Ella Quittner Transcript
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Hi, everyone. You're listening to The Future Of Food Is You, a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Abena Anim-Somuah. And each week, I talk to emerging talents in the food world and they share what they're up to as well as their dreams and predictions for what's ahead. I love this new generation of chefs, bakers, and creatives making their way in the worlds of food, drink, media, and tech.
Today's guest is Ella Quittner, the journalist behind some of the most buzzed about writing and food media. She's making a name for herself with pieces like her New York Times article, “I Love You, but I Hate Your Cooking” and “The Bizarre Allure of Sexy Cakes” in New York Magazine. You might be surprised to learn that Ella spent years working in finance before pivoting to a freelance writing career. We chat about how she made that jump and how she landed in her first full-time editorial gig. Ella talks about how she learned to pitch to media outlets and her methods for keeping track of her ideas, plus her observations on the state of food media today. Stay tuned for our chat.
The next issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine is almost here and it's all about the city of the summer, Paris. Whether you're planning a trip to Paris or daydreaming about a future visit, you'll love this issue. Get recommendations from folks like Molly Baz and friend of the pod, Zaynab Issa. Learn about the coolest Parisiennes on the food scene and check out the fun French-y recipes to add to your repertoire. You can subscribe now at cherrybombe.com or pick up an issue at your favorite local bookstore, magazine shop, or gourmet store. Places like Casa Magazines in New York City, Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Omnivore Books in San Francisco, or visit cherrybombe.com to order an issue today.
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everybody. This is Kerry Diamond from Radio Cherry Bombe. We are hosting a special event in Las Vegas this Monday, June 24th, from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Join me and some of the city's top female culinary talent to celebrate our new podcast miniseries, Destination Cherry Bombe, which is dedicated to all things food and travel. We'll have networking, a panel conversation, and great food and drink. We'll be at the beautiful La Fontaine Restaurant located inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas. Come meet other members of the Vegas Bombesquad and learn about the folks shaping the city's culinary landscape. Tickets are $30 and include the latest issue of Cherry Bombe magazine plus all bites and sips. Head to cherrybombe.com to get your tickets today or check out the link in our show notes.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Ella, thank you so much for joining us on The Future Of Food Is You podcast.
Ella Quittner:
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Can you tell us where you grew up and how did food show up in your life?
Ella Quittner:
Sure. I grew up back and forth on the East Coast and West Coast, so I was raised partially in Long Island and then partially in a strange pocket of Northern California outside of San Francisco. And how did food show up in my life? I mean, it showed up in the conventional ways. I grew up in this Philip Rothian anxiety field. Anxiety was our religion, family of very tightly-wound type A neurotic parents and children. And I think food showed up in a way that was almost medicinal for us, not in the nice way where it's like, "Food is medicine, plants are medicine," et cetera, which totally love now. Food was the thing that grounded us. We could all be spiraling or disagreeing or things could be chaotic, we could all have different opinions about a thing or I could be freaking out and melting down about this thing, my sister about another thing, my other sister about another thing, my parents not even home from work yet, and then the thing that would ground us and center us as a family was having one of a few meals that were recurring characters in our lives.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I love that.
Ella Quittner:
The same chicken dish or... My parents made this thing which was like they would just boil spaghetti or bucatini... Spaghetti. I don't know why I'm pretending I'm fancy. And then they would get cold Polly-O ricotta, basically spread that on a plate, twirl the hot pasta onto it, but not mix it in, put a nest of... I think they had just discovered Pomi boxed tomato sauce, so a nest of that doctored a little bit. And then 20 minutes after they got home from work... Because they worked late. They would do that a lot. That was a really grounding one.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
You have one of the most impressive resumes in food. You have bylines in some of the most prominent publications. You're working on a cookbook, you're a recipe developer, but that was not your first foray out of college. You actually had a career in finance before food. What were you working on and did you take any lessons from that time into the world of food?
Ella Quittner:
Yes. I spent the better part of a decade working in finance working on Wall Street. The technical description of what I was doing was raising capital for private equity fund managers. We were a smaller group within an investment bank. And so practically, what that looked like is how it looks for Hollywood agents or managers to operate with their clients, at least that's how I see it now that I'm on the writing side of things, where we would work with basically the managers at these private equity funds from the inception of their idea to raise a fund through helping them create all of the marketing about it in the description, and then we would set up the meetings for them to meet with potential investors and go with them to the meetings and help convince investors that they should invest-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Wow. That's a lot of different functions.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah. Sometimes the projects would last three years, sometimes they were six months, but it was never short. I mean, I think every job is useful, to be honest. I've brought lessons learned from my four or five years as a barista in high school to my day-to-day life too, and from getting fired as a babysitter and a tutor to my day-to-day life. I think the main things from my time in finance were working at a very fast pace, meeting deadlines, managing a lot of balls in the air because the way the business was structured, you could be on anywhere from three to six deals, meaning three to six disparate clients around the world who you were raising money for and you had to make all of them feel like they were your only client. Working on teams, learning to manage people is really helpful even though I'm a freelancer now, so it's almost the opposite, but just understanding those relational dynamics is useful.
