Sohla El-Waylly's new cooking show succeeds because she's in creative control
Sohla El-Waylly's new cooking show succeeds because she's in creative control
Issue 202: “People just ate all the cheese they wanted to eat, and then they died.” — Sohla El-Waylly, 2020
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a food solutions newsletter. On Mondays, I send a reading guide of food system ideas, and on Thursdays, I dig deeper with an original essay or conversation you can only find here.
Check out last Thursday’s dispatch — Pick-your-own farms, agriculture as entertainment, and the pastoral fantasy. How are you-pick apple orchards responding to COVID-19? And how have they created a romanticized, nostalgic version of farm life that’s more entertainment than actual agriculture?
Programming note: Due to Yom Kippur, next week’s Monday Nosh Box will come out on Tuesday. Thursday’s will be normal. See you then, and have an easy fast if it’s your custom!
At the beginning of August, six Bon Appétit Test Kitchen YouTube channel hosts — Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Rick Martinez, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz, and Carla Lalli Music — announced they’d no longer appear on video at BA. This came after five weeks of contract negotiations with Condé Nast Entertainment in which the company just bafflingly refused to pay Rick, Priya, or Sohla the same rates as they say white colleagues received. Business Insider reports that the pay structure Condé Nast offered would actually have meant a pay cut for Rick.
Enter the Babish Culinary Universe, the new name for the channel formerly known as Binging With Babish, which today debuted a new show: Stump Sohla. That’s right, our guy Babish has yoinked Sohla out of the Test Kitchen and into a channel where she’s presumably being paid fairly and can be as creative as she wants (a privilege that at BA seemed to only be given to white hosts like Brad Leone and Claire Saffitz).
Here’s the first episode, where she’s challenged to make mac and cheese in an 18th-century style:
It’s so, so good. The quirky editing pleasantly reminds me of the Test Kitchen series, but it’s the outlandishness and extreme commitment to the bit that make it feel uniquely Babish. The conceit of the show is that she spins a wheel to determine how to prepare a particular dish, with choices like “make it scary,” “astronaut food,” “serve on fire,” “convenience store,” and, uh, “Beat Babish,” which I hope turns out to be like Beat Bobby Flay but better. In the words of one commenter, “Giving Sohla her own show is a big whisk move.” (lol. Babish drives home the point with tiny whisks in his suit jacket like a pocket square.) Next episode comes out Saturday, so I know what I’ll be doing.
(And of course, this show has already sparked the requisite reaction/out-of-context meme twitter account)
In light of this…
I want to revisit what I wrote in a Nosh Box issue earlier in the summer, about the tasks at hand for those of us who actively enjoyed BA Test Kitchen videos:
Several writers, including San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho, have noted that the Test Kitchen shows seem to portray a chipper workplace not unlike the show The Office. Goofy colleagues in a fun workplace, talking-head-driven comedic nuggets, standing around shooting the breeze while ostensibly working.
The Office is a scripted, fictional show; and one that’s not without its own problems. BA Test Kitchen chefs did not sign up to be actors in an imaginary paper-obsessed universe. (And in fact, some BA staffers of color were barred from entering the kitchen at all, per Business Insider’s Rachel Premack.) The form itself encouraged BA Test Kitchen viewers to laugh off the racial and power imbalances that were glaringly apparent.
An example? Take Sohla El-Waylly, the BA editor who’s been particularly vocal about the magazine’s toxic environment. She’s one of few chefs of color on the Test Kitchen shows and is frequently called upon to fix white chefs’ mistakes or educate them about basic ingredients that the show exoticizes.
She has to help Claire temper chocolate (might I remind you, Claire went to pastry school at École Grégoire-Ferrandi in Paris), has to help Brad pronounce turmeric (I mean, come on. The show gives her a chyron that says “Sohla El-Waylly / Dialect Coach,” which is… yikes), has to advise Chris on toasting spices, has to explain starch chemistry to Carla, has to basically salvage Molly’s attempts to make a tortilla big enough for an ostrich egg breakfast taco… the list goes on. These are things BA chefs should know how to do!!! Just imagine if a non-white chef appeared on Bon Appétit without being able to carefully explain and flawlessly execute their dish.
And the show portrays her as cheerfully and graciously lending this expertise, despite the fact that her job description did not include video. So to also find out that she wasn’t getting paid for these video appearances — let alone the extra labor she had to put in to help the compensated editors do their literal jobs — is appalling.
