Rage Baking | Kathy Gunst
Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women's Voices
By Katherine Alford & Kathy Gunst
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Kathy Gunst: Hi, I'm Kathy Gunst, the author of Rage Baking, the Transformative Power of Flour, Fury and Women's Voices, which I co-wrote with Katherine Alford.
Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend, I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. "And then late one night I found myself in my kitchen pulling flour, sugar, butter and baking powder out of the pantry. I decided to bake a simple almond cake topped with late summer fruit. I scooped out the flour and made sure it was perfectly level in my measuring cup. I softened the butter. I listened to the whole almonds growl as I chopped them in the blender. I peeled ripe peaches and caught every last drop of their sweet juice in my batter. I scattered the last of the tart wild Maine blueberries on top. And a few hours later I had a gorgeous cake and a calmer heart." Can you sort of take us through that experience and what led up to it?
Kathy Gunst: Sure. It's nice to hear you read it. It was during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was giving testimony about her experience as a teenager and what she alleged occurred between herself and Brett Kavanaugh. So I was listening to NPR, I had the TV on for a while, I became a bit obsessed with this trial. And every night when it wound down, I was wound up. I was filled with rage, it really set something off in me. And I found myself in my kitchen, as you just read, baking, but it wasn't really very normal, in that I would bake that almond cake you just described, then I would bake a batch of cookies, and then I would make a pie all in one night. And then the next day I listened to the entire trial again and baked obsessively that night. And it actually took several months before I understood what I was doing and why I was baking like that.
Kathy Gunst: It was not about rage eating. I sort of had no interest in eating these gorgeous things I was baking, it was more about the science of baking. I think I found it soothing and grounding. The thing about baking is that if you weigh your flour and if you level your sugar and if you follow the rules as they're written in a recipe, you will be rewarded with a cake or a tart or a pie. And I felt like when I was watching this trial, all the rules were being broken. I felt that I was listening to these men, primarily men, pretending to listen to Dr. Blasey Ford, pretending to have their mind open to voting for or against Kavanaugh, but what became increasingly clear to me was that they were not listening to her and they had already decided how they were going to vote and the trial was a charade.
Kathy Gunst: And I was remembering Anita Hill, and I was remembering so many brave women who have come forward to say, "I know something about this man that you're about to put in this powerful office," that should convince you that maybe he's not the right person for this job. And it just, it really made me full of rage. And so this rage baking began, and I started posting pictures of the results of my baked goods on social media, #RageBakers. And I got a lot of response from a lot of women saying, "I'm doing the same thing," or, "I'm rage knitting," or, "I'm rage sewing," or, "I'm lying on the couch sobbing, maybe baking would be better." And I thought, "Wow, there's really something to this." And then I talked to my friend Katherine Alford whose been in the food media business for as long as I have, which is quite a while, and one day she said to me, "We should write a book." And I thought, "Wow, we should write a book. We should absolutely do something called Rage Baking." And it was born.
Suzy Chase: The definition of rage, is violent, uncontrollable anger. I found it interesting that you use the word, rage, in the title. It's a very emotionally charged word. Why do you think female rage is so off-putting to men?
Kathy Gunst: I guess that first of all, I'd want to take exception with the use of the word, violent, in a definition of rage, because for me, and I can only speak for myself, there's nothing violent about it. I mean, if I can pound on bread dough and feel calmer, that's the extent of my violence. But to get to your larger question, I mean, you think about Hillary Clinton and everything that went down during that election, and that's a whole other conversation, but one of the things that came out about her was that she was, "Shrill," and that she was, "Angry." And there is something about being a woman where people, men in particular, don't like us to raise our voices, don't like us to act like them. And I, you need to talk to a psychologist, I don't understand the root of that or why it's so threatening, but women raising their voices goes back a long, long time.
