The first cake is a disaster. Gooey in the centre, woefully underdone — the kind of failure most cookbooks would never admit to. Tanya Bush admits to it on page nine. The rest of the book is an argument for why that matters.
Bush is twenty-three, unemployed, and living in a New York apartment so small that she and The BoyBoyfriend cannot occupy the kitchen at the same time. There are grains of rice in the silverware drawer. The heater growls like a wounded animal. She has no plans on Saturday. So she bakes. Not because she has a calling, not because she has training, but because she is desperate — her word — and wants to make something. This is the honest engine of the whole book, and it never pretends to be anything grander.
Will This Make You Happy is structured as a year in four seasons, and the recipes climb in difficulty alongside the narrator's nerve. Winter is chocolate chunk cookies and buckwheat madeleines made without a piping bag, the batter spooned in and smoothed with a knife. By spring, Bush has talked her way into an unpaid internship at an agriturismo in Tuscany, where a man named Matteo drives too fast and a chef named Maria runs a kitchen full of KitchenAid mixers lined up like soldiers in a medieval villa. She arrives with no knife skills and a résumé padded with college service jobs she has presented as kitchen experience. The Italians do not seem to mind. The Americans she is meant to serve and charm do not seem to notice.
By summer and into autumn, she is working pastry at Little Egg in Brooklyn — the real restaurant, where her cruller would later be named New York magazine's best pastry. The Boyfriend is still there, on the other end of the couch, scrolling. And then, gradually, someone else appears. The book's quiet love story is not between a woman and a man whose moustache once charmed her in a college dorm hallway. It is between a woman and a woman, emerging in the margins of the Fall chapters with the tentative heat of something that cannot yet be named, only felt. A sauna on the equinox. A stamp of a pear on the inner wrist. The question that recurs — will this make me happy? — stops being about cake somewhere around the poached pear chapter and starts being about permission.
What distinguishes the book from the small mountain of cookbook-memoirs published in any given season is that Bush writes as well as she bakes, and she knows these are not separate skills. Her prose has the rhythm of someone thinking aloud while her hands are busy — a long, clause-heavy sentence about brown butter will give way to something short and blunt about The Boyfriend: "Nothing bothers The Boyfriend the way it bothers me." The humour is dry and self-aware without being cute. She describes receiving a baking science book as a gift and recoiling from its charts of water content percentages. She does not want to take apart the machine. She wants simplicity, comfort. She wants to watch an Australian influencer's wiener dog lick frosting off a spoon. Slowly, despite herself, she learns the science anyway.
The recipes are not appendices. They are the book's punctuation. A chapter about loneliness ends not with reflection but with madeleines. A scene of professional drudgery — nine hundred and ninety-two grams of flour, thirteen hundred and fifty grams of sweet potato purée, four hundred and twelve grams of tahini, all of it measured out under fluorescent light while everyone else is at the beach — dissolves into carrot cake. Bush titles her recipes with a confectioner's instinct for temptation: hojicha tiramisu, genmaicha snickerdoodles, sour cherry and pistachio chocolate orange scones, savoury scones with country ham and Gruyère and scallions. She insists you weigh your ingredients in grams. She is right.
Forsyth Harmon's illustrations are warm and slightly off-kilter — the kind of drawings you would pin above a desk, not frame. Vanessa Granda's photographs make you want to touch the food, which is what food photography should do and rarely does. The book as an object lives comfortably on a kitchen counter, a nightstand, or the arm of a couch, which is probably where you will read most of it before the urge to bake wins.
The last recipe is a yellow sheet cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting and rainbow sprinkles. It is the simplest thing in the book, the kind of cake you make for someone you love when you cannot explain why. Bush's headnote is one line: "I suspect it will make you happy."
She does not answer the question in the title. She leaves it open, the way a good question stays open, and that is the whole point. The year ends. The narrator has not arrived at happiness. She has arrived at something more useful — the willingness to keep asking.
