disabilities. It's the kind of inclusive, helpful attitude that encompasses much of Tando's work. She grew up in Southend-on-Sea in Essex, raised by a father who worked for the Royal Mail and her mother, a school admin worker. raised by a father who worked for the Royal Mail and her mother, a school admin worker. Her working class roots have left her with little patience for food elitism. And her earlier book, the Sunday Times bestseller Eat Up, was a manifesto which railed against the wellness craze and cooking snobbery and argued for a more relaxed, pleasure-filled attitude to the food we put in our mouths. She has become a champion for many through her public honesty around her own history of disordered eating and her fearlessness in calling out double standards. She once took to Twitter to

label Piers Morgan, sentient ham. And yet, when I first met her for The Observer way back in 2013, When I first met her for The Observer way back in 2013, Tando admitted, definitely my natural instinct is to question myself and to undervalue my own achievements. I've had a lifetime of self-doubt. Ruby Tando, welcome to How to Fail. Well, that was all very nice. Thank you so much. I'm so relieved. I always wipe the sweat off my brow that I hope I've got all the facts right. Yeah, it's very strange hearing your kind of recent life echoed back to you like that, but seems about right. Is it still true that you feel riven by self-doubt?

Less so, less so than before, for sure. I have a clearer sense now of which things might just be you know almost those mechanical anxieties you know you're kind of used to having a worry about something and so you just anticipate it and it kind of unfolds almost in such a predictable way so I can kind of pinpoint when that's happening a bit more now when it's not rooted in something that's really happening it's just a pattern yeah I still have a lot of self doubt that to my mind is completely justified but I'd have to pick apart whether that's really true all of the time how old are you now I am 29 oh my gosh you're still so young how have your 20s been for you because I do think that that's a decade where so often we question ourselves and learn how to tackle our own anxieties yeah I mean I remember when I was kind of a teenager I remember

my mum saying I would never want to be a teenager again if I could choose one time in my life to go back to I'd be 28 29 because that's when you really relax into yourself you know who you are a bit more and you just are better able to handle things but you still have kind of I don't know some kind of crazy hope as well and I've kind of been waiting for that moment to hit it's not quite hit just yet but it might be around the corner but yeah so far my 20s have been just wild I guess in a way not sex drugs and rock and roll but just I came off bake off when I was I think just 20 or 21 I'm not 100% sure and then since then it's just been food writing and books and things like that which is definitely not what I would have

anticipated for this decade in my life. Don't worry, it's taken me until 42 to feel sorted. So it's fine. You've still got time ahead. Why did you want to write Cook As You Are, which can I just say, is such a brilliant idea. And like the best ideas, I'm shocked that it hasn't been done before. And it feels like it could only have come from you because you come from this fresh, innovative perspective. But why did you feel that you wanted to write it? this fresh, innovative perspective. But why did you feel that you wanted to write it? I knew that I wanted to write more recipes. I do love writing recipes. I love spending time in the kitchen. And I love communicating to people about food. I really enjoy that. But quite often I get sent cookbooks. And quite often, they are really complex and not particularly

accessible. And I think that's fine because I think a lot of people myself included are like quite dedicated food cooking hobbyists in a way so we don't mind going that extra mile but it struck me just how few of them were really good for everyday cooking like the kind of stuff that you can roll in from work and actually make or the kind of stuff that doesn't just serve two people but might actually serve a family for instance with a few people living under one roof whether that's loads of flatmates or whether that's kids or grandparents or whoever it is so I wanted to do something that would actually cater to those people so outside of the two portions of a veg only and somehow 25 ingredient meal do you know what I

mean I wanted something a bit more accessible and affordable and on top of that I just saw so many people talking online about how much they struggled with cookbooks being quite difficult to follow so whether that was the instructions presuming loads of prior knowledge or just the layout and things like that and so I worked really really hard to kind of dig down into why do we have the recipe writing conventions that we have and in what ways do they work and in what ways don't they work and how can I write this so that as many people as possible can cook from this book in a way that doesn't send them spiraling into just a meltdown and a yeah so that cooking isn't stressful basically it's so interesting that because hearing you talk I

realized that my attitude to cooking has changed where I feel recipe books are too complicated for me even to begin to delve into and when I look at cookery programs on TV, like MasterChef or indeed Bake Off, it feels like on the amateur side of things, it's got more and more complicated. And you couldn't get through the first round of MasterChef unless you did a sous vide chicken and a carpaccio foam and have, you know, know what to do with a jar of preserved lemons. So yeah, I really, really think this book book is brilliant and there's such a gap in the market and the other thing that I know you've spoken about in the past that a lot of cookbooks do is they focus their core message around slimness so was that also something you wanted to address?

Yeah it was I mean I think cook as you are I mean like the title kind of was what started this and everything spun off from that all the ways that I decided to approach writing the recipes and then how to illustrate the book as well it all spun off from the title and I mean I guess at its core it's about meeting you where you're at and making cooking something that's not aspirational so it's not for tomorrow when you've got more energy and it's not for next year when you've saved up for a better kitchen or for like five years time when you finally got the body that you want for whatever reason. You know, it's about here and now, what can you cook today that's going to feel good, that's going to nourish you and you might even take some pride in. So that was just the heart of it. And I mean, that philosophy is spilled out to the illustrations as well which were done by an

amazing illustrator called Sinead Park and we talked about how do we want to bring this book to life and obviously the usual way is to have glossy food photographs which I've had in previous cookbooks and it's really fun doing a food photo shoot like that but what happens with those shoots is you go into a location kitchen or a studio kitchen and it's really beautiful and it's like nowhere I've ever cooked before. And then you have the food photographed in that setting. And I thought like this isn't going to work for this because I want people to be able to see themselves, see their kitchens and their lives kind of represented in this book a bit more.