Kathy Gunst: It is the anniversary, the 100 anniversary of a woman's right to vote this month, right now, right here, and when you think about that a hundred years ago we weren't allowed to vote, and here we are in 2020 still fighting for our rights to control our own bodies and what happens with it, women have had a long fight. They will continue to have a long fight. And if we don't speak up, and whether that takes the form of anger or rage or speaking loudly, we have to own it. One of the contributors to this book, Rebecca Traister, wrote a brilliant book called, Good and Mad, and we have one of her essays in the book, and she talks exactly about this, "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't speak up and be angry." She's essentially telling women, "Own this. Use it. Work together." And that's the message of this book.
Suzy Chase: In terms of your #RageBakers, I feel like you inadvertently started a movement to rebrand the word rage.
Kathy Gunst: You see references to rage and rage baking, particularly as early as 2012, I think it was originally an offshoot of the #MeToo movement, of the women's movement. I can't own it, nor can anybody, it's really about... you can find references to rage baking as early as 2012 in literature, in journalism, on social media. And historically women and rage, we wouldn't be voting today if women didn't have rage and were angry and said, "We are equal to men. We have every right to get out there and vote." So it has a long, long history. This book, Rage Baking, has clearly touched a nerve. We've had incredible response. I keep getting emails and photos and comments on social media, from women all over the country who are showing me pictures of things they're baking, or talking about how they responded to the Kavanaugh hearings, or how they've responded to the recent impeachment trials. And for many women baking, which is a very traditional woman's activity has been grounding.
Kathy Gunst: It's also really important for me to say that the message of this book is not, "Hey ladies, get back in the kitchen, start baking, and you'll feel so much better. Everything will be okay." Hell no. That is not what this book is about. This book is about empowerment. It's about creating beautiful baked goods. It's about women sharing community and voices. And ultimately, I hope by the time you look through the book, cook through the book, read that recipe, read the essays, read the interviews, you'll be left with a sense of hope.
Suzy Chase: Among the ranks of the contributors are enthusiastic, amateur bakers and James Beard winners. This book has recipes for bakers of various skill levels. Tell us a little bit about the contributors.
Kathy Gunst: We have the most incredible group of women in this book. When Katherine Alford and I decided we wanted to do a book, it felt really important to us that we have a diversity of women's voices. So we reached out to food writers that you've probably heard of, wonderful bakers like Dorie Greenspan, Ruth Reichl, we reached out to musician Ani DiFranco, we reached out to Jennifer Finney Boylan, a writer for the New York Times editorial page. We reached out to so many different women, and almost everybody answered our emails extremely quickly with a, "Hell yes, we want to be part of this." And the book kind of came together in a very organic way.
Kathy Gunst: There's some wonderful, wonderful essays by young writers, Hali Bey Ramdene, who is based in Albany, New York, wrote this gorgeous essay, Hurricane Beulah, about her grandmother, about the drive she took as a child every year from Albany to North Carolina, and the foods that they would be greeted with by her grandmother. And how as she aged, she understood that part of putting together this meal was her grandmother just releasing the rage of various things from her life. There was another incredible essay by a writer named Osayi Endolyn, called Typing is a Kind of Fury, about being a young African American girl and watching her mother and grandmother type letters when they felt that she was being discriminated against or somehow people were taking advantage of her, they would voice their rage on the typewriter. So it's a huge variety of voices, some of whom you've heard of and some of whom you'll probably discover for the first time.
Kathy Gunst: And then of course, they're the essays Alice Medrich, a great cookbook author who writes about chocolate, her chocolate pudding, it's just, there's a wide range of voices as well as recipes. And you touched this earlier, it's important to say that this is a baking book for a home baker, that you do not have to have gone to baking school or feel like, "Oh, I know how to bake anything." Ruth Reichl's oatmeal cookies are five ingredients and they take about 15 minutes to make?
Suzy Chase: Eight.
Kathy Gunst: Eight?
Suzy Chase: Yeah, I made them over the weekend.
