Julia Turshen Had 13 Coconut Angel Food Cakes At Her Bat Mitzvah
They say that rain on your wedding day is good luck. But what does it mean when it pours on the afternoon of your bat mitzvah? Such is the question cookbook author Julia Turshen had to reckon with at 13. “It was the rainiest day ever. There was so much rain coming down that there were bubbles in the grass filled with water because the ground couldn’t absorb that much rain,” Turshen tells me. And to add insult to injury, the party was set to take place in the backyard of her childhood home. “We had a big tent and we put some tables over the [bubbles in the grass] so no one would step on them. A lot of people ended up wearing rain boots instead of whatever they were going to wear.”
By the time of her bat mitzvah, Turshen had already begun her love affair with cooking. “I never knew my mom’s parents but [they owned a bakery] and it has always had a large [presence] in my family,” she explains. “I spent my entire childhood essentially interviewing my mom, aunts, and cousins about the bakery. I felt extremely connected to them through my love of food.” The teenage Turshen would get her hands dirty in the kitchen, too. “I went through this big phase where every Saturday I’d make hash browns. Sometimes I would boil the potatoes first, sometimes I would bake them, and sometimes I would do them raw. I was basically recipe testing without exactly knowing that. I was very invested in teaching myself how to cook.”
Now 36, Turshen is the bestselling author of the cookbook Now & Again as well as the recently released Simply Julia. She’s also the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. And when I ask Turshen what her hash brown making, 13-year-old self would think of how her career turned out, I can hear a smile spread across her face, even over the phone. “I think she’d be thrilled,” she says.
Below, Turshen reflects on her bat mitzvah day — massive french fry platters included.
On her short-lived blow out:
I have very curly hair, as do all of the women in my family, and many other Ashkenazi Jews. At that age I hated my hair. I didn’t understand it. So on the morning of my bat mitzvah, my mom took me to this hair salon near our house to get it professionally blown out and flat ironed to make it as straight as possible. But because of all of the rain, the photos from my bat mitzvah show how my hair started off kind of straight and then as the evening progressed it got more and more horizontal. It was as if someone was slowly inflating a balloon.
On her 13 coconut angel food cakes:
Instead of a large cake with 13 candles, I opted to have 13 cakes. I had 13 angel food cakes each topped with whipped cream, shredded coconut, and a candle. It was wild. I love coconut cake and I’ll eat angel food cake, but I don’t go crazy for it. I just thought it would look so chic, though I don't know where I got the idea from. My other big request was to have big platters of french fries. I remember talking a lot to the caterer about it and being very excited.
On honoring her grandmother through her candlesticks:
There was one table that was basically dedicated to my grandmother’s candlesticks. My grandparents, the ones who ran the bakery, had fled Eastern Europe during the Pogrom and eventually ended up in Brooklyn running this bread bakery. There were twists and turns in between, but one of the only material objects that my grandmother brought with her were these candlesticks. They’ve been in our family forever.
In my last cookbook, Now & Again, I wanted to include a photograph of them because I had a Passover menu and it just felt important to me to have a picture of them with it. So my mom lent me the candlesticks during the photo shoot and then I was going to bring them back to her house and she was like, “No you keep them. They’re yours now.” It was pretty amazing for me. It was nice to see them in the pictures from my bat mitzvah since they’ve been around for every big occasion in my family.
On her Torah tutor, Gary:
I never went to Hebrew School. I had a Hebrew and Jewish studies tutor named Gary. He had this small Torah he kept in the trunk of his car and his slogan on his business card was, “Have Torah, will travel.” We would do things like play Jewish Jeopardy and that’s how I learned about this stuff. It was really about learning the cultural things in Judaism and the stories in the Torah as opposed to actually learning Hebrew.
I remember feeling some pretty classic Jewish guilt and some nervousness around the fact that I [didn’t learn much Hebrew]. I have some family members like my grandfather and my cousins who are a bit more religious than my family. So I felt like a little bit of a fraud. I guess it was imposter syndrome because I was like, “Is this a real bat mitzvah?”
On reflecting on her 13-year-old self in therapy:
I spend a lot of time in therapy having conversations with my 12 and 13-year-old self. So specifically at my bat mitzvah I wish I could tell myself two things: One is that you can wear a really awesome tuxedo and you can let your hair be really curly. I also wish I could tell myself that this occasion is a good reminder that you can define what family and faith and ritual mean to you.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