And so we settled on illustrations. And so Sinead did these amazing illustrations that showed people of every size and shape, every race, with every kind of kitchen, with every cultural accoutrement you could possibly imagine decorating their lives, just to show like the breadth of the people who can cook and who enjoy cooking

and who might get something from cooking from this book it just felt really important for this I keep being sent celebrity wellness books that have kind of vegan recipes and then hamstring exercises and advice for wild swimming you have been a welcome and outspoken critic of some of that kind of marketing. Where are you at now with the cult of wellness and aspirational eating? So I've written about this in the past. I fell victim to a little bit of it when I was at university because I became vegan when I was at university. And it was a really easy shortcut to not really being able to eat very much especially back then it must have been maybe 2012 and there definitely were places you could get vegan food but it's not

as widespread as now it just meant that I couldn't eat a great deal and when people went out to restaurants and stuff I probably couldn't come with most of the time so that kind of led me a bit towards wellness stuff and gave me like this sanctimonious feeling of like I've had vegetables today which have left my body feeling efficient and taught or whatever you know so that was my experience of it and I had an eating disorder for a number of years but the more that I read about wellness culture and kind of saw it unfolding real time actually because it really boomed over the course of a few years maybe from 2014 to 2020 the more I was able to see it for what it was and I think it really really cleverly repackaged diet culture ideas so about kind of the morality of food and bodies which bodies are good and bad and kind of about how important it is to lose

weight and to be thin it repackaged those ideas in a really seductive format because it stopped being about shame it wasn't like 90s diets where it's like you're gonna eat cabbage soup for six weeks because you're disgusting it wasn't that anymore it was you're gonna eat kale soup for six weeks because you're fabulous and because you deserve to take care of yourself so it was a really kind of I'd say insidious way to repackage these diets and it made it really widespread because people felt like they were doing the right thing they felt like they were achieving a glow like they were nourishing themselves like it was self-love but actually a lot of the ideas were to do with thinness and losing weight and all of that. So just seeing that really, I don't know, it opened my eyes to how dangerous all that stuff is. And since writing about it, I've kind of felt like I've never been more distant from it myself anyway than I am now.

It was interesting witnessing that kind of language during lockdown as well, because I feel at the beginning of lockdown when none of us knew what we were getting into there was this sense that you could have your lockdown glow up and you could spend your time doing at-home workouts and eating really healthily and now it feels there's a sense of like losing your lockdown pounds and oh my gosh I ate too much banana bread. And there's so much self-loathing packaged up in all of those ways of thinking, isn't there? There is. And it's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, you'd think that we've just seen down the barrel of the gun, so to speak. We have seen our own mortality. We have seen how fragile our bodies can be and in spite of all of that it should be kind

of an epiphany for us we should be like oh my god I'm gonna transcend this bullshit and I'm gonna just live my life instead of doing that we've been like I'm gonna sink deeper into self-loathing deeper into micromanaging my body and doubting its capacities and being really fussy about things that don't even matter than ever. And I find that really depressing. I think it's extraordinary what our bodies can do. It's terrifying sometimes the ways in which they can fail us as well. I think that is scary. But the idea that a juice cleanse could be a panacea for all of that is really worrying. Well, I love that your work is such a corrective to all of that. And I thank you for it. And before I get onto your failures, I wonder if I could just ask you a

quick question about Bake Off, because you mentioned earlier, you're now 29, you were on Bake Off when you were 19, 20. So you've had a decade, I guess, to process what happened. to process what happened. How do you feel about it now? Because I remember that series so vividly and I remember the amount of criticism you got for not emoting enough because it felt like that's how we wanted our women to be. We wanted them to be simpering or smiling or crying and that's how we could box them up. How do you feel it all went down looking back on it now? God, it was so, so strange. I think I'm still trying to make sense of it. But I think that people's big criticism from what I can understand was that my self-doubt was performative. I think that was the idea that I was kind of being self-pitying and I was being not entirely sincere and that behind that was maybe it was implied that I was trying to trick the judges

or I was trying to like spin things for sympathy I think maybe that was the rough gist of it and on top of that I think some people just found me annoying which I think is absolutely justifiable but I think the most frustrating thing for me since then is actually I think that people some of the criticisms were right but in a way that makes me feel like god you just can't win because I think there may be something to me playing up myself down now that doesn't mean that it came from nowhere a lot of the time I really wasn't happy with the bakes I produced but other people might suck it up and be like you know what I did my best and that would be my comment whereas I would just say god I'm so unhappy with what I made oh what if I've thrown it all down the toilet with this

honestly I think that on some level the reason that I let that doubt shine was because I didn't want people to say oh she's stuck up I didn't want people to say she's full of herself she's stuck up she's an ego she's a bitch all of these things and so honestly I think that you know people who say the self-doubt was played up I think maybe they had something right but if anything it was a defense against the other great charge leveled at women which is that they're up themselves so I don't really have any regrets about the way I handled myself I think there was emotional truth to everything that I said and did there. But it's so strange to see the ways in which at such a young age,