Kathy Gunst: Aren't they great? They are these lacy, crunchy oatmeal cookies that a friend of mine made with his two and a half year old last weekend. And then there's a chocolate cake with raspberries and whipped cream that might take you an entire afternoon to make, and everything in between.
Suzy Chase: Part of the proceeds from this cookbook goes to Emily's List. What is Emily's List?
Kathy Gunst: Oh, it's such a great story. So we also knew that we wanted to give some of the proceeds of this book to an organization that felt relevant and that we could relate to. So we started researching Emily's List, and I'm from Maine, and what we learned is that Emily's List, I always thought it was a woman named Emily that started I, it's actually an acronym that stands for Early Money Is Like Yeast. And the woman who started Emily's List was once upon a time a baker in Maine, and it is an organization that gives money to women candidates that want to run, and help seed their campaigns so that they can move forward, everyone from small local state races up to the presidential candidates.
Suzy Chase: The chapter titles are so good, one of my favorites is, Bake Down the Patriarchy Cakes. Talk a little bit about the chapter titles.
Kathy Gunst: We did have fun with them. We really wanted them to say something, it felt like an opportunity. So, you picked a great one, the title of the cookie chapter is also a favorite of mine, it's called, Sugar and Spice and Done Being Nice, Cookies, Bars and Bites. We also had fun with some of the recipe titles, rage and women and activism, these are kind of heavy topics, so we wanted to have some humor and lightness in this book. There's a fabulous recipe by a Hollywood writer named Tess Rafferty, called The Revolution Will be Catered, that will have you absolutely howling. And some of the recipe titles are pretty great, we have, Don't Call me Honey Cupcakes, we have, No More Sheet Cake, and then one of my personal favorites is, Pigs in the Blanket, which I dedicated to the men of Alabama who are working so hard to take away women's rights. So we had fun with this.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, what are some of the recipes that you contributed to this cookbook?
Kathy Gunst: Well, let's see. Katherine and I each contributed, I would say over a dozen. My chocolate pistachio butter crunch is a perennial favorite for everybody that thinks, "Oh no, no, no. I can't make candy, that's hard." Your mind will be blown. I have chocolate raspberry rugelach, that beautiful Jewish pastry that's got cream cheese in the dough. What else are mine? Oh my favorites, the chocolate chip tahini cookies, I am not a fan of peanut butter in sweets, which I know is blasphemy to many people, but I adore tahini. And I found that if you add tahini to a chocolate chip cookie, it kind of does what peanut butter does, it adds a nutty richness and a creaminess, but I think it's better. And you make the dough and you sprinkle on white sesame seeds and bake them till they're just crisp around the edges, and then when they're still warm, you sprinkle them with coarse sea salt. Those cookies are amazing.
Suzy Chase: So, did writing this cookbook influence your ideas about women and political change?
Kathy Gunst: When I started the book, I really think I was coming from a place of rage and anger, and I really ended up by reading the essays these women wrote by making these recipes, by interviewing various women from Ani DiFranco, the musician, to Marti Noxon, the Hollywood producer who wrote Sharp Objects and many other brilliant TV and movie scripts, I came away with a sense of hope about how when women pull together, create a community, and use their voices, how powerful and hopeful that can be. So, I think it energized me. I feel deeply passionate about the book, about the recipes in the book, but even more so about the voices in the book and the power that these women's voices have, particularly when they're all pulled together.
Suzy Chase: As an avid, avid, avid, NPR listener, I have WNYC on all day long in my kitchen, and I've been dying to talk to you about NPR. So for the last 20 years you've been with WBUR's, Here and Now in Boston, and I'm curious to hear about that.
Kathy Gunst: Well, it is the joy of my life. Talking on the radio about food is one of the most challenging and fulfilling things that I've ever done. Challenging because of the obvious, that food is such a visual medium, it is so much about how it looks, how it tastes, how it presents on the plate, the textures of it. And there you are on the radio with only one sensory element going on, which is audio and sound. And so, my job is to weave stories and talk about food in a descriptive way where you almost feel like you can taste it and see it. And one of the most rewarding things over the years are getting letters from listeners who say, "I was in my car, I was headed to run errands. I heard you talk about this dish. I made a U turn, I went straight to the store, bought the ingredients and we're having it for dinner tonight."
