FAST FOOD FRIENDS
In Food Between Friends, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Tanous share the recipes their Libra bond was built on
The inside scoop on cooking and dishing with Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Julie Tanous, indecision and kitchen chemistry.
Some of my closest friends are food friends. Baking, cooking and eating together is just what we do. Not even a pandemic can stop us. We may no longer be sitting elbow-to-elbow around a table, or chopping side-byside in a kitchen, but virtual bake- and cook-alongs have helped fill the void. Even just messaging photos of our triumphs and failures back-andforth feeds the connection.
Given the vital role cooking and eating together plays in so many friendships, it’s surprising there aren’t more cookbooks focusing on them. Food Between Friends (Clarkson Potter, 2021) by actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Modern Family star, and chef and recipe developer Julie Tanous is one of the few. The timing of its release, unintentionally coinciding with a global health crisis, only serves to amplify its message of friendship, togetherness and delicious food.
“There was a part of me for awhile that felt it was insensitive to write this happy, fun book in a time of such suffering,” says Tanous. “But my husband, (Will), works in the music industry, and we reminded ourselves that those are two of the most universal themes in the world: food and music. So Jesse and I started to take solace in the idea that this book could be a source of joy and happiness for people.”
When Ferguson and Tanous met at a themed dinner party in Los Angeles roughly seven years ago, they clicked instantly. Reluctant attendees, they had both planned their escapes at the outset — choosing seats conveniently located by the exit. Instead of bolting for the door as soon as dinner was over, though, they ended up bonding over their shared love of cooking. “It was love at first sight,” recalls Tanous.
As their friendship grew, they became cooking partners. Each week, they met at one of their houses to cook for their families or throw intimate dinner parties for friends. In March 2016, they started sharing their recipes on a blog: Julie & Jesse Cook.
“Very original,” says Tanous of the name, laughing. “When we started cooking, we didn’t know we were going to start a blog or anything. We just thought, ‘Oh, we have some delicious recipes. Let’s put them out there into the universe. Manifest this.’”
The first recipe they posted, “Julie & Jesse’s Perfectly Roasted Chicken Over Brussels Sprouts,” was mouthwatering, but also gave them a taste of internet food criticism. In developing the recipe, they had tested various types of fat for painting the chicken skin — butter, ghee and oil — before ultimately landing on butter. The photo, though, showed a pale, portioned chicken that had been basted with oil, which didn’t crisp up and brown as butter would.
“We posted it and people on Instagram were like, ‘Eww, this chicken looks raw and undercooked.’ And we just laughed it off,” says Tanous. “We could have stopped there and felt defeated by the trolls. But we just kept going and we still laugh about some of those comments … And you know what, it was a really ugly chicken photo.”
The family recipes they shared with each other and riffed on to create new dishes laid the groundwork for their debut cookbook. With chapters devoted to brunch, chicken, beef (“with a little pork and lamb”), fish, meatless Mondays (“for every day of the week”), sides, sweets, starters and drinks, Food Between Friends captures the dishes their friendship was built on. The ingredients and flavours of their childhoods, such as the Hatch chilies Ferguson grew up eating in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the sorghum syrup that was a staple in Tanous’ hometown of Cullman, Alabama, form a thread throughout the book.
Cooking together brought Tanous back to her culinary school days, as she helped Ferguson hone his knife skills and overcome his fear of making pie crust. As their friendship developed, so did their style of cooking together.
“Jesse and I are both Libras, so we’re both indecisive. We’re peacemakers. We want everyone to be happy. In the beginning, we were probably a little more, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ We’re a lot more confident now in our communication and our ability to be very constructive about recipes,” says Tanous.
Writing Food Between Friends was a natural process of trading ideas and building on each other’s concepts. As a chef, having Ferguson as a sounding board gave Tanous a direct line to the needs of home cooks.
After coming across a recipe card for her great-aunt Mattie’s legendary yellow cake with boiled fudge frosting in the back of one of her mother’s books, she knew she wanted to recreate it for Food Between Friends. But when she sent the list of steps and necessary equipment to Ferguson for his feedback, he put it in perspective.
“He was like, ‘Julie, this terrifies me. So I’m just wondering what everyone else is going to think.’ And I said, ‘You know what, you’re right.’ Because it was nice to hear what a home cook might think when they look at these recipes,” says Tanous. “So then we turned the frosting into a buttercream hybrid that still had that dark, rich, big flavour.”
The emphasis on their friendship happened naturally as they wrote the book, she adds, and many of the recipe headnotes started as late-night text conversations.
“Jesse and I had such amazing chemistry in the kitchen, I think neither of us take ourselves too seriously. And even on bad cook days, we ended up laughing about a burnt chicken or something,” says Tanous.
From the night they met, she knew they would cook well together and as it turned out, they write well together, too. “When we started the writing process, that terrified me. I’d never shared my writing with anyone and I was so nervous to share it with Jesse. He said, ‘Julie, just send it to me. The world’s going to read this. Start with me.’”
Recipes and images reprinted from Food Between Friends: A Cookbook. Copyright © 2021 by Julie & Jesse Cook, LLC. Photographs copyright © 2021 by Eva Kolenko. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Random House.