“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with a butter knife?” and why I don’t follow recipes

I recently cracked open my copy of The New Yorker’s collection of food writings, Secret Ingredients, and stumbled upon an essay by Anthony Lane called ‘Look Back in Hunger.’ In this essay, Lane discusses the current role of cookbooks in our at-home, culinary lives. He praises those cookbooks that we have come to accept as “classics,” such as Irma S. and Marion Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, or Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, but wonders if their content is starting to flounder in today’s home kitchen. For instance, Lane mentions, “when Escoffier tells us to ‘stuff the fattened pullet with pieces of truffle and poach it in the usual manner,’ he presumes that we habitually spend our weekends looking for pullets to fatten and that we can poach them in our sleep. Many readers are scared off by this assumption; I feel flattered and consoled by it, all the more so because I know it to be dead wrong” (152). Lane also discusses the trend of celebrity cookbooks, wondering if their content too might not be quite up to snuff. For instance, “there’s Rosie Daley, whose food looks perfectly nice, but whose In the Kitchen with Rosie might not have reached the bestseller lists were she not employed as a cook by Oprah Winfrey. It’s kind of hard to concentrate on the ingredients, what with Oprah’s cheerleading ringing out at regular intervals. ‘I have thrived on [Rosie’s] pasta. I can eat it every day and practically do.’ You’d never guess” (155).

The real reason that this essay caught my attention, however, was because it described the author’s relationship with cookbooks as remarkably similar to my own. “Cookbooks,” Lane asserts, “do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but, in all honesty, a cookbook is something that you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed” (156).

I read cookbooks like they’re novels. I go to the library weekly, scrounge up all the new cookbooks I can find, bring them home, spread them out on my bedroom floor, and stare dreamily at the pictures as I skim through the pages, lying child’s-pose-style in the middle of the room. Don’t get me wrong, I cook. I’m actually a very good cook, utensil skills aside. I never had formal training, and, unlike my boyfriend who can brunoise with his eyes closed without ever having been taught, I am constantly asked by my mother and friends if I wouldn’t be more comfortable cutting that apple with a butter knife, the implication being that I will inevitably cut off one my digits, or one of theirs if they get too close while I’m holding a “real” knife. In any case, there is nothing that I would rather do than cook with and for my friends. But I cook in the moment. I mix stuff, I taste it, I add this, I add that, I stir some more, I add some more, and then I serve it. My mom has asked me no fewer than sixteen times in the last year to write down my recipe for salad dressing. And yet, I still haven’t done it. Is that because I’m a bad daughter? A little bit, but truthfully, it’s because I don’t know it. I can tell you the ingredients, but quantities? Just mix the stuff until it tastes like the right balance. I’ll know it when I taste it. I became a food writer for Examiner.com to try and curb my lack-of-recipe-following-habits because you can't actually publish something like "mix the stuff together until it tastes good" as a legit recipe on a how-to website. Nevertheless, if you read my articles, you'll notice they are dangerously close to just that sort of lack-luster instructional, offering ingredients suggestions but also saying things like "open the fridge, see what you’ve got in there, use that.” But I guess I think that’s one of my strengths too. All you have is baking soda, a cucumber, and some beer? I can work with that.

But this “talent” for cooking is also the exact reason why I’m not such a good baker; because tasting the batter is not an appropriate means of judging what the final product will taste like (although that doesn’t stop me from tasting an indecent amount of cookie batter. Afraid that I will die of salmonella poisoning, Zach has started sending me care packages filled not with cookies but rather with egg-free cookie dough. I eat it by the spoonful on the floor of my bedroom while I read the latest batch of cookbooks). And then there’s the problem that baking is really more like science and less like cooking. And in that seventh grade science experiment where you build a parachute to land an egg safely on the ground when it’s dropped from the roof of the building, mine only survived because I wrapped the damn thing in bubble wrap four times since science is not my friend and my parachute never even deployed. And in science, and baking, if you don’t follow the directions, weird shit happens. For instance, my cupcakes are always deformed. Why? Because I just put in whatever amount of flour I felt like using. Or perhaps I was only making half a batch, and the full recipe called for one egg, so I figured how important could that fraction of an egg really be? Turns out, that portion of an egg was important, essential even.

            Lane recalls two of his own specific cooking conundrums that describe perfectly the difficulties that arise when cooking from a recipe. The first was a dish by entertaining expert and entrepreneur, Martha Stewart. The “it” that Lane refers to is a baked ham from Stewart’s Menus for Entertaining:
                  “It looks succulent in the accompanying photograph, and I have long yearned to make it, but three factors have restrained me. First, it serves sixteen, and I don’t know that many people who would be happy to munch ham at one another. Second, you need ‘one bunch chervil with flowers.’ (That’s plain silly[…]) Third, the ham must be baked for five and a half hours in a pan lined with fresh-cut grass. As in meadow. ‘Locate an area in advance with tender, young, organically grown grass that has not yet been cut,’ our guide advises. ‘It is best to cut it very early in the morning while the dew is still evident.’ I’m sorry Martha, but it just won’t do. I have inspected the grass in my backyard, and I am not prepared to serve Baked Ham with Cat Whiff and Chopped Worms” (150).

In his second recipe mishap – the sardine and potato terrine – Lane perfectly describes that moment of pure terror in the middle of preparation when one realizes that reading the recipe, before just diving in, might have been a wise decision:

 “There I was – apron on, gin in hand, closely following the recipe of the French chef Raymond Blanc. All went well until I got to the harmless words “a piece of cardboard.” Apparently, I needed cardboard to lay on the terrine mold; the cardboard then had to be covered with ‘evenly distributed weights’ for twelve hours. Weights? Cardboard? Twelve hours? They weren’t listed with the ingredients. I had my sardines; I had my twenty capers and my freshly grated nutmeg; but I had no cardboard” (157).

That’s the problem with following recipes – it requires way too much advanced thought. You have to 1) read the full list of ingredients, 2) go buy those specific ingredients, and 3) read the whole recipe through at least once prior to preparation just so there are no surprises in the middle of cooking. Here’s the thing – in the unlikely event that I do dare to prepare an actual recipe, I will probably get through steps one and two, but step three? Well, that’s for amateurs. The result of my, let’s call it spunk instead of laziness, is that I normally get half-way through preparing a recipe, run into a snafu, say to hell with it, and make the rest up. And I usually pull it off; it may not look pretty, but it tastes good.

I seem to remember a Christmas when I decided to follow my mother’s family recipe for meringue cookies. I dug the recipe out of the red, tin recipe box, I shopped for all the ingredients, I tied on my Christmas apron and prepared to make wonderful, nostalgic pavlovas. But this was my first time making meringues, and so when I got to the point where the recipe read, “whip the sugar with the egg whites until they form stiff peaks,” my confidence started to waver. Are those peaks? Are they stiff enough? Maybe I should keep going? Are they stiff enough now? But the more I whipped, the looser the concoction seemed to get. And I continued like that until, in a furious panic of runny whites, I read the rest of the recipe, which said, “be careful not to overwhip.” Be careful not to overwhip?! Doesn’t that seem like just the kind of essential information that would have been better placed, gee, I don’t know, at the beginning of the instructions, where I would have read it before I whipped the shit out of the egg whites? Disgusted with the recipe, but unwilling to waste a dozen eggs, I decided to bake it off anyway. What came out of the oven was not so much a batch of individual cookies as a meringue replica of a cookie sheet, but it tasted good.