And I think, in a weird way, burning out at times, Wall Street or in finance helped me understand the way I as a person am inclined to work and the way I am a person am inclined to really seek external validation. And even if I can't totally control it still, I think just that the growing up I did in that job and the introspection I was forced to do at certain moments when I was teetering on the brink of like, "It's 1:00 AM and nothing feels possible and everything feels like it's going to go wrong if I don't do all this stuff," and having the requisite people say to you like, "You're not an open-heart surgeon. Let's take a step back," that emotional lesson I think is useful for me now since I juggle a lot of different jobs.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. You leave finance, but while you were in finance, you had started freelance writing a bit. How would you describe your writing style to those who are unfamiliar with your work?
Ella Quittner:
Broadly, I would say I write about culture. Often that involves food, but not always. And then as much as I would like to be writing the hard-hitting investigations that are changing lives and all of this, I think what I tend to write about... And maybe in the future, I will do some of those. I hope to, one day-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
It's time to manifest.
Ella Quittner:
... that would be cool. Yeah, I'm going to manifest that. But I tend to write more things that I would consider amusing or entertaining. So I think the big things across all the mediums I write, in fiction, nonfiction, journalism, screenwriting, is that I like to make people laugh and I like to make them feel things. I would say I like to make them cry, but I don't mean I like to bully them. I mean I like to make them feel in touch with the things that make us human and why that can be beautiful, and why that can be hard, and why it can be confusing.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Looking for some fun things to do this summer? Check out Cherry Bombe’s Summer Series. The Cherry Bombe team is hitting the road from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon for special dinners, networking events, and even Women Who Grill celebrations. Learn more and get tickets at cherrybombe.com.
So you are a freelancer and I think that's how most people will get to approach your work. But you've had one full-time job in food where you worked at Food52 as a writer and recipe developer. How did you get that job coming out of finance and transitioning into the food world?
Ella Quittner:
I'm sure most people have a similar answer to this, which is that I applied for probably dozens of jobs over the course of maybe two years. I realized, a few years into finance, that I was much more interested in who had made the bagels that someone brought in when we were all hungover that sat on the little table in the middle of the bullpen than I was in the day in and day out machinations of the markets. Not to say I wasn't trying to keep up with that, just that if someone started talking about the best burger in an office near my sad little cubicle, that I was eavesdropping on. But it took a minute. I applied to a lot of jobs. I applied to jobs at Bon Appétit. I remember I applied to multiple jobs at The Infatuation, which at the time was red-hot growing-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yes.
Ella Quittner:
I applied to... Oh, gosh, I blocked it from my memory because there's just so much rejection.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Those no’s hit hard.
Ella Quittner:
I still face rejection all the time and it doesn't get much easier. Yeah, I applied to a lot of jobs, and then I finally applied to this one at Food52. I can't remember if it was the first job I'd applied to at Food52 or if I had already applied to a job and done the whole rigmarole of going on LinkedIn and Instagram and-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The cold emails. Yeah.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah. Going through my resume and everyone I've ever met or gone to college with. I guess the way I got that job was twofold. One was I just knocked on every door I could of people who could potentially connect me into the hiring process because I remember a big thing at that time, food media was blowing up. This was 2018-ish-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Oh, that was a season.
Ella Quittner:
This was like people were posting their cappuccinos on Instagram story and writing copped, and I'd love to say I was rolling my eyes, but, no, I was sprinting to-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
You were right there with them.
Ella Quittner:
... the East Village to get that cappuccino so I could write on my Instagram story, which had 30 followers, copped. Yeah, fully, I was an acolyte of whatever the strange cult they were building-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The test kitchen.
Ella Quittner:
Claire was reverse engineering a Twinkie. I was wrapped. I was like, "Shut up. I'm busy, I'm working," and my bosses were like, "No, but... So I remember that was going on. I was very acutely aware that at a lot of these places, probably my applications weren't even getting read, so I knocked on as many doors as I could to try to just get my application read at Food52. I remember at least I had a friend whose neighbor and friend, who's now a friend of mine... Confusing. Had, in some way, been involved at the inception of Food52, so I got them to put in a good word for me. I think I ghost-wrote an email about myself actually that was like, "Ella is so amazing. Every time we run into her, we're just floored by how insightful she is. And by the way, the olive oil cake she makes, we think about constantly and we beg her to make it for us," and basically convince them to forward that to someone, things like that. And also, I think it helped that I'd been reading Food52 since it was born-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
So you knew the style.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah. It was a deep fan of Kristen Miglore's column, Genius Recipes.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah.