I was already preemptively trying to shield myself from people's censure and their aggression. And in doing so, I managed to put myself in the line of fire, which was really shot myself in the foot there. It's so strange. And actually, I think the cultural landscape, thankfully, has changed an enormous amount in that relatively small period of time. And I like to think you wouldn't be treated that way now. But I'm so sorry that you were. I feel I can guess the answer to this. Do you still watch Bake Off? No, not at all. No, I can't. I just, you know know I appreciate it as a show I think the format

is clearly compelling but no when I hear the little song the little jingle at the start I feel sick I just can't have anything to do with it I'm afraid you've also said some hilarious things about Paul Hollywood I think I feel like the ultimate Rupi Tando criticism is using some form of ham or pork product to describe a man. Oh, God, I can't even remember the insults I've thrown out at this point, which doesn't reflect well on me that I've thrown out that many. But yeah, oh, I've just found it. You called Paul Hollywood a walking gammon joint. Oh, so I did. That wasn't even the most uncharitable thing I said I don't think but yeah well I want to come on to that a bit later because it's sort of part of one of your failures

not the gammon joint but I loved reading your failures so much you are an amazing writer and you can tell that even in these relatively short gobbets but your first failure is that you failed at university, as you say it to me, four times and counting. So tell us about that. Well, I just can't seem to finish. I just cannot seem to get a degree. At this point, it's ridiculous. I kind of have pretty much given up hope. So I was at school, like very much overattentive, overachieving, highly str highly strong straight a student I think you can tell that by the way I am today and I was just very focused on my studies and I was looking forward to going to university I was always like big into that it was never really a doubt in my mind and actually no one in my immediate family had even been to university before and I'm the

oldest child as well. So I think there was, for me, there wasn't really pressure from my family. But for me, there was a sense of excitement about going away and doing this thing that I didn't really have a blueprint for. So I applied and I was going to do physics. And then just as I finished sixth form, in that summer after sixth form where you're kind of set free into the world I basically just had a a breakdown at the same time as that a boyfriend at the time broke up with me and I just couldn't imagine going to university so I'd enrolled and it was day two of term and I was meant to show up and the clock was ticking down and I literally just I couldn't make myself go so I didn't go that year I applied for a different course to a different

university the next year I applied for physics and philosophy at King's and then I dropped out after a year then I moved to UCL to do philosophy and history of art and I dropped out after two years and then finally I tried to do a creative writing master's at Birkbeck and I did maybe six weeks of that. So I've been all around the disciplines. I have had a little sample from pretty much every undergraduate subject you can imagine, but not quite managed to make it stick. That's so interesting on multiple levels, because we know that you can finish things and finish them brilliantly.

I mean, looking at your bakes that you did on Bake Off for instance and we know that you're a straight A student is it that you get bored? Yeah I guess so I think the boredom is part of it but you know what I think I really like being self-directed I think that's one part of this the thing is I love learning about things I absolutely love it and I think that's part of what I love about writing so much is that I get to turn my attention to a person or a topic or a cause or whatever it is. And I get to research it in depth. I get to interview people. I get to learn about something that was completely alien to me and really plunge myself into it. And I do that for a month or two and then it's over. And I love it it that way and I wonder sometimes whether university was just

too much depth and not enough self-direction I think maybe that's why it couldn't hold my attention but also I kind of flip from thing to thing very flighty so if a project's longer than a few months that tends to be when I'm on the at risk of running. Do you have long-lasting friendships? Not particularly no a couple but I'm certainly not one of those people who's managed to you know for example have friends from school that they are still in touch with and still friends with now and stuff like that although I do envy that I think you're just too intelligent like I think it's a very generous interpretation of my significant failings I think your mind works much more quickly than most other people's and that's why

you when you're talking you sound like you've accumulated the wisdom of a 65 year old I've accumulated the exhaustion as well my like emotional brain is just like oh it's worn out it's worn out from all the chopping and changing and jumping from thing to thing you mentioned at the beginning of explaining this failure that you had a breakdown and I just didn't want to let that pass without acknowledging that and that must have been horrible what what happened exactly I mean at that time I'm just thinking so it'd been the summer holidays and I was just 18 and I was going out with this guy and then that kind of all went haywire as things tend to do when you're that age anyway we hadn't even been going out for very long

but I think that was the catalyst for unleashing of pretty much the emotions of the last six years or so of being at secondary school in sick form because I was so high achieving and stuff I think I just I swallowed a lot of things and I just always applied myself I never did anything desperately naughty or like went off the rails and so once school was over and with that little breakup, I think it was just the floodgates opened and all of that pent up anger and stuff just unleashed. I was self-destructive and I got put very briefly. I think they used it more as a kind of scare tactic than as a diagnostic or curative thing. I got put very briefly on a mental ward, a local one. But yeah, it was so much pent up stuff and it just came out then, I think.

