FLAVOUR OVER FADS

depth, utterly delicious.

“The language of some of our most beloved food writers has gone from flavour and feasting to cleanness and lightness,” Tandoh lamented in an essay written for Vice U.K. last year. Taking a closer look at the trends toward gluten-free and sugar-free foods, toward clean eating and wellness, she sometimes found a moralizing and restrictive message hiding between the lines, making unscientific promises about the benefits of certain foods and the damage caused by others.

In particular, it was the sweet potato brownies. Wheat-free, sugar-free versions were blooming on food blogs and in Paleo forums, embraced by eaters without allergies.

“I made them,” said Tandoh, who was initially curious. “They were rank.”

Marian Burros wrote about the “clean food diet” in The New York Times in 1996, when it was just starting to gain steam. The diet was then packaged as a new though vague standard for health food that went beyond the organic label. Followers were focused on maximizing nutritional value in foods they generally defined as “pure.”

The term clean eating has since ballooned into a buzzword that describes tea cleanses, liquid detoxes, raw foods, superfoods and a variety of other wellness-related diets.

Tandoh is not interested in presenting her own counterdiet. She won’t play the part of a guru, or prescribe any single dogma.

“Some of the most delicious cakes I’ve had have coconut oil in them,” she said, “but I just don’t believe in the evangelism of ingredients.”

Tandoh grew up in Essex, the eldest of four children, with parents who often cooked burly soups and stews from the vegetarian Moosewood cookbooks. Her father worked for the Royal Mail, her mother was a school administrator, and the family subscribed to The Observer Magazine, which featured Nigel Slater’s elegant, almost poetic food column.

“We didn’t have a lot of money,” Tandoh said. “The recipes were quite special compared to what we had day to day.”

Though a stint in a London restaurant kitchen lasted only one day, Tandoh worked for months in the kitchen of a youth hostel in Lisbon. Cooking daily for 30 people, on a budget of just 25 euros, she learned the value of one-pot meals that make the most of cheap ingredients and feed a crowd. She now cooks sweet and savoury at home, for herself and her girlfriend, daily.

“Flavour makes food a pleasure,” Tandoh wrote in the introduction to her new cookbook. “It is taste then – not presentation or prestige, health or fashion – that shapes the recipes in this book.”

Those recipes roam across the country: There’s a luxuriously creamy English fish pie, made with smoked haddock and peas, topped with a thick layer of mashed potato.

There’s also a lentil soup spiked with lime juice, and an opulent meringue rolled up with cream and cherries. Tandoh is a skilled baker, and her recipes draw from a rainbow of cheap sweeteners that are easy to find in Britain: honey, dark brown sugar, golden syrup and treacle.

Food writers don’t often acknowledge the ways food can be tied up with anxiety for their readers, all of the complications that can get in the way of pleasure. But Tandoh has written about her struggles with an eating disorder as a teenager, and she offers support to those who struggle now.

Over the holidays, she sent positive messages via Twitter to buoy followers who may have been feeling vulnerable, nudging them, with words and emoji, to be kind to themselves. “Christmas can be tough if you have a troubled relationship with food,” she wrote, “take care of yourself!”

Self care is also at the heart of her approach to cooking, the central message of every recipe. Whether she is baking a honey cake, frying anchovy-stuffed sage leaves or poaching a whole chicken to make soup, she believes that taking pleasure in food is an inherently nourishing act, that to cook yourself dinner is to be good to yourself.

But rules? “Eat what you love” is the closest thing Tandoh has to one.