Ella Quittner:
So that was one way just to get my application read. And then the second way was when you apply to editorial jobs, you have to do something called an edit test, which is you're basically given a series of prompts that require you, if you're applying to be a writer, to invent a lot of ideas and pitches, and then write some sample headlines, write some sample captions or sample paragraphs or write some sample features depending on what you're applying to, or if you're applying to be an editor somewhere, the edit test might be that they're giving you-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Something to edit.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah, exactly. A freelancer piece that ran or didn't run and they just want you to redline it in Google Docs or whatever. So for Food52, I remember I was like, "There's no way... I faced so much rejection, "There's no way anyone wants to hire me whenever I threw my hat in the ring. I'm probably never going to hear from them." I remember I was getting on an airplane to go to the bachelorette party of a friend and I wouldn't have WiFi for six days. The bachelorette party was overseas. This will become important.
And so I get on the plane, I get on the red eye in row 48 of 47. Literally my seat is the bathroom and it's already clogged. And I look at my email one last time, and I'm also so email-triggered at this point up life already because I'm still in finance, I had that email app. I'm constantly checking it. I'm already nervous. I'm going to be offline for three days or whatever. I'm already scheming of how I can go to a WiFi cafe. And I have an email from the hiring editor and she's like, "Hey, so here's an edit test. Would you be able to complete this and turn it into us by Monday?" This is a Thursday, I think, at 11:00 P.M. Right?
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. Did you bring your laptop at least?
Ella Quittner:
Sorry, I'm laughing because at this time in my life, my friends just relentlessly trolled me, because I didn't go anywhere without, not one, but two laptops. My personal laptop, which was some old beat-up Mac that I was using to apply to all these jobs and also in my humiliating burgeoning and now failed and hidden career as a stand-up comedian, and you notice in all these cold pitches and whatever and do my double-life. And then my work laptop, which was a horrible Lenovo-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
ThinkPad.
Ella Quittner:
... PC. Yeah, that was 14 inches thick and 14 inches wide. Yeah, it was horrible. So I was clunking around everywhere with constant back pain. So I did have both laptops and I got the email and I was like, "Oh, shoot. I'm going to have to just make it work without WiFi." So on the plane, I have two seconds before we take off. I go to Food52's website... Because the big thing in edit test is you don't want to repeat any content they've already done. So I don't even have time to think about stuff. I'm just blindly screenshotting hundreds of recipe pages, hundreds of stories, whatever I can literally screenshot on my phone before we take off.
We take off, I'm like, "Okay, whatever I didn't get, I'll just go to an internet cafe and figure out, or when I figure out my ideas, I'll go to an internet cafe and make sure they don't already have it." We land, I'm like, "Okay, it's 6:00 A.M. on day one. I'm just going to wake up early because I don't want to disappoint my friend and just do the application for three hours every day." Oh, I'm sorry. It also involved developing recipes. So in addition to the ideas, the pitches, and the features, it was literally turn in three full recipes. That was the main part of it.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Wow.
Ella Quittner:
I had to write recipes from scratch and I was like, "Obviously, I don't know what I'm going to do because I can't test these."
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Have you been doing recipe development at that time?
Ella Quittner:
Not professionally. I had done it in my life, but not in a way where I was like, "Well, I can just grab these three off the shelf that didn't get published by whatever other publication." So I get there, and then there's a big complication-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Oh, dear.
Ella Quittner:
... which is I don't remember what it was, but there was some legislation at the time that made it so Food52 couldn't be accessed in Europe. I wasn't aware of it, so I just had to do it blind. And then at a certain point, I wrote the recipes and I begged people, I think my parents, maybe my sisters, maybe some friends who weren't with me, to cross test the recipes at home and also check the website for me to make sure I wasn't straight up copying anything or duplicating it.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
So it seems like you got to understand writing and recipe developing, and if anything, all of this is just a testament to the persistence of being a freelance writer. So once you leave Food52, it sounded like you didn't spend too much time there, in hindsight, relative to your career, what motivated you to transition into freelance writing where you are now?
Ella Quittner:
I knew that I wanted to also pursue screenwriting and fiction writing, and nonfiction writing, journalism about culture, or essays, reported essays, travel writing, all the stuff I do now, and so it felt like the best way to do that was to transition to a freelance relationship. Now that I'd built up a editor situation at Food52, I knew I could pitch someone there. It felt like it might be the right time to take that leap, but it was three or four months before the pandemic hit, so it was actually insane timing in retrospect and not the right time to do that.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
But it worked out.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah, I'm sure it would've, wherever I was, gotten laid off anyway.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
From your perspective right now, what is the current landscape of food writing as it exists in the media?