I'm so sorry you went through that. That is a lot at a very formative age. I mean, the mental ward must have been a difficult thing to navigate at that age. I think more than anything else, it was a sense of shame. Yeah, I think lots of people will experience this. It was a sense of shame that I hadn lots of people will experience this it was a sense of shame that I hadn't been able to like hold things together better I felt embarrassed and I felt like I'd let people down like that where actually I think what I wish I'd been able to feel was just sadness that

things had got to that point I wish I'd been able to feel sad rather than ashamed and I think that kind of pattern is something that I'm still working on now, like trying not to jump straight to shame and embarrassment and just sit in whatever the more immediate feeling is. Yeah, I totally understand that. I think my default just as I go about my daily life is guilt, just complete guilt about everything, things that I haven't done, things that no one expects me to do that I felt guilty over. And I just can't shake shake that and that's sort of where I start from and it's such a strange thing and I spoke to my mother about it and she was like I don't feel guilt at all I was like what I just thought it was the human condition but there are some people out there who don't feel it no no some people don't but you know what like one thing that

I've been thinking about a lot recently it's come up a couple of times just seen it written around places is that the evil step cousin of guilt is resentment and so either you say no to things and you feel guilty or you have the option of saying yes to things and becoming a resentful husk which I think is what I tend to do so I think you've chosen like the right side of things if you have to have like toxic emotion, I think that's the one to go for. Oh, thank you. Now you've made me feel better. Resentful, harsh, what a great phrase. Great title for your memoir later on in life.

When you mentioned there that you put yourself under pressure at school to get good grades, I read somewhere that you were also desperate to be liked during that phase of your life. So was there a pressure there as well? Yeah, I mean, like what you were also desperate to be liked during that phase of your life so was there a pressure there as well yeah I mean like what you were saying about guilt like you just think that this is how everyone feels it seems to me that surely everyone's desperate to be liked but maybe it's not quite so painful for some people I'm not really sure yeah I was desperate to be liked and when I felt that people didn't like me, that shifted quite quickly into real hatred of those people.

Tell me how your parents feel about your chopping and changing attitude to university. Do they care or are they just proud of you as you, the immense success that you are? I've never had any pressure from my parents to kind of do or be anything in particular I think my mum felt a bit of pressure from her mum growing up about you know how she should perform and what she should do and what kind of job she should get and things like that and I think she's been really really conscious of not passing that on maybe to a fault because I kind of am very much left to forge my own path I've never really had anyone say okay come on you cannot quit this again let's get you to stick with this one thing

I've never had that which maybe at times would have been useful I've had their support and I've always felt that they've been proud of what I've done which is nice it means that I've not had the kind of shame burden compounded by that from them as well. You chose this as one of your three failures. And I suppose the question I'm going to ask is, really, do you really feel that this is a failure? I think the failure in it, for me, is the ways in which I dropped out. I think that's where I'm not proud of myself. A lot of the time when I

kind of quit things in general it's because I've had a feeling and that feeling is amazingly urgent in that moment and I cannot imagine ignoring it and so I just have to quit something or try something new or whatever it is and that's the way I've dropped out of university a lot of the time as well. So like I wish, like after I had that breakdown when I was 18, I wish I had just deferred my place. I could have just done that. But for some reason, it was like throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like, no, I won't start late. I'll start never.

And that's kind of been the attitude for a lot of things as well. So the failure in not finishing university I think is the attitude that I had in doing it I wish I just made decisions from a more like positive place rather than just like jumping ship do you think you're one of those people who I admire but can't fully understand who would categorize themselves as spontaneous and would just like book a paragliding trip in Portugal in a couple of days time. I mean, I always see myself as quite boring and quite a worrier and quite anxious. But actually, I think you're right. I think I am quite spontaneous in a way that is sometimes reckless.

I hate committing to things. It's actually a miracle that we've made it to this conversation today because I was like, oh, it's coming up. And the longer that I have to anticipate something, the more I dread it. So I think that's why I tend to book things at short notice, arrange to meet people at short notice, because then it's kind of, I'm in the emotion, we're here, I don't have a chance to get cold feet before it happens. So yeah, I guess I am spontaneous for that reason. That makes so much sense. I've never had it explained to me in that way, because it feels like I have a very strong work ethic, which sometimes tips into unhealthiness, where just work fills all available space, and helps distract me from sort of uncomfortable emotions. But part of that,

the motivating force for that is that I want to make the most of my time on this earth. And there's a sort of fear that if I don't say yes to all the opportunities, then I won't have done that. And maybe it's a similar thing for you that you have a fear of getting trapped in something that won't be making the most of your time. Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent.

Do you know one of the most quite embarrassing sad little things about me is that I absolutely love the Lord of the Rings films I've not even finished the books so I'm not claiming to be a fan like lots of people would hate me for saying I just love the films and I always get so teary when those little hobbits set out from their little home and go to see the big wide world, not even knowing if they're going to come back. It makes me break down every single time. And I think that's the way I feel. I feel hugely restless and I feel like the world is so, so big and so exciting. And I just want to try so much of it.

