Food has been on our minds at Shondaland. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of food in America, from the restaurant industry to farming to our food supply to the food security and cooking habits of citizens. Given that, we’ve decided to bring to you a series that explores many different facets of food in America. From a look at the chefs working hard to provide food during the pandemic, to the rich story of Southern food, to a deep dive on what it means to be a “foodie” in 2020, we’re looking at food and cooking as it relates to and affects community, comfort, joy, healing and sometimes lack thereof. And we’re topping it all off with some simple and delicious recipe ideas for summer, including cocktails made from kombucha and agua fresca. Because it’s five o’clock somewhere, right?
Bon appétit!
There’s a famous story about Chrissy Teigen attempting to make cheesecake for Kanye West. She’s told it before, on Watch What Happens Live, but she’s recounting it again now, speaking via Zoom from L.A., to underscore a point. Despite having released two cookbooks and her own line of cookware, and despite launching her own food-themed website, Cravings, Teigen has not always been a confident chef.
“Fear is a big reason why people don’t get in the kitchen,” Teigen says, sitting casually on a sofa as the life of her house continues on behind her. “John said when he met me that one day I would write a book called ‘The Insecure Chef’ because I would make things for him and he would go to throw something away a few hours later and see the whole meal [I had made earlier] in the trash. One of the scariest things I ever did was make Kanye a cheesecake. I was so scared out of my mind all the time to cook for other people, whereas now it’s such a fun thing to do because I trust myself so much more.”
On Food: A Shondaland Series
West, of course, had some thoughts on the cheesecake after Teigen served it to him at a dinner party she and husband John Legend hosted for him and Kim Kardashian West in one of their early New York apartments.
“He said it was flan-like,” Teigen laughs. “I was so nervous that I was over-mixing it and over-mixing it, and I got too much air into it. So he was totally right. Maybe that’s why I hate baking, it’s like instilled in me now. I recall that memory somehow!”
In the years since, Teigen has developed into a voracious home cook, one who embraces both American comfort food and flavors from around the world, including those of her mom’s Thai heritage. She constantly shares her recipes – and her mishaps – on social media, often posting long IGTV stories of the cooking process. Her website, which launched in November, offers fans an opportunity to ask questions, like “Is there a specific brand of fish sauce that you use?” or “Can you freeze your banana bread?” Her first cookbook, Cravings: Recipes for All of the Food You Want to Eat, released in 2016, was all about passing her confidence in the kitchen on to others.
“There’s so many people in my life who say they aren’t cooks or they can’t cook or they don’t cook,” Teigen shrugs. “And I hate when people say they can’t cook because everyone, if you can read, you can cook. It can be pretty basic at certain levels. This was always my dream for people – to realize they didn’t have to go out on Friday night and go crazy to have a good time. You could stay in and drink wine and cook one of the best meals of your life. Or make a mistake and try again later. I love that people who have never been in the kitchen are getting in there.”
Teigen’s love of food materialized as a child. She grew up with her mom, Vilailuck Teigen, who is known to fans as Pepper Thai, and her father Ron Teigen Sr., who is of German and Norwegian descent, moving around between cities like Seattle and Huntington Beach, California. Her mom mostly cooked American dishes for the family, including a lot of meat and potatoes (Pepper’s recipe for scalloped potatoes can be found in Teigen’s first cookbook). She and her dad bonded over a dish he called his “hobo burger dinner,” which Teigen recreated in her second cookbook, Cravings: Hungry For More, describing it “life changing.” It’s basically ground hamburger meat, potato and carrots, covered in sauce and baked in foil, and, for Teigen, it’s emblematic of how she perceived food growing up — simple, all-American and easy to make.
Her relationship with Pepper’s Thai cooking was more complicated. Pepper did cook Northern Thai dishes during Teigen’s childhood, but usually she only made them for herself. Eventually, though, Teigen’s curiosity got the best of her.
“It wasn’t just Thai food,” Teigen remembers.” It wasn’t just Pad Thai or the foods you’d typically order in a Thai restaurant. She was making foods at home using shrimp heads and crazy flavors. To me it was wild. The smells that were coming from the kitchen when she was cooking for herself compared to when she was cooking for us. She cooked Thai food for herself, but for the most part I was such a daddy’s girl and so I would just team up with him and side with the scalloped potatoes and the meat. So she would make her dinner afterwards. But then I started getting more and more curious about the flavors she was using when I was eight or nine.”
One of the first Thai dishes Teigen learned to make with her mom was Jok Moo, a rice porridge with pork meatballs that’s traditionally eaten for breakfast. It’s a recipe Teigen has long shared with her readers and it’s something her own kids, Luna and Miles, currently eat for breakfast several times a week.
