Turshen, whose first novel is out this summer.
Illustration: Brian Lutz
One morning this spring, Julia Turshen arrived at Sleeping Giant Ice Cream, which is halfway between the towns of Ellenville and New Paltz, in a beat-up gray pickup emblazoned with the words “Two Peas Farm, Sungold, NY” on the side, and I started to worry. The plan was that she would take me to Long Season Farm, the vegetable farm in Kerhonkson where she works part time. Kerhonkson, Wikipedia had assured me before I’d left the city that morning, was indeed a “census-designated place.” Sungold was a tomato. Or was I confused? It did not occur to me, until Turshen charitably explained it, that you can just get decals made.
These, for example, were in celebration of her upcoming queer pastoral romance, Down to Earth, which centers around Two Peas Farm in the idyllic upstate Sungold. In the novel, Paige, a high-powered Brooklyn Pilates mom separating from her husband, meets Frankie, a charismatic vegetable farmer who “looks a little like Bridget Everett if Bridget Everett were more masc and sported short, dark hair with flecks of silver.” The book is a double romance, a love story between Paige and Frankie and — more autobiographically — between Paige and the farm.
“It isn’t always like this,” Turshsen warned me as we pulled up to the (real) farm, gesturing toward the absurdly perfect weather. Turshen began farming in earnest a few years ago during the pandemic. “I was like, I need to get outside and put my anxiety somewhere,” she said. She had been a Long Season customer for years and gotten friendly with the owners, Sam Zurofsky and Erin Enouen. Turshen possessed no technical experience, but she did know an unusual amount about vegetables. “They didn’t have an apprenticeship program, but I made them do one,” she said. “I guess I interned? I came one day a week and just helped out with whatever they were doing.” Then she bounded off bucolically to help push a truck out of the mud.
It is easy to become sentimental about farming. But it’s tedious, unpredictable, and only marginally profitable even in the best of conditions. Turshen liked the physical grind of the work, the clarity of it. “You basically just put things in the ground and take them out,” she said, pointing toward a field of sprouting asparagus she had helped plant a few years earlier. For most of her life, “exercise” was what you did to become as small and lithe as possible, but here, exertion was practical: “I was like, ‘I really love lifting heavy stuff.’”
Farming was also a welcome change. Turshen had worked on 15 cookbooks in as many years, and the national news was, just as it remains, not great. “I was angry at the world, sad, scared, and burnt out in my work,” Turshen recalled. “I thought, I’m gonna apply to work on that crew at the farm full time,” which she did. It’s the only job for which she has ever submitted a résumé: “I just really like trying new things.”
Down to Earth is another new thing. “‘I’m writing this queer romance novel!,’” she remembered telling friends. “And they’re like, ‘You’re what?’” She had toyed with the idea — she fell in love with the genre first through Jasmine Guillory and then Casey McQuiston and then whichever library e-books met her criteria (“romance, LGBTQ+, specifically women”) — but hadn’t taken her covert ambitions seriously until the opportunity presented itself through 831 Stories, the small independent publisher of fiction about love. (“We love romance novels and that they bring happiness and horniness to a world that could use more of both” is part of the company ethos.) For years, Turshen had been crossing paths with the founders, Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, so she wrote them an email and, as in an actual romance, things got a bit hazy from there. “I can’t remember if I hit on them or if they hit on me,” Turshen said, but at some point, someone suggested that if she were ever interested in doing this, they should talk.
For Turshen, the project felt not only logical but natural: Of course she should be writing a sweet agricultural love story. (In her own life, Turshen is married to Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney. The two wed four months after they met, a decision Turshen described as “a no-brainer, the most obvious, easy thing.” And when, a year after that, they decamped for the Hudson Valley, that was obvious and easy too.) “I feel more relaxed about this than I’ve felt about anything in my career,” Turshen explained. “This just feels really fun.” And it makes sense to other people in her orbit. As Alison Roman told me, “I think she’s building the world she wants to live in, whether it’s through romance or cookbooks.”