But I think in my enthusiasm, I think sometimes I get a bit of stage fright. I'm like, well, what do I choose when there are so many options? And that's when I end up doing nothing. Oh, you're just a little hobbit. How do you manage your mental health now? I've got lots of skills that I have learned over the years, sometimes from the internet, sometimes from the internet sometimes from friends sometimes from professionals that definitely help I mean that kind of impulsivity that I was saying about and

that kind of feeling that emotion is so urgent I can't possibly ignore it I'm definitely working on not honoring that all the time these days because that's how you end up just quitting things on a whim so I mean for me I'm learning to kind of sit with feelings a bit more let them brew let them simmer see what happens and then act on them in a few days if I have to but not just be kind of just terrifying tornado of raw emotion all the time great advice also another good title for a memoir terrifying tornado of emotion um your second failure really it did make me laugh it's that you regularly fail at cooking for people which people wouldn't necessarily expect so tell us what you mean and why you chose it yeah do you know what you know those embarrassments like when you've embarrassed yourself in conversation or whatever it is that are so deep you're walking around asda and you remember it

like a shot in your spine like you're just like bolt upright all of a sudden you're like what it strikes you you're sweating instantly just at the memory of this thing that maybe you said at a party six years ago or something that's how i feel about all the times that I have cooked for people and absolutely mortified myself I remember it all the time I'll be minding my own business in an H&M somewhere and I'll suddenly start sweating thinking about the time I cooked for like a reviewer or something and it just ballsed out completely so yeah basically I am terrible at cooking for people I cannot do it like I'm very capable of cooking I've written cookbooks I love cooking I read about it all the time I know I can cook I cook for myself and for like very close friends with no problem all the time but when it comes to

it when I actually have to demonstrate that aptitude I cannot I mean one that I always remember is I had someone interviewing me from a really big newspaper and I was you know I was nervous about it was maybe the kind of biggest coverage I had got so far and it was for a book that I'd written that I was really proud of so I really wanted to make a good impression and she came all the way to Sheffield where I was living at the time. And I thought I'm going to cook her something really special. And so I bought a whole tilapia from Sheffield's Moor Market. And a tilapia is a fish?

It's a fish. It's just a kind of fish and it's delicious. And I have never cooked whole tilapia before. What was I thinking? Like, I didn't know what I was doing it's a rented flat with an oven that was really temperamental it just all spiraled it went so incredibly wrong I cannot express you the depths of my embarrassment because I served her like this whole fish that I hadn't prepared properly I think it still had some scales on the outside or something it was raw a great deal of it was raw there was onions in some other component of the dish that weren't cooked it was actually shocking like my face is feeling we're just

thinking about it she wrote up like you know a very gentle profile after this but I was thinking like why didn't you write that I can't cook if I had interviewed someone and they claimed to be a cook and they'd cooked me that I would have not even finished the profile would have been like I can't participate in this in this lie but yeah it's so embarrassing and that has happened so many times tell us about Diana Henry oh I'm sorry to make you relive it oh It was a podcast thing. It was an episode of a podcast that she was recording. And she came to my house, a different house in Sheffield this time, because I've moved house as many times as I've quit university. And I cooked again, something that I've never done before, because I'm ridiculous. Like there's something called

groundnut soup, which I make all the time. It's a West African thing, a Ghanaian thing for me. And it's a kind of like a peanut butter soup with scotch bonnets and ginger and garlic and stuff. It's delicious. But I decided that instead of just doing it the way I always do, which is just as a vegetarian soup, I do it as a stew, which is a legitimate way of doing it with beef in it. And the beef was just tough as billed tongue. And she is a cookbook writer herself. She's done so many cookbooks. She writes recipes for newspapers and things like that. She's really acclaimed.

She's a much better cook than I am. And I was just so, so deeply embarrassed that, again, I had bitten off more than I could chew and then made her bite off more than I could chew and then made her bite off more than she could chew with that bloody beef it was so embarrassing and so is this a function of the pressure that you put yourself under to get it perfect I think so yeah I think what I've identified in this over the years is like the compensatory drive that kicks in when I'm feeling a bit nervous. I think when I'm cooking, if something's not going 100% to plan, if I feel like it's not quite impressive enough, if it's too watery, salty, hot, whatever's going on, rather than just see how it goes and deal with it in the way that I ordinarily would when I'm cooking,

by tasting and using my intuition and checking a recipe or whatever, I just swerve. I think this is why I have not yet learned to drive and don't trust myself to. Because if something goes wrong, I might just like swerve into another lane. I just go, I compensate way too hard. And I think that's where it goes wrong with the cooking. I bypass all cognition and I go straight to panic. Okay. it goes wrong with the cooking I think I bypass all cognition and I go straight to panic okay I feel like what you need to do is just cook loads of stuff in advance freeze it and then just bring

it out when someone you don't know comes around I feel like that would be a good coping tactic I think it would I think there are so many things I could do along those lines to make my life easier and I need to start employing them I've embarrassed myself so many times that could do along those lines to make my life easier and I need to start employing them. I've embarrassed myself so many times that I actually won't cook for people, especially not people that I don't know particularly well. I just can't do it. I say no to any opportunity to do that but I'd love to cook for people. I want to do it more so I need to figure out what's reasonable for me to expect of myself and how can I stop myself panicking and getting it all completely wrong when it comes to it. I also feel, and sorry to make this sort of cod psychological,