“For me, that was one of the earliest things I remember loving growing up and watching her make,” Teigen notes. “But for the most part what I cooked with her was the scalloped potatoes or casseroles.”
Once Teigen left home to pursue a career in modeling, she really discovered the joy of cooking for herself. She moved around a lot, living in model houses or borrowed apartments in New York City, and those unfamiliar kitchens provided opportunities to test her skills. She was inspired by Top Chef and the challenge of what you could create with a few random ingredients. While food was a huge part of her upbringing, it was in her early 20s that Teigen stopped watching other people cook and began to embrace it herself.
As Teigen’s modeling career took off, it quickly became evident that she wasn’t headed for the cover of Vogue (until later, of course). She appeared in ads for brands like Olay and Billabong, and she found there was a difference between being a catalogue model and being a high fashion model, especially when it came to your body shape. But being a model and loving food was a struggle and Teigen is quick to affirm that even she had issues with her image.
“The model part was tough because you had maybe six girls in a house who each had their own disorder,” she remembers. “Some people worked out like crazy. Some people would eat cotton balls dipped in chicken broth. There were people who just didn’t eat. And I definitely had my times where I was like, ‘Okay I have a shoot tomorrow so I’m not going to eat all day today.’ That was my normal thing. It was not a thought – it was just how it worked. But I really loved to eat. And if I wasn’t full I wasn’t happy. I’m still the same way. It was really hard.”
In her early twenties, Teigen managed to eat a ton of junk food and still look good.
“You can get away with eating so many things,” she laughs. “When I worked in Miami my best friend got a job at a burrito stand on Alton Road. She also worked at my modeling agency, but got this second job so we could eat burritos, basically. I remember eating a ton of McDonalds. Going from McDonalds to burritos, McDonalds to burritos. I just didn’t gain weight because I was young.”
It was around the same time that Teigen began to get more and more into cooking; at the same time, she’d began dating Legend (the pair met on a music video shoot). The couple married in 2013 in Lake Com and began inspiring each other to explore new dishes, even though Teigen was still struggling with some confidence in the kitchen.
Then, in 2010, Teigen scored a spot in the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which named her “Rookie of the Year.” She appeared in the issue for the next three years, returning again in 2017 after giving birth to Luna.
It was that recurring gig that gave Teigen the confidence to embrace her body as it was and begin to integrate her love for food into her career, allowing herself to be a model who also cooks, eats and shares her food. She attended a training program at the Food Network Test Kitchen to see if she would make a good cooking show host (she ultimately decided she couldn’t talk and cook at the same time) and looked for opportunities to evolve her career in a more culinary-minded direction.
The tension between loving junk food and wanting to take care of her body is apparent in all of Teigen’s recipes, which she posted on her early blog So Delushious! before moving on to cookbooks. She loves chicken wings and queso and anything covered with cheese and bacon, but she’s aware that you can’t live a long, healthy life filling your body with crap – even if it tastes amazing. She refuses to work with a nutritionist because having someone tell her what to eat (and what not to eat) makes her “very emotional.” The balance has to come from within.
“I know what’s best and I know when I’m being bad,” Teigen says. “I take it very personally. The reasoning behind the name ‘Cravings’ is because I work that way. When I’m sitting at the TV I can not be hungry at all, but if I see a commercial for something I’m like, ‘I must have that!’ I’m exactly who they target with those things. I’ve learned that I can’t watch Carnival Eats anymore. If I watch Carnival Eats for too long, I have the worst week of my life, food-wise.”
It’s a struggle you can see in the evolution of Teigen’s cookbooks — both of which she co-wrote with best-selling cookbook author Adeena Sussman. She’s preparing to start her third cookbook in August and this time she’s considering healthier ideas and even – gasp – recipes without cheese and bacon.
“This next book, honestly, I feel like I’m so open to lighter and brighter flavors as long as I feel full and satisfied and the flavors are really bold,” she explains. “Still a ton of garlic, still a ton of spice – the flavors are super present. But I’m open to the idea of ‘Oh, meat doesn’t have to be a part of this meal.’ For the same reason I loved a challenge when I was younger, I love trying to make healthy food taste good now. Healthier – not healthy because I’ll never personally be that way. I want all my books to always reflect the time that I’m in and to hopefully be food that I’m not only eating now but that people will like to eat too.”