Turshen’s parents weren’t cooks — hers was a 1990s SnackWells household — but her grandparents, whom she never met, ran Ratchick’s, a Jewish bakery in Midwood she never visited. “Part of me always thinks the bakery is in there somewhere,” Turshen told me. “I think a lot of my work in food is trying to touch a thing I’ll never be able to touch, trying to get back to a place that doesn’t exist.” Turshen moved with her parents from New York City to the suburbs and spent most of her childhood plotting her return. (In her bedroom closet, she kept a box labeled in magic marker “For My Future Apartment.”) “Basically, my dream was to live in Manhattan and work on books,” she said. She toured and applied to exactly one college, Barnard, where she studied poetry and, upon graduation, got to work on books. That fall, PBS was filming the travel and cooking show Spain … on the Road Again with Mark Bittman, Mario Batali, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Spanish actress Claudia Bassols gallivanting through the country. Turshen’s job initially was to assist the guy writing the companion cookbook, which, she decided in lieu of any particular direction, meant taking copious notes. Halfway through Spain, the official writer left the project. “There was this moment of Oh shoot, what are we gonna do?,” Turshen recalled. “I sort of raised my hand and was like, ‘I think I might have it in progress.’”
After Spain, she collaborated in assorted capacities on several more cookbooks, supplementing the irregular income with stints of private cheffing. “I just, like, made dinner and got paid to do it,” Turshen said with an enthusiasm many people do not share toward the gig economy. But “it took me a while to understand who I am as a cookbook author.” Eventually, she realized, “Oh, I’m a home cook who writes for other home cooks.” She has never worked in a restaurant and has never wanted to. “I just think home cooking is so important — it’s the fuel so many households run on. It’s what holds people in those households together,” she said. I thought briefly that she might cry, though I could have been projecting. “It’s such important work,” she said, “and I think it is so dismissed and undervalued. I feel very lucky to have received acknowledgement for my home cooking.”
In that way, romance novels and cookbooks are more alike than most people may assume: They are both, in Turshen’s estimation, forever underestimated as literary forms, incorrectly viewed as unserious books for unserious people, specifically women. “I distinctly remember a man I’d once worked with saying, ‘Oh, are you ever going to write a real book?” Turshen said. But “how we spend our time at home and what we daydream about, I think both of those are wildly important.” Besides, writing about food is not so different from writing about sex: “They’re both completely about desire, figuring out what you want, and having options available.”
It helps that romances and cookbooks are the “economic backbone of publishing,” Turshen pointed out. (“Romance print sales,” journalist Rebecca Ackermann told Marketplace last fall, “actually pulled the entire industry into the black.”) And there are, Turshen has come to realize, subtler structural similarities. “They’re both formulaic genres,” she observed. Is it so different if the formula ends in everlasting happiness or a well-balanced bean salad? The rules don’t have to be constrictive. “There’s actually a lot of room to weave in powerful stuff,” she said. In Simply Julia, Turshen’s 2021 cookbook, she wrote for the first time about her own struggles with body image. “I had only ever felt two things in my life: happy or fat,” she explains in an essay sandwiched between recipes for “Almond Chicken Cutlets for Grace” and “Spinach + Artichoke Dip Chicken Bake.”
Back in the truck as she drove me to the bus station, Turshen wondered if maybe I had other questions. Because she wanted me to understand what writing Frankie, the Bridget Everett–esque farmer, had meant to her: “I feel like the way Frankie lives in her body is, like, how I want to feel in my body.” Frankie is big and strong and soft, comfortable with herself and desired by Paige “without any disclaimer.” To create a character like that was “just incredibly healing,” Turshen told me. There was a time, not that long ago, when she couldn’t have imagined it: “I had no sense of what that might feel like.” Then she started working on the farm. “To me, it’s all very connected,” she said. After leaving me with some snack intel — had I ever been to Moonburger? — she turned the Two Peas truck around and drove back to Long Season.