Kathy Gunst: And I thought that's what it's all about. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get people back into the kitchen, back at the family dinner table, and getting excited about seasonal foods and regional foods, and the joy of shopping and the joy of cooking and trying to get rid of this constant refrain of, "I don't have time to cook." I hear that from so many people, particularly people with young children, and I just have kind of made it my life's work to try to motivate people that in the time it takes for you to get out the menu for the takeout, pick up the phone, put in the order, wait for the order, go pick it up or wait for them to deliver it, you could have dinner on the table. So I very much use my role as the resident chef on Here on Now as a platform to show people how simple it can be to make delicious food, and to try to educate people about ingredients that are in season and are within their region, that are going to make their taste buds awake and happy.
Suzy Chase: I remember when you used to cook on the air, what happened with that?
Kathy Gunst: Wow, it's so cool that you remember that. Yeah, the first few years I used to do live cooking. This is in Boston, so the host would be in the studio, I would be in what was essentially the WBUR cafeteria. We'd kick everybody out, I would start a dish at the beginning of the show live, and I always tried to pick very sound rich dishes, never boiling pasta, lots of chopping, sautéing, shallow frying, things that had a lot of sound, and then at the end of the show, before they signed off, they would run back into the kitchen, I would finish the dish and they would taste it and we would talk about it. And it was so much fun, and it got very complicated and it got very difficult to segue from wars that were going on, horrible news stories, to going back and forth into a kitchen. So now I do my best to use words and images to try to make the cooking come alive.
Suzy Chase: And now you have a new female CEO and general manager at WBUR. That's exciting.
Kathy Gunst: This is very exciting. I mean, and when Here and Now started, it was just heard in Boston, and then I believe it was heard on 15 networks, and now it's an NPR show that's heard on over 550 public radio stations. And I just love doing it. The host, there are now 3 hosts, Jeremy Hobson, Robin Young and Tanya in L.A. and they're just fabulous to work with and it is a great joy.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called, My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?
Kathy Gunst: Wow, that's kind of like asking me which of my children I like better. Marcela Hazan's, The Classic Italian Cooking, the very first book she did, because she showed me how picking the right ingredients and following simple recipes was the key to having delicious food. I'd have to mention Julia Child, because I remember being a teenager and discovering that book and having my mind blown open. I did not grow up in a home where my mother loved cooking and shared the joy of food and cooking, so in a way that book, I was, "Wait, what? You can make French food in New York? You can make French food anywhere?"
Kathy Gunst: Those 2 women were huge influences and I could name 5,000 others, but you asked for one. I was lucky enough to meet Marcela Hazan and go to Italy with her. And she really did have a huge influence on me for the reasons I said, for understanding how to shop, and the joy of shopping, and the joy of finding foods that are in season. So, okay, you've pushed me, I will pick Marcela Hazan's, The Classic Italian Cookbook, I believe that's the correct title. Her first book.
Suzy Chase: Okay. Yay, I did it.
Kathy Gunst: You did it. I did it. Wow. And the 4,000 others I love.
Suzy Chase: So where can we find you on the web and social media?
Kathy Gunst: Well I'm at kathygunst.com, K-A-T-H-Y-G-U-N-S-T, for this new book Rage Baking. We have a new website which is www.ragebakers.com, and you can find all our events there and find out where we'll be talking and doing cooking classes and demonstrations. And I am at mainecook, M-A-I-N-E-C-O-O-K on Twitter, and I'm on Instagram under my name, Kathy Gunst.
Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Thanks so much Kathy, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Kathy Gunst: Thanks so much, Suzy. This was really lovely.
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