Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:
Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.
Yet the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages: “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook,” “The Adaptable Feast,” the ones with disingenuously plain names—“How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking” (a good one, in fact)—and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like “Dining on the B. & O.: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age.” Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as part of an appetizer” is all you get.
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Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all’Amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.
The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.
I mean, given that young people learning how to cook today are doing so in a culture in which nearly all the things that bound us organically to tradition — in cooking, and in everything else — have been severed. Severed by migration and the melting pot, severed by the industrialization of cooking and the disruption of labor patterns (e.g., frozen food and fast food displacing traditional home cooking, partly because of women entering the work force), severed by the evolution of culture away from authoritative orthodoxies (e.g., This Is How We Do It Here) toward ever-expanding choice and variety (e.g., You May Do As You Like).
We can complain about this, or celebrate this, or, illogically, both (that’s my paradoxical stance), but it simply is, and we are left to figure out what to do with what we have, where we are, both in terms of time and place. Which is a highfalutin way of saying, “What do I, an amateur cook in Dallas, Texas, in the year 2009, with a heretofore unthinkable array of ingredients available to me, and a virtually infinite number of recipes near to hand, cook for dinner tonight?”
What we’re left to do, if we’re serious, is to try to cobble together our own traditions by grafting older ones onto our own culinary repertoires. It never would have occurred to my mother, for example, to open up an Italian cookbook and attempt smothered cabbage in the Italian style (e.g., shredded, and cooking down in olive oil and its own juices). We ate cabbage chopped and boiled to mush in salty water — which for me, meant I didn’t eat cabbage, because it tasted like glop; it was discovering that there are other, better ways to prepare cabbage that taught me to love cabbage. And I’m supposed to complain about this? As someone who loves to cook and loves to eat, I’m grateful for the variety available to me. And yet, I do my best to keep alive a repertoire of dishes from Louisiana and the Deep South — but Gopnik’s point about the importance of living tradition, one tied to place, becomes clearest to me when I make turnip or mustard greens in my Dallas kitchen. Nobody else in my family will eat them, and anyway, they taste odd when eaten away from my mother’s table. Though greens may not be in your family’s culinary tradition, you can probably think of a certain food that’s so tied to region that the experience of it is strange outside the context of place.
Another problem with cookbooks is that following recipes to the letter inhibits the impromptu adaptive stuff that happens when you have to substitute, improvise, or fix your mistakes. The British food writer Nigel Slater compared recipes to wearing a straight jacket or compromisingly tight Spandex. Exacting recipes transform the engaging, romantic alchemy of cooking back into a laborious, anxiety-ridden chore.There’s little doubt that certain recent cooking tomes of biblical proportion (some weighing in at up to 12 pounds) don’t really seem designed for kitchen instruction. They’re meant to tell stories, whether those stories are about perfecting techniques or about creating unreproducible seared duck breasts. Except for the exacting science of molecular gastronomy, which takes persnickety-ness to its furthest extreme with spheroid balls of solidified tea and freeze dried lobster tails, more cookbooks are shedding absolute, codified recipes in favor of instructions designed to inspire culinary improvisation.
Which brings us to one of the biggest recipe food fights in recent memory: The battle between Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated, on one side—representing the professional tried-and-true, thoroughly tested recipe measured down to the last ounce, in one corner—and the online food wiki, Food52, on the other—representing the open-source, evolving, experimental recipes from any home tinkerer’s kitchen. Kimball has been criticized for dry, bloodless writing, whereas Food52 can come across as just another collection of half-baked recipes—a modern form of the community cookbooks put out by the Ladies Auxiliary. Next month, the two are hoping to stage a showdown that will settle which method makes the best recipes.
The primary point of their standoff may—like cookbooks themselves—be entertaining storytelling. Cooking ultimately comes down to the cook—not a recipe. Home cooks who can’t derive a good meal from a cooking magazine won’t do better using intuition alone—or a wiki model. But, hey, if there’s conflict and resolution, it’s a good recipe for a book, a home-for-the-holidays meal, or a protracted online food fight. I know I’ll be watching.
Danielle at Reading Between The Lines:
I think someone needs to get over the fact that he can’t cook. There’s nothing wrong with using a cookbook, for goodness sake. Cookbooks are a step-by-step iguide to cooking–it’s how we learn! Sure, there are a million different recipes for the same meal but that’s the beauty of it all–you can always mix and match recipes, add your own flavors, and substitute things you don’t like, to create something new. But you need a foundation recipe in order to do that.
I honestly don’t understand why Mr. Gopnik is so up-in-arms about here. He’s just wasting his energy.
Let the people cook already!