Ella Quittner:
That's such an interesting question. I mean, I think there's a few different threads that come to mind. One is where are we and where are we going? One trend I see a lot is that I think that, in all media, we're transitioning culturally... And I don't mean this in legacy publications. I mean in a supply-demand, what we're consuming way. I think we're transitioning a little bit to a situation in which we're much more personality-focused... And we have been for years, right? You and I were joking earlier about loving the Bon Appétit test kitchen, and we were loving that for the personalities, not necessarily because it was-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Everyone had their favorite-
Ella Quittner:
... part of a legacy. Internet just gave us another way to worship celebrities that we think in some weird subconscious way are relatable to us even though when we meet them, they're most often not. That's just getting exponentially more and more intimate and more and more intense with things like Instagram Reels, and TikTok, and the continued growth of YouTube and the way these creator programs are incentivizing people to go viral. So I think that's one thread I see, which is that food media and all media, it's not fully transitioning to an individual or personality-based thing where folks are just TikToking about stuff, but that's a lot of where our attention is. And then I think people do still have a yearning for trust for certain legacy publications across the field of media.
The other thing that comes to mind about your question, you said, "Where do you see food media in the landscape of overall media?" Something I see a lot is that at certain publications I see that places that cover a number of topics that have a number of beats, whether it's an old magazine or what have you, the people in charge have started to realize, it seems like... As an outsider, I have no insight into this, fully a freelancer. But it seems like they've started to realize how valuable food coverage is.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
1000%.
Ella Quittner:
I think 20, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, whatever, I'm just going to keep saying numbers of years to seem intelligent, since the dawn of time. I think that maybe food was thought of as something that was lower-hanging fruit in the writing space and things like art, fashion, books, literature, theater, world news, all those thought of as a bit higher-brow, a bit more literary, or if not more literary, more intellectual. And I think that, in a certain sense, we did it. I can't take much credit for that. I haven't been around very long, but the leaders of food media, the people who've been writing these beautiful pieces about how important food is to culture and how food brings us together, and tears us apart, and makes us want to live, and makes us want to die or saves us when we're dying or brings us back to life, whatever it is, all of these stories about food have really done the trick and I think have convinced people who needed to be convinced that, and also I think money is telling a story. Right?
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Where are people's eyeballs going? Where are their wallets going?
Ella Quittner:
Exactly. Where's ad revenue coming from? Who are people falling on YouTube? You see this a lot. I don't know if it's indicative of a larger trend, but something I see a lot is a major celebrity in another field like a movie star or something, will start doing cooking videos on TikTok or Instagram. There's definitely an argument to be made that some of that's just organic because part of the reason you and I love food, and reading about food, and writing about food is because it's so important and so integral.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I eagerly look out for your bylines. I think you write in some of the publications I'm a loyal subscriber to. And a lot of your writing, especially in the last couple of months, has focused a lot on cultural observations of restaurants and food phenomenons from the prominence of butter, as this idea, this movement, this artistic representation to the functionality of chore coats as waiter uniforms. What is your approach to finding relevant topics to write about as food intersects with culture?
Ella Quittner:
If something that I encounter out in the world or even just in the confines of my home, if anything makes me want to pick up my phone and send a text message to a friend or family member that is, I'll just say, spirited. If I want to pick up my phone and do a little rant about something or if I want to pick up my phone and say, "Have you noticed this? It's insane," or, "What is going on with this," or if I'm screenshotting something and I'm sending it to someone to say, "This is driving me wild," that's usually a pretty big indicator. That might not be the angle, but that's usually a good indicator to me that there's something going on. There's something in the ether that I want to pluck out and look at a little more closely like most people alive in 2024. I keep an insane number of iPhone notes that are half-finished, and one of them is just a long-running list of things that I've noticed, food or otherwise. It's not like everything I notice like, "Person in yellow coat," but it's-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Same pattern of seeing trends.
Ella Quittner:
Exactly.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Observations. Totally.
Ella Quittner:
Weird trends, right? I'm getting a drink to kill time and I notice a table at this strange dive bar's ordered a table-side flambe, and then I'm like, "Is table-side flambe back?" So I'll write down the example, and then-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Dinner theatrics. There's a whole theme around that.
Ella Quittner:
Exactly.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Totally.
Ella Quittner:
And then maybe I encounter it again four months later and I've completely forgotten about it, I go to write that in the note again and I'm like, "Oh." And people talk a lot about the rule of three. If you see three instances of a thing, it's a trend. You need to not just have the rule of three, but also take a minute with yourself and say, "Is there some bigger cultural reason why this is happening? Can I connect this into other ideas I'm having about what's going on in society, inflation, what's going on with the economy?"
Abena Anim-Somuah:
How do you develop relationship with editors of these publications to bring these ideas and observations you have to life?
