Recipes

A while back, on Twitter, I offered to supply a follower with a recipe for an item she was thinking of making and she replied to the effect that she does not use recipes, she likes to just throw things together and rely on her own culinary skills to create dinner each night. I must admit that this sentiment stopped me in my tracks. I thought about it for a few days and concluded: ok, she is an artist, and perhaps I am more of a technician in my approach. But that didn't settle it, either. The best artists are also great technicians, so the two approaches are not necessarily distinct.

Recipes, and cookbooks, are more than simple sets of instructions. I like to read recipes and make food from them in part because it is a form of human connection, of communication, that fascinates me. There is no rule book about how to write a recipe, and there's no law that says the recipe's author must test it until it is just so. So I like to see how each author presents his or her recipes, and to try determine how well the recipes have been tested. Some dishes turn out so finely seasoned, so correctly textured, without any major tweaking during the preparation of the food, that you can well conclude that the recipe was tested well. Rose Levy Beranbaum, Dorie Greenspan, Susan Spungen, Paula Wolfert, Maida Heatter; these women are conscientious recipe testers. That said, assiduous testers are not always the best communicators. Some indicate their passion for perfection through pedantic, over-complicated instructions, and others (those listed above, for example) convey their instructions with an ease and delight that shines through in the accompanying prose and through generous suggestions for substitutions, and the like.

For me, ultimately, a purely autodidactic approach has severe limitations. When I learn from someone else--a teacher, a friend, a cookbook author--I feel my hands doing things they have not done before, my brain goes in directions it had not gone before, and I see the world in a new way. Having so many different instructors allows you eventually, too, to critique the teaching methods, and to advance beyond what you have been taught by synthesizing concepts. Recipe writers are instructors. By going through my books and trying recipes out from many authors, I get to know those authors' styles and learn whose work I like best, and whose I must take with a--sometimes literal--grain of salt. And, yes, I often throw together a meal without using recipes, creating fine food more often than not. But the straightforward goal of "getting dinner on the table" is not all that drives me. I like experiencing new flavors, new textures and working with new ingredients, as well as enjoying the process of the preparation.

Copying recipes for people can be a fraught exercise for me. I do follow recipes, as I have said here, but almost never to the letter. I make dozens of adjustments sometimes, so I grapple with whether to just copy the recipe and phhht--there you go. Or, do I write notes: "I use this brand of X ingredient here," "I use 1/4 teaspoon instead of 1/2 teaspoon of salt there," "I substitute green chilies for the red peppers," etc.? It depends. I have found that many people are not as detailed in the way they may follow recipe instructions and I have learned to scale back on all that I might actually tweak for myself. I have found that it's a bit anti-social to foist minutiae on people, unless there is a good reason to do so.

So, cookbooks and recipes are often more than just sets of instructions to be followed to the letter. At their best, they convey something of the soul of the author. So often, celebrity cookbooks are disappointing because they are disingenuous. They are not the culmination of a life's work, they are a marketing vehicle, first and foremost. They are not akin to a lesson, they are like watching an entertaining TV show: lots of beautiful pictures and not much else. I have a few, but I am not drawn to them.

Today I will go to a friend's dinner party. He doesn't do desserts and, oh, I DO DESSERTS. I have pulled out Dorie Greenspan's Baking...from My Home to Yours, and I'm thinking of making the chocolate ganache tart, or the French lemon tart. I am a big Greenspan fan, and I read the recipes last night. No matter what I make from that book, I know I won't be let down.