but is it a fear that you, just as you, that cooking as you are, Ruby, is not enough? Because it feels like you're trying to do things that you've never done before like add beef to the groundnut soup and actually you could have just been yourself it is a hundred percent that yes I should be paying you 60 pound an hour yes it's that you can cook me a meal and I will put you to the test just to be yourself in that context is it unsettling because you're known for being a cook to feel that you're not good at it in those scenarios it is yeah it really is because it puts you in such a weird place when you know you're good at something you know you love it but you can't show that to other people not even a lot of your friends it makes you wonder like whether you're making it all up am I just delusional am I actually the world's worst cook and kind of it

makes you harbor well it certainly makes me harbor this kind of paranoid belief that everyone thinks I'm just a terrible cook that I'm shit at what I do that I have no ability whatsoever because that's how I'm walking around feeling all the time and I've never had the opportunity to prove them otherwise wow it's that's terrible it's like an extreme self-imposed imposter syndrome yes yes it is yeah you know you were right when you said it that I'm not cooking in a way that's authentic to me because if I just made the dishes that I write up as recipes the dishes I cook for myself it would all be fine but it's because you know someone knocks on the door and

I'm like oh Christ like it suddenly occurs to me that I've never made vol-au-vents and I have to suddenly do that for someone to impress them so it's punching above my weight in service of ideals that nobody asked me to meet except for myself. Well, I'm in the very fortunate position of having tasted a Ruby Tando bake, a cream bun. But the brilliant thing about it was when I went into you for the Observer in 2013, you'd already made them. So you didn't make them specifically for me. And as a result, it was totally delicious. And you were very kind to give me one because I was basically ogling them throughout the interview.

Did I definitely not make them for you? Or was that just a fib I told so as not to seem keen? Because I can't remember and it may be, yeah. If it was a fib, I'm very charmed by that. But I felt like you'd made them anyway. Just because that's what Ruby Tando does. She just bakes on the drop of a hat. You mentioned that you've got siblings. How many siblings do you have? I have three siblings. So I have a sister and two brothers.

They're all younger than me. Do they put the same pressure on themselves as you do? Or do you think maybe it's a function of also being the oldest I think we're all very different I think my sister I always marvel at because she is so she's six years younger than me and she's so together and that's not to say that she never finds anything difficult or anything like that but she's so good at holding herself together and setting realistic expectations for herself and finding things that she enjoys and people she enjoys spending time with and just making a life out of these components which is something I've tried so hard to do and can't seem to get right so I really admire her for that I don't

think she kind of is quite as up in her own head as I am as for my brothers I think they're quite hard on themselves but we're very very different so it presents differently so I think maybe they're more inclined to kind of retreat from the world whereas I'm more inclined to bludgeon my way into spaces and then doubt myself once I'm in there. Oh Ruby you're so delightful. When you came off Bake Off did people try and pigeonhole you? Did you get sort of pitched cookery programs that would box you in a certain way? I mean I think the one thing that's challenging is that I knew after Bake Off that I never wanted to do cookery TV, have a cookery show, anything like that. I'm absolutely fine with never doing that again in my life.

But there's just an expectation that you're going to show the completely positive, charming, smiley, exuberant side of cooking and what it is to be a cook, I think, especially if you're a woman. And it's just not who I am. I simply cannot fake it. I'm very tempestuous. I'm not always in a good mood when I cook. I like to be a realist about these things. I guess that's what at the heart of Cook As You Are. I like to be a realist about these things. I guess that's

what at the heart of Cook As You Are, I'm very much a realist with it. And that isn't particularly marketable for people who want to make shows and books and stuff like that. So that was a challenge for me. Do you think only certain kinds of people are allowed to present primetime cookery programs? I think there's a real range I mean I don't want to be a dick and be like they're all fake and I'm real because that's absolutely not true you know that would be yeah that's my kind of old bullshit but do you know what I think it's just not me like I've never been someone that's good at kind of turning it on at being charming at performing at kind of holding the attention of a room

that's not the person that I am I hold myself really awkwardly I'm terrible on camera and things like that so I think you just need to be a different type of person I think it's as simple as that and I think there's a huge variety of people that get into those kind of gigs and and I'm happy that they do and I'm also happy that it's not me. Okay. Your third failure, I think is one of my favourite failures of all time. The way that you've expressed it is so funny. I'm not going to read it aloud because I want you to tell the stories yourself, but it is in brief, your failure to rise above things. And at school, you wrote to me, you used to be a certain way how would you describe yourself oh vengeful spiteful scheming malevolent just nasty just anything you can imagine along those

lines that was me at school it sounds like I'm kind of playing it up I really was all of those things and on occasion to this day I still am those things it's so funny because people so often come on this podcast and I hear them saying like things that not this verbatim but things of this essence like my problem is that I'm too nice my problem is that I didn't say no to people enough and I'm just like what I can't relate my problem is I'm not nice enough have not been nice enough and I'm just like what I can't relate my problem is I'm not nice enough have not been nice enough and I'm just a bit of a dick sometimes so yeah I read somewhere you were asked who's your favorite literary hero or heroine and you picked Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker and James and the

Giant Peach and you said that you saw something of yourself in them and I wondered if that was related to this failure because they are kind of awful characters who are cruel in a hilarious way. God, I hadn't remembered that. But yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, they're actually quite ghastly. So I don't know why I felt like I should say that. I guess I was just trying to communicate

that I'm not a Miss Honey character. Let's put it that way. Do you know what? One of the characters I most relate to now, actually, now that I come not a Miss Honey character let's put it that way do you know what one of the characters I most relate to now actually now that I come to think of it there's a children's book by E.L. Konigsberg and there's a character in it who's this little girl and she's just so capricious and she's also lovely but she gets into her head and then she lashes out at people in these little ways there's this line in the book goes, it's the weather in March is a lot like me, nice for one day, then nasty for two. And I relate to it so deeply.