Can the BA Test Kitchen videos be saved? Personally, I hope so.
I find it refreshing to see chefs work hard to make something, maybe stumble, get frustrated, have to get creative. As a food nerd, I like seeing cooks come together and use their unique strengths to troubleshoot each other’s challenges. It’s a reminder that we, as home cooks, also don’t have to achieve the instant and solitary perfection sold on Food Network, for example. We can screw up. We can ask for help. But this privilege has to be afforded to everyone at Bon Appétit, not just upper-class white chefs.
I stand by this, and I think it’s great that Andrew Rea is making creative space for Sohla — and hopefully more folks, too — on his platform. I said in that excerpt that I hoped the Test Kitchen videos could be saved. But maybe, as the events of the past couple months have suggested, the BA channel itself doesn’t deserve to be saved. Instead what I hope carries on is a legacy — not of what the Test Kitchen actually was, but of what we wished it were: An upbeat, democratic, creative environment that celebrates food as a nerdy, labor-intensive endeavor. From the one episode I’ve seen so far, it seems like Stump Sohla succeeds.
And you know what? It succeeds because Sohla calls the shots and can pull from her own knowledge base. In the first episode, she makes mac and cheese with spaetzle as noodles. She may never make Bengali food. And that’s FINE! It’s often white chefs who are allowed to frame themselves as experts in cooking dishes from a variety of cultures, while chefs of color are expected to only be specialists in their culture’s stereotypical foods — Priya would come on the BA Test Kitchen channel for Indian dishes; Rick would appear for videos on tacos and tamales and the like. But Sohla, along with Priya and Rick and countless other chefs of color, are all insanely skilled at cooking and should have the space to dictate what they cook on their own terms.
This is something Sohla has run up against before: A couple years ago, she and her husband opened a diner in Brooklyn, and it closed in less than a year in part because, as Sohla said, people didn’t come in expecting white diner food. Because of the El-Wayllys’ cultural backgrounds, diners expected something a little more… “ethnic,” explains Khushbu Shah at GQ:
They constantly faced having to meet people’s expectations for “cultural” twists on the menu. Unfortunately, the media and customers expect a certain amount of “ethnic-ness” from chefs of color—no matter what kind of food they are cooking. But it’s very much a Goldilocks problem. If the food is too white or too brown, it will not sell. It has to be just the right level of “ethnic.”
As Sohla put it:
“There would have been more leeway allowed in the food shrouded by illusion of ‘authenticity,” … “There are white chefs that can pull from different cultures without explanation, but us making white food always needs a thesis behind it.”
In conclusion, let Sohla cook whatever she wants!!! You know it’ll be good.
One more thing before you go —
In case you missed it, here’s an excerpt from last Thursday’s article on you-pick farms amid COVID-19 and how they construct a nostalgic, imagined version of agriculture for entertainment purposes. What does this mean for the way we teach kids about our food system?
Apple picking at Aamodt’s Apple Farm in Stillwater, Minnesota, will end about four weeks earlier this season than last year.
But this isn’t a casualty of COVID-19 — it’s thanks to it, said owner Chris Aamodt. Aamodt’s has been busier this season as families try to find safe outdoor activities.
“When I answer the phones, people are like, ‘What can I do with my kids? They've got to get out of the house!’ And that's the biggest question I’ve had,” he told Nosh Box. “I said, well, unfortunately we're not doing wagon rides and all that, but you're more than welcome to come pick apples. You can walk through the orchard. You can bring a picnic and find your own quiet little spot somewhere with a blanket and spend some time and enjoy it.”
While some pick-your-own operations, including those on the East Coast profiled recently in The Counter, have struggled as a result of COVID-19, two Minnesota PYO owners I spoke with said they were able to adapt: Masks are on, plexiglass shields are up at the registers, and some activities are cancelled, but customers are still coming to pick apples and strawberries.
The critical transformation that separates the pastoral fantasy from agricultural reality, for Williams, is this erasure of labor — the exact thing pick-your-own orchards are designed, by their very nature, to do. Pick-your-own customers are replacing the labor with a leisure activity: Harvesting crops becomes not work but rather something you do to have fun on a day off from work. It’s a safe family activity to do during the pandemic. For the overwhelming majority of U.S. agricultural laborers, of course, this is not the case — especially during COVID-19. Being taught that, for fun, you can sample the typically backbreaking, dangerous work of picking strawberries contributes to the pastoral myth.
OK, bye for real now. See you next week!