Ella Quittner:
There's probably a more composed answer to this that involves things like networking and that sort of thing, which is probably true, and I'll come back to you, but the honest answer to how I was able to eventually get things placed at some of these publications is I would say 75 or more percent of the time is incessant cold pitching.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
But it's the reality.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah. I did do a lot of cold pitching for a long time. I think the practical things that helped eventually land ideas... There are a few things. One was getting some bylines, and I was lucky that when I was in college before I went into finance, I had done some internships thinking I might want to work in journalism.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Interesting.
Ella Quittner:
So I had some bylines from places like health.com, which was the website for Health magazine or that kind of thing, which is useful because when you're cold pitching people, especially very early in your career, you really want to have that stuff to be able to say, "You can take a risk on me because someone else has, and I did the thing that you have to do," but, yeah, a lot of cold pitching that eventually over time got slightly better.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. And I think there's a beauty and consistency, and I'm sure within time you've found your voice, you've drawn feedback together. Are you getting assigned pitches and is there a balance between what you're getting assigned by these editors and what you're pitching to them as something you're seeing out in the world?
Ella Quittner:
There's definitely a balance, and I love, love getting assigned pitches because I really like collaborating with a lot of the people I work with. Some of the editors I get to write for are some of my favorite people on earth, and they're so smart and they're funny, and I love when they're like, "Hey, here's a trend. Do you have a take on it?" Because it's being in a writer's room or just riffing with your best friend, it's like, "Oh, now that you mentioned it, I do." So I really like that. And a lot of the ideas I get from editors I work with, I do take because a lot of it's people who I already trust and love working with. Right? It's not just a PR email that's like, "Have you ever thought about writing about-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
So-and-so.
Ella Quittner:
Exactly.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Brand thing.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah, how shrimp is delicious.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I'm curious to hear, just being so connected to these publications, has there been something that surprised you about the mechanisms of food media publications as they exist today based on your observations as a freelance writer?
Ella Quittner:
I think the number one thing, and this is going to reveal my just deep-seated insecurity if I haven't already, I'm still constantly taken aback by the respectfulness in the way that editors will take you seriously once you've agreed that you are going to write about a thing once they've accepted a pitch or what have you. The idea that they're treating me like a real person who has input on a thing and/or is an expert on a thing that I've researched is so intoxicating and so validating in a weird way. I guess coming from an industry where I was really climbing up the ladder and it felt really endless, and I am, by the way, still doing that in other industries like screenwriting and still literally nobody-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Everyone's constantly growing.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah. And so I think going into a situation where someone is actually taking you seriously and is like, "What do you think about this? What do you think the headline should be? I've made some edits, but do you like them or can you maybe elaborate on this? Or do you have more ideas about this," is just for me, it's just catnip, and it's why I can't imagine having a different job. It feels so good to be surprised by someone wanting to hear what I think about a thing.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
That's really powerful, and that's really nice to hear that you go from having this difficult relationship getting an editor to notice you to you finally reaching their line of sight and them being like, "Oh, I see this camaraderie, this reciprocity," and building something together. That's really special.
Ella Quittner:
I think that is why it's so jarring. You just articulated it really well. It's because you spend years and years trying to convince anyone to just open your email-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Read your words. Of course.
Ella Quittner:
... or open your follow-up email that you've just carefully crafted with the help of six of your best friends to seem carefree, and-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
We love a crisis comm group chat.
Ella Quittner:
Yeah, literally. And then, yeah, it's so shocking when it's like, "Okay. Yeah, we're listening. What do you have to say?"
Abena Anim-Somuah:
What do you think the future holds for food media and how do you think people like you as freelance writers are playing a role in shaping that?
Ella Quittner:
I think that there's a balance will strike eventually a harmony between personality-driven content, I'll call it, instead of media, because I'm not talking about just... I guess videos are media, so I think it's a harmony, a balance between personality-driven stuff, and then folks deciding collectively how much institutional backing they're seeking and what percent of the content they're consuming. They want to have that because it's not something we crave all the time.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
No.
Ella Quittner:
I don't need an institutional backer if I'm trying to scroll on TikTok to find out what the best primer is to put under my makeup, I just want to see how it looks on people's faces in different light, I want to see a consensus of all the stuff they're recommending. So I think it's a balance between that. And it's ultimately, I think, up to the consumers, us and everyone else, readers, watchers, viewers, subscribers. I think Substack is an interesting space to watch and an interesting trend predictor in that sense, because we're also starting to see the institutionalization of Substack a little bit.