Tell us about some of your schemes. Oh dear. I think what a lot of these boil down to is a lack of, I think a real sensitivity and over-sensitivity to what people think, and then dangerous coupled with a lack of impulse control. When I was at infant school, so I can't have been older than seven, I heard a story about how some boy at my younger brother's nursery had bitten him. Something, it maybe got kind of lost in translation a little bit, but something like that had had happened and despite the fact that I have never been particularly protective of my brother that's a failing of mine as a sibling I've never been that protective I really took it on myself to worry about this to scheme and plot about what I would do to this other little boy if ever I saw him and I was so consumed with my

revenge plots that one time when my brother's nursery I think occasionally they'd use the playground of the school where I was at they'd kind of take it while we were in lessons and I somehow snuck out of class and went and stood in the PE cupboard which looked out onto the playground and stood in there crying with my forehead pressed up against the glass trying to pick out which little boy it was that had bitten him and just thinking about how hard I would bite him and I had to be kind of retrieved from the cupboard by like a teaching assistant or something but that has been kind of the spirit I've taken into more of my adult life than I'm happy to admit. I'm going to come back to that but also

tell me about the school meetup when you were 10 oh gosh yes so after infant school I was homeschooled for a few years so me and my younger brother the one that was bitten and my sister was very young at that point but we were yeah homeschooled my mum gave us some books and sat down with us each day and guided us through all of that but part of that was that we had to meet other children so that my behavior and our behaviors just more generally didn't disintegrate into a feral so we'd go to these home school meetups with other people in kind of the Essex area who were also homeschooling so we could kind of socialize and meet other kids and at one of these I met a girl who was maybe a year or two older than me which at that age feels like a lot and she had some friends there I got something wrong I think I said something

like they were being a bit mean and I think I said something like instead of sidekicks I'd obviously heard it wrong and I said you and your psychics are stupid and they just obviously mercilessly laughed at that and so I grabbed her by the throat and I tried to strangle her and obviously had to be pulled off and obviously my mum was mortified by this I don't know if we ever went to another meetup I'd embarrassed everyone deeply but I remember being sat down actually by that girl's older sister later in the day and I thought that she was an angel because she was maybe 15 which felt so grown up and so glamorous and she said oh my sister can be really mean sometimes but you just have to take a breath

and rise above it and that was such excellent advice that I didn't follow at all for years afterwards, but I've always remembered it. Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how grateful I am that you chose this as a failure. No one has ever spoken about it before. And I relate so hard because I think you're right. It comes from an intense sensitivity to what other people are thinking of you and how they sometimes might get their perceptions wrong. And when I was a child, I remember being completely unmoored by the idea that someone was laughing at me or thought I was foolish or had misinterpreted something meaningful about me. And unlike you, who was sort of brave enough to go there with the strangling and the biting fantasies, I would just nurture a grudge for years.

I still hold grudges from school. And I have obviously long ago forgiven that person, but I will never, ever forget. Like it just lodges deep in my psyche. And I find it so fascinating that it can come from actually a very sweet thing, which is like a need to be accepted and liked. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is the heart of it. And I mean, I've thought a lot about this because obviously I don't want to be that sensitive to what people think of me I don't want to be completely derailed by the idea that

someone's got something wrong about me I really don't want to be like that so it is something that I've obviously been working on and I mean I don't strangle people these days to start with this is a dreadful thing to say I'm gonna say it anyway but I've always wanted to have a fist fight I don't care who with I just you know it's not actually gonna happen it seems highly unlikely at this point but you know on some level I'd love to just you know someone that really deserves it maybe you're out and you see a man just being like horrible horrible to someone and I'd finally get my chance to plant one on someone you want to be a superhero well yeah less noble than that maybe but it's so much stress and it's so much holding things in I'm very meek and mild in a lot of ways and so that means all of these

little moments of aggression and frustration kind of don't really have an outlet I think that I probably wouldn't fantasize about one day being able to have a punch up if I just e.g. said to someone in the supermarket you just cut me up I was actually queuing like if I could just say that you know yes it's subsumed anger isn't it and anger is one of those things that women particularly historically have not been allowed or encouraged to express so it comes out in lots of really difficult explosive ways like I have terrible road rage and I feel like that's where my stuff comes out all of my frustration and will suddenly just be a launch into an expletive late rant of some poor person who's just driving in their car without any knowledge. But what are you like in an argument?