At first, Teigen wasn’t sure she wanted to do another cookbook right away. Cravings: Hungry For More came out in 2018 and now maybe it was time for something else, like a memoir or a relationship book, but being locked down with her family during the COVID-19 pandemic reminded Teigen yet again of why food is the thing that drives her.
She’s spent most of the lockdown cooking and sharing her recipes on IGTV, even doing an Instagram Live session in which she (somewhat drunkenly) showcased her and Legend’s fried chicken.
“I got complacent eating the same things,” says Teigen, who recently decamped from L.A. to Mexico, where she and Legend stayed with the kids and Pepper because they needed a change in location. “And then all of a sudden through quarantine it became so fun again. Our day revolves around cooking with the kids. I love teaching people how to cook. And my mom’s been working on a cookbook, so looking over and seeing her work on her Thai cookbook and seeing her passion for all these ingredients — I was getting jealous.”
Lockdown has also brought its share of drama. In May, The New York Times food columnist Alison Roman took aim at Teigen in an interview with The New Consumer, criticizing Teigen’s Target cookware line as selling out and calling the Cravings website a “content farm.” It hit Teigen hard, especially since she’s a self-professed fan of Roman, even writing on Twitter that the incident made her want to cry every time she saw a shallot. Roman offered a public apology, but it couldn’t erase her assertion that Teigen had sold out. In actuality, Teigen is deeply involved in all aspects of her business. She has frequent meetings with the company that produces her cookware line – they come to her home every few weeks – and she has always made a point of being as involved as possible (Cravings is run by her and two other women). It was important to her from the start to be hands on.
“A lot of things I had signed on to, in terms of collaborating with, like makeup or clothing, they never really cared so much,” she says. “They wanted your name, but you didn’t get to have such a hand in it. And some people don’t want to, really. They just want to put their name on it. But I wasn’t comfortable not knowing every piece. If I was questioned about something I didn’t like that I didn’t know if it was in the line. What I loved about the cookware line was that in my first meeting with them you could tell they had looked at the things I was loving and using and talking about for years and years and years. When I jumped into it was already so thought about from such detailed level.”
She adds, “We’ve kept it small enough where I still get to have such a hand in it and I love that. I’m really a part of something. Honestly, I could drop everything and just be a part of the Cravings brand. I don’t need anything else.”
Teigen is still learning, just like the rest of us, how to navigate an industry that is being called out for its lack of diversity and its systemic racism. She feels like she’s gotten away with things in the past because she’s half Thai, but as the industry has its reckoning she’s open to being called out. Which she was, recently, when she shared a miso pasta recipe and referred to it as a carbonara.
“Obviously, I got a ton of shit for calling it a carbonara,” says Teigen, who apologized on Twitter after initially posting the recipe, one of many recent dust-ups on her social media pages. She’s outspoken, political and ready to engage with trolls, which means she can be a target for vitriol and conspiracy theories (like the recent claims that she had ties to Jeffrey Epstein). She’s even gone head-to-head with Donald Trump on Twitter after he referred to her as Legend’s “filthy-mouthed wife,” so it’s no surprise that something that seems as simple as pasta would cause some drama.
“Since it had the components of a carbonara I just didn’t think it would be offensive to Italians,” she shrugs. “It wasn’t something that I thought about because I’ve been doing it for so long with Thai food. But then I realized that I can do it with Thai food because that is my culture and I have more ownership with that.”
“Obviously so much more attention is being paid to paying homage and being respectful of where food comes from, and I think that’s always a good thing,” she continues. “Where it can get messy is when it comes to spices and things where the trade had such an impact on what we can call our own versus someone else’s. Everything has a birthplace, but some things were either taken or used by different cultures. I think it’s okay as long as you’re respectful of those ingredients and the people who started it and created it and the flavor profiles that go along with it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing all the time as long as you’re respectful of it and still learning. And not pretending you have ownership of it or that it’s something you created. That’s the biggest deal, people putting an American spin on something and then taking ownership for it. You could easily say in the recipe ‘The flavor profile of this is Moroccan’ or ‘This is a curry.’”
For Teigen, food isn’t inherently political. Or, at least, she hopes it’s not, although she knows that’s probably wishful thinking. Politics can divide, but food brings us together. It’s one thing we can all agree on, which gives it a unique power, particularly in today’s world.
“It’s something that is still so beautiful and still so sacred to us as humans,” Teigen reflects. “It’s the one common we all have, a love for being together. That is the only thing that establishes us as together in anything. There’s really nothing else that forms us as the species even. Everyone has very different brains and different political takes, and I really think it’s the only sacred thing we can all agree upon. That it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing to be able to eat a meal with your family.”