Right now, we're paying for the ones we want to read, et cetera, but I think probably we're going to start to see Substack imitating a traditional magazine a little bit for a while or a traditional blog or a zine, where you and I get together because we have a lot of the same readers and we're like, "Instead of charging $5 to every reader every month, maybe you, me, and someone else get together and they pay $9, but we only have to write one in four." Right? So I think we're going to see stuff like that, and that's going to be a weird way we're seeing that equilibrium between institutions and individuals because what even is an institution? Are you, me, and one other person who are running a Substack not an editorial board? Do we not have a policy? Do we not vote and talk about what we write about, what we don't, what our ethical guidelines are about press strips, et cetera?
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I want to transition into your recipe development side. I think you're one of the writers that has this balance of writing bylines, but also you have these recipe concepts and things that you develop. You post these really awesome visually aesthetic projects on your Instagram where you basically take a baking sheet, line it up with some washi tape, and you take a food, let's say a pancake, and you show us these different iterations of the pancake either with coconut oil, butter, AP flour, cake flour, which has this almost beautiful scientific yet home economics vibe to it. And you call these concepts head-to-heads. How did you come up with this idea?
Ella Quittner:
I came up with the idea through my own neuroticism. I think at some point, I looked around and was like, "This is the thing I'm doing anyway. Everyone else doesn't have to do this too. This takes forever. I'm doing it. Let me do the work and let me post the results and let me just tell you what I'm thinking." And by the way, the project is called The Best & The Rest, and it's about this obsession with finding the best way to cook things where I'm melding tips and tricks, and techniques, and recipes from all these different things I'm testing, but I also very much firmly believe that there is no such thing as the best, and that context is really important to anyone's understanding of the best.
And so another piece of the project for me is this is my perspective. I'm testing 20 different ways to make a biscuit, and I'm going to tell you what I think the best recipe is based on all of that, but with my own mission in mind, which is, for me, I really love a biscuit to be super layered, and flaky, and a little sweet, and get a caramelized bottom, and it can lean savory if you put ham in, it can lean sweet, it can be the top of a cobbler, it can be all of these different things. That's what I like in a biscuit. So I really endeavor also to conceptualize each of these head-to-heads with that context.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. It's also interesting. It seems like for some of them, you're following the same recipe but just with variations, which I think is just a testament to recipes. Recipes are guides. They're ways for you to try out and build your own relationship to food. But then you also have ones where you take a chocolate chip cookie, and then you've done different versions of different recipes of people's chocolate chip cookies. So you've done the King Arthur chocolate chip cookie, or you've done the Pillsbury cookie cookbook, and you've done the New York Times one, and it's really interesting to see you take that comparative concept and bring it on in these different ways. Do you cook each batch of the recipe or do you make samples to then display out-
Ella Quittner:
It depends on the item and it depends on how flexible it is. So in the book, there's a chapter on yellow cakes. That's an example of something I could only scale down to be half recipes pretty much if I wanted to be able to get a clean slice of yellow cake that didn't feel like it was confused in the pan because I'd scaled it down so far, it was just a muffin or whatever.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Of course.
Ella Quittner:
But I really hate food waste, so I tend to try to scale things down as much as possible or pick flexible bases that I then manipulating toward the end. An example of that is vodka sauce. You could start with-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The base.
Ella Quittner:
... not with every single test, but for as many of them as possible. You can start with an allium base divided into four pots, and then add different amounts of tomato paste and vodka or whatever. The ones that were the hardest to scale for the book were definitely yellow cake, certain frostings actually, certain butter creams, because when you're making a meringue, of course you need a certain volume to be able to actually aerate the eggs properly and get the right results with the sugar syrups and butter and things. Roast chicken, although I want to shoutout Mia Glickman, who helped me with a lot of the head-to-head testing behind the scenes in my kitchen, who's amazing. And we did it with a lot of chicken pieces and parts, so we couldn't scale down every test because some were like, "How does it affect it if you spatchcock a whole chicken versus just roast it straight up versus just truss it, but leave it on spatchcock. So those three, for example, had to be whole chickens, but for a lot of the trials, we would just use a thigh connected to a drumstick.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I'm curious to hear how the head-to-head style has informed your cooking and harness your relationship to food in general.
Ella Quittner:
I think equal and opposite reactions. One is that I'm very obsessive naturally and very neurotic naturally if that's not clear at this point in the podcast. So it is always playing on a ticker tape in my mind. If a friend is like, "I'm coming over, let's make cookies, let's make chicken or whatever," I'm like, "Okay, I know the things that will make it the best chicken for my palate," so I have to get those things ready and be ready to do those steps. The opposite reaction is I think I'm really burnt out on cooking right now-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Of course, you've been developing a cookbook.
Ella Quittner:
Sure. But it would be better if I was carefree and walking in grass barefoot... I don't know how I would've access to grass, but if I had access to grass, I'd be walking through a barefoot-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Prospect Park.
Ella Quittner:
... Gingham apron, yeah, carrying a beautiful tray of a thing I made casually to my beautiful friends who love me and think it's delicious.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Sun is setting, birds are chirping.