Do you get into arguments in real life? Because I never do. I'm very conflict-averse. But one of the things that I respect about you is that you do call things out. And that must be quite a hard thing to balance if you also have all of this other stuff going on yeah I do get into arguments but it's weird I think I'm quite fragmented as a person and I think that's probably why I feel quite unmoored a lot of the time I'm quite uncertain about what I should be doing and who I really am because you know online for instance I'm very happy to say

like that I don't know some person has said something ridiculous about food and something insensitive about bodies or whatever it is I'm happy to call that out I'm happy to call Piers Morgan and Gammon or whatever it is I'm not scared to do that it doesn't give my day a frisson of stress and anxiety and sadness it's just something I do I'm like and I feel reasonably justified in doing it and then I move on whereas in my personal life I think I'm a lot more cautious and I think I'm a lot more prone to holding things in and questioning myself and wondering whether I've got things wrong like should I really be annoyed about this and I think actually for good reason a lot of the time because I do have a history of being annoyed about things I shouldn't be so I do question

things a lot more in that area of my life and do you think I mean I suppose Piers Morgan is a bad example for me to choose because I'm not sure that he cares about insults it doesn't seem to go in but do you ever think about the impact that that might have on the person hearing it that they might be hurt by it in the way that you would be hurt by it I think that is such a recurring theme for me and something that I've only recently started to compute is that so much of the time when I'm unkind to people is because I genuinely don't think that they will care I think that they have so much going on in their lives they've got so much going for them they're so popular they're so whatever it is that they will not care one jot what I think of them it won't hurt their feelings at all I really

believed that in the moment and I think I felt that way all the way from school when there was one girl at school who had lots of friends who called me goat girl on myspace in a bulletin one time and I couldn't let it go I could not forget it and I dedicated months and years to kind of following her social media and her friends and kind of hating them all and saying really quite horrible things about all of them because I didn't think they'd care because I thought well they're a friend group they've got some things that I wish I had and so what would they care if I'm saying this stuff about them and I think that has carried on a lot and I think in the last few years I've learned to be way more careful and to realize that just because people are successful, just because they have things that

I don't, it doesn't mean that there is nothing I can do to hurt them. Because ultimately, I don't want to hurt people. That's the thing. That's so beautifully expressed. Are there things then that you regret having said? Or do you feel actually, I meant them in the moment and so I can stand by that? I don't have massive regrets. No, in terms of things I've said on the moment and so I can stand by that I don't have massive regrets no in terms of things I've said on Twitter and stuff I've been flippant but like there are things I've said about Paul Hollywood for example I think you mentioned one earlier but I don't particularly lose sleep over that I don't feel too bad I don't think that he's particularly hurt by that I don't think he's very vulnerable to the judgment of others so yeah that I don't feel too bad about I mean there's definitely things

that I've phrased more harshly than I wish I had with hindsight the only thing that I try to do now is just to think a little bit more and to go in less intensely than I kind of want to on a gut level and to try and keep things to the point as well like if someone said something that's absolute nonsense these days I try to say it was nonsense rather than saying that they are a hand product of whatever variety yes well it's like as you said you've taken that girl's older sister's advice to heart and you think about it and act on it now so well done her well done 15 year old her yeah yeah very grateful for her but she was lovely I'm very grateful for you I really am I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this interview and how much I've enjoyed your failures and I hope that

doesn't sound weird but how has it been for you because you said at the very beginning before we started recording, that you were a bit nervous about it. So what's the experience been like for you? It's actually been quite lovely. It has. I mean, obviously it's really intimidating. I had to think long and hard before I even committed to doing this with you

because I was so nervous about airing my dirty laundry for the world, so to speak but I think there's something really really special about knowing what you've done wrong knowing where you've gone wrong and knowing that you don't want to do that again and I think that is the thing that kind of strips the shame from it the sharing strips away the shame and then knowing that you're going to kind of do things differently in future strips away that kind of corrosive self-hatred and self-doubt so if anything it's been a really useful process so thank you thank you so much for having the courage the self-insight and the humor to bring everything you have done to how to Fail. You are my groundnut soup forever.

Ruby Tando, thank you so, so much. Thank you. This episode of How To Fail is sponsored by Stripe and Stare, purveyors of the most comfortable, sustainable knickers and loungewear in the world because it's what's underneath that counts stripe and stare make products that are kind to you and kind to the planet and i hope it's not tmi but i'm wearing a pair of stripe and stare knickers right now and i can fully condone this strap line i wear them all the time since they started sponsoring the podcast. And I absolutely agree that they are unbelievably comfortable and there is no VPL.

They don't ride up. You don't get wedgies. They're so comfortable, you forget you're even wearing them. So it lets you worry about far more important things throughout the day. And they are sustainably sourced. Only 3% of the underwear market is sustainably sourced, which is pretty terrible for a product that we all wear every day. Stripe and Stair products are sustainably sourced from beechwood trees, which mean

they are softer than cotton, use 95% less water in their production, and they lie perfectly flat against the skin. You don't need to just take my word for it. They've been described as the most comfortable knickers by magazines such as Forbes and Harper's Bazaar, and their pajamas are really amazing as well. Anyway, shop online at stripeandstare.com with a 20% discount for the next month using the code HOWTOTWENTY. That's HOWTOTWENTY. Stripe and Stare are also available at Selfridges, Shopbop and Revolve. And they have a knicker subscription. So you can have a new pair of knickers delivered through the letterbox on a regular basis. And you never need to think about shopping for pants again.

Thank you so, so much to the wonderful Stripe and Stare. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently it helps other people know that we exist.