Ella Quittner:
The sun's setting. There's a cloudy, raspberry-colored wine. The reality is most nights, my husband and I make something we call slop, which is absolutely disgusting. We just take what's in the fridge and saute it for a really long time.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Love.
Ella Quittner:
And I'll give it a name to try to be generous and gentle with myself. Last night, I did uncased Italian chicken sausage, a lot of kale that I just had that was on its very last legs, puree I had made earlier in the week of Pecorino and more kale that I'd blanched-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
This is a very exquisite slop.
Ella Quittner:
Well, it didn't look it. And old rice. I always have really old rice. And so I put a lot of that in there. And then I had a leftover broth because I had made Sohla's Hainanese-ish, I think it's called chicken or it's called Hainanese chicken-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
It's such a good recipe.
Ella Quittner:
I'd saved the poaching liquid. So I used that as a broth. And what I made is really scary-looking and tasting. Yeah, I think the way it's affected me is in my own life, when I am burnt out, I really cannot do more than one pot. I have to use just one cutting board, one knife, one spoon-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
One element on the stove. Yeah.
Ella Quittner:
Oh, my God, if that.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
We've been hinting at this, but let's talk about the cookbook, “The Best & The Rest,” that's set to come out next spring. Congratulations. That's really exciting. And you describe it as a culinary exploration of America's obsession with the best. What inspired you to write the book?
Ella Quittner:
I think I've been obsessed with this nebulous idea of the best. I say that in scare quotes for basically as long as I can remember, right? I was a child that didn't even know what the word validation was, but I craved it so deeply from my teachers, my parents, my siblings, whatever. And then in every one of my lives that you can... I say that I have a million novels in me like my past lives. But in my college life, and my Wall Street life, and my Food52 life, and my post-Food52, just screenwriting, writing journalism life, whatever, I think that's been a really guiding principle, even though I haven't wanted to accept it.
And funnily enough, when I pitched this book concept, I really did it in the third person, I guess, is what you would call it. I don't know if that's right. But I said, "I want to write this book about the American obsession with the best or why certain people are obsessed with the best and why if you say, 'This is the best way to do something,' everyone's going to want to click it and everyone wants to know the best of everything," but it took me until maybe three days before I turned in a rough draft of my manuscript, which was really recently, to be like, "No, it's me. I'm part of this. I've been obsessed with this forever-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
"I am the American obsessed with the best."
Ella Quittner:
Yeah, I am. I really am. I can't walk past a thing that says, "This is the best thing." I can't walk past a person who is training and throwing everything into trying to be the best at something. I can't walk past a eating competition. I can't walk past any billboard that's promising the best way to get a deal on a thing. And so I think what inspired the project was both that innate urge that I've always had, and then also my classic self-critical outlook where I really wanted to analyze why I am the way I am. Right? I wanted to follow people, places, things around who were also obsessed with the best to try to understand the cultural urge, whether it's American or whether it's ubiquitous to be the best, know the best, eat the best. I wanted both pieces. So it's a little meta.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I love that.
Ella Quittner:
Because you are still getting my cooking tips for the best way to cook chicken.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah, of course, but there's a deeper meaning behind it.
Ella Quittner:
I hope so.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. Well, tell us about the collection of recipes that readers will expect when the book comes out next year.
Ella Quittner:
So every recipe is based on these head-to-heads I did. I did a juicy shrimp head-to-head where my goal was to find a way to make the juiciest shrimp. After that head-to-head where I tell you about the results, and what worked, and what didn't, and what tips and tricks, and whatever... And by the way, a lot of that is intel that I just got through research that work other people did. I want to be very clear to give credit everywhere, and I tried to in the book.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah, of course. You're comparing the best. Yeah.
Ella Quittner:
Right. But a lot of that is stuff I found in XYZ cookbook or XYZ blog or this person did it. So there's a very fulsome list of references in there. Pretty much none of this is something that I thought of independently. So I test all this stuff and I write up the results, and then I develop recipes based on what suited my mission and my preferences the most.
So for juicy shrimp, the method that I found gave the most... When I combine this factor, this factor, and this factor as far as how to brine the shrimp, how to cook the shrimp, how to... Whatever, whether it's head-on, shell-on, et cetera, what made it the most succulent, and melty, and juicy, almost like when you get a fresh uncooked shrimp and a piece of nigiri or something like that, that quality of shrimp, but in a shrimp cocktail. So I give you a recipe for that. And then I have recipes that are also spinoffs. Either there are other methods where it's like, "Yes, that's the best way to do it for me, but here's a quicker way," or they're just recipes where you can use, "Here's that shrimp that's prepared in XYZ way, but now you can use it in this new way to make a dip," or whatever it is.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
How do you hope people will feel when they read the book and how do you hope bringing the book out into the world will influence and shape cooking culture as we know it?
Ella Quittner:
I hope they'll feel delighted and amused. I hope that they laugh a lot. I hope that they feel things. It's the same with all the writing I try to do. I want to make people laugh and I want to make them feel feelings, and I hope that they bring their existing love for cooking and their existing love for how to do things to the book, and then I hope they learn some new things, and then I hope they get mad at me and tell me it was all wrong and tell me new ways to do things so that in book two, in book three, I can try those new ways and realize I had a huge blind spot and actually there are all these other better ways to do things I didn't even test. So I hope that it gives us something to talk about and it opens a dialogue around cooking that I personally really enjoy, that feels familiar to me, like bickering with my sisters in the back of my parents' Honda in 1994.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
What advice would you give to someone who simply just wants to improve their writing?
Ella Quittner:
I guess the advice I would give would just be to read everything. I love to read, and I love to read out of the genres I write in, and I love to just consume content. That, to me, I find the most inspirational and also the most helpful in understanding what my voice is and what I like to write about. Because when you read things, sometimes you read something that's so good and it's so you you're almost jealous. You're like, "I wish I wrote that," that's really good information.
And then sometimes you read something and you're like, "That was incredible. So smart. Loved it. Never could have come out of my brain ever," also very good information, and that goes down to the nitty-gritty of sentence structure. Sometimes you read a sentence and you're like, "Ugh, I love that sentence. I wish I wrote a sentence like that." That's all really helpful. It's like if you didn't know what food you liked to cook or eat, so you went out and ate a lot of food. It's just all good information and it's very pleasurable in the process, and you're also learning interesting things in the process.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
As a writer and cultural commentator, based on what you've seen out there and what you're writing, how do you hope that your work shapes the future of food writing and the narratives that we've established about food and culture?
Ella Quittner:
For me as a kid, as a weird lonely kid that was often friendless or often just going off and doing weird mad scientist vibe things, I think art was really important. Not food media. I mean, I was... Whatever, six, the internet barely was what it is today. But I just mean in the sense of art like songs I liked that I would listen to or books that I would get into or movies, et cetera. I think good art was important to me because it made me feel less lonely. I have this memory of being a preteen or teenager and reading “Dubliners,” the James Joyce collection.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Great book.
Ella Quittner:
At the end, there's a sentence that's like, "His eyes burned with anguish and anger, and he was driven and derided by vanity." It's some sentence like that with a parallel structure with a lot of beautiful description in it. I just remember being so moved, my face got really hot and my eyes filled with tears, and that didn't really happen to me. I'm so cynical, and like I said, I grew up in this very tense humor as deflection, neurotic, funny, but not emotional family. I have memories like that of hearing a Frightened Rabbit song or watching a film or TV show and just feeling like maybe I wasn't as alone in the world as I thought I was day in and day out if other people had had these experiences, which were actually universal. So I guess I hope that one day, whether it's this cookbook, whether it's the novel I'm working on, whether it's something that hasn't popped into my brain yet, that I can contribute something to the canon of art that's out there that makes people feel like maybe they're not so alone in the human experience.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Ella, thank you so much for this conversation. I'm excited to keep seeing your bylines in my favorite publications, and I can't wait for your cookbook to come out. If we wanted to continue to support you, where are the best places to find you?
Ella Quittner:
Oh, there's not that many places to find me. I think the best place to find me maybe is Instagram. My handle is at @equittner, my first initial and last name.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Amazing. Thank you so much. Before we go, our guest is going to leave a voicemail just talking to themselves 10 years from now. You have reached The Future Of Food Is You mailbox. Please leave your message after the beep.
Ella Quittner:
Hi, Ella. It's 10 years ago. What's trending on TikTok is people eating a lot of protein. You just watched Baby Reindeer. Talking to 10 years in the future you, I guess the one thing I want to remind you of that feels weirdly prescient now is that last week, you interviewed a wellness expert, the mother of mindfulness she's called on the internet, and she told you that stress is invented. It's something we invent, she said, and it requires two things.
One is the anticipation that an event will happen at all, which is a losing game to try to predict. She said that we're actually very, very, very bad predictors of what will and will not happen and how it'll happen. And she said the second thing is that we have to believe that when the thing happens, it will be horrible, and a tragedy, and catastrophic, which also almost never happens usually, she said, it's just inconvenient. I don't know how good that advice was or wasn't, but you've been thinking about it a lot, so I just want to remind you 10 years from now if you've forgotten about it, because things have gotten really crazy and that that's what she said, and you can give it a try.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our show. The Future Of Food Is You is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Thanks to the team at CityVox Studios, executive producers Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, associate producers Jenna Sadhu and Elizabeth Vogt, and content operations manager Londyn Crenshaw. Catch you on the future flip.