Home Cooks and Recipes: What We Owe to Each Other

Four Crucial Questions to Ask

First off, since several folks have followed or subscribed in the two weeks (perhaps due to our shared participation in Alicia Kennedy’s excellent workshop on Substack newsletter writing), it’s a good opportunity to reintroduce myself…

Hello! Nice to meet you! This is a wishing-it-was-weekly newsletter written by me, someone who’s had almost nine lives in the food world and lived to tell the tale. I’ve been a cookbook editor, a museum specialist and program host, a lateish-in-life PhD student, and now a doctored-up food historian who writes, edits, project manages, and teaches for a bunch of different outlets. While the scholarly stuff in this newsletter may come and go, what I always hope to offer is an inquisitive look into the food world, asking how books, recipes, and ideas evolve about both home cooking and fine dining, and what they say about our larger appreciation of food in American popular culture. So stay tuned for more…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve prepared two different pasta dishes, and both ended up in the trash. This was unusual for me on several fronts. First, I seldom throw out recipe results, so deep is my commitment to waste-free cooking. (Several years ago I worked on a cookbook that required testing a pecan pie recipe more than five times, and yet even the eggiest, wettest version of that pie was consumed.) And second, even though I don’t generally believe in “foolproof” cooking, most of the time I don’t even use a recipe, especially when it comes to pasta. However, both of these recipes had a few fatal flaws, and it reminded me that there are four valuable questions to ask when smart home cooks meet brand-new recipes. (Note: The point of this post isn’t to point fingers at the authors—I won’t link to their recipes, books, or otherwise— but to instead show you, the cook, what should give yourself permission to do or not do, so that your dinner doesn’t end up in the dumpster.)

Question #1: What’s the recipe’s goal? When I’m cooking from a recipe, about 99% of the time the recipe is usually focused on delivering the following things: flavor, cultural insights, and (very rarely) well-rounded nutrition. That’s not much of a surprise—what inspires us to cook is usually what inspires us to live, and unless you eat to live rather than live to eat, you may not seek out recipes with dietary restrictions or nutritional information at the forefront. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with using recipes that come from nutrition- or health-oriented authors, websites, or resources, and many of them can be quite good. (Health-oriented cookbooks, in particular, can be very good, because they have to go through multiple rounds of review and revision, and often require rigorous recipe testing.) But when you start to notice key details missing from the recipe’s headnote—discussions of flavor, texture, comps to other kinds of dishes to entice you into the preparation—you may start to ask: is this recipe aimed at my pleasure? My learning process? Or my overall health? If you can identify the recipe’s goal based on its publication platform, authorship, and headnote, then you can decide if it’s right for you long before you head to the grocery store.

Question #2: Do I know something the recipe doesn’t? It’s very easy to distrust yourself when cooking from a recipe. There’s a natural relationship between the “author” and the “authority” they communicate, and cookbook editors often promote new titles on the grounds of the new mastery, knowledge, or appreciation of a dish that the right author can give to any reader. Yet when an author is endorsing something that seems fundamentally wrong to you, don’t ignore your spidey sense. If a recipe for homemade gnocchi requires eggs (the norm in the Veneto, not the norm in Emilia-Romagna), that’s one thing—cultural context matters, especially in variations on a well-known dish. But if you’re making a pizza dough and it’s so wet that you can’t pull it together, add enough flour until you can, even if the author doesn’t tell you to do so. Written-down recipes are an important form of knowledge, This is especially important when we encounter recipes that cite rigorous testing, years of restaurant work, or scientific precision as the basis for their excellence. To be told that we’re “doing it wrong,” over and over again, is not the way that authors engender trust or gain authority, and it’s something we have to unlearn if we’re going to become better home cooks.

Question #3: Do you have enough information to do things well? When restaurant chefs sit down to write their first cookbooks, it’s a major learning curve. Restaurant recipes for stocks, sauces, and par-boiled vegetables are often scaled to produce multiple gallons or pounds, not for a family of four (the standard serving size for most cookbooks geared toward home cooks). These recipes also don’t often include descriptive details, because professional cooks have the visual/textural criteria for doneness in their bones, thanks to culinary school and/or narrow menus repeated over and over again during long restaurant shifts. But recipes targeting home cooks have to tell you more than just how long to cook and at what temp. They need to tell how often to stir, whether or not to cover a pan, and most importantly what ingredients look, smell, and feel like when they’re done cooking. Caramelized onions take more than 5 minutes, so instead of citing a cook time, cite the visual cues of a well-made version—reduced in size, dark brown, and glossy. It requires you stay at the stove to observe—what all good scientists do—but you learn a lot more about cooking onions in the process. Editors call these “doneness indicators”—the signs the recipe is proceeding as intended, in ways that can’t be measured on a stopwatch or an instant-read thermometer. You can learn that a roast chicken is generally done when it has an internal temperature of 165°F, but that won’t tell you anything without also assessing the interior firmness of the meat and the exterior crispness of the skin. (Unfortunately, going by the chicken’s juices is a fallible indicator, but so is my cat’s meowing at the oven.) It’s tempting to reduce cooking to a chemical process, and chemistry does have a place in the home kitchen. But your eyes, nose, ears, and fingers are culinary tools too, so don’t shove them to the back of the drawer.

Question #4: Am I going to like it? It doesn’t take a degree in food studies to understand that taste is subjective: we all have our avowed preferences and innate points of disgust. Knowing your own taste is subjective is essential when going into a recipe with confidence, even if it’s a recipe that’s gotten a million upvotes. And though it’s easy to mock people who deviate from written recipes with less-than-stellar results, as a food editor, let me clear this up now: you are allowed to change recipes to suit your style of eating. Recipes are formulas, but unlike in chem class, the formula can and should be adjusted to taste. If you prefer your peanut butter cookies extra salty, splurge on the flaky Maldon and bring it on. If you can’t stand the texture of runny eggs, then feel free to swap in a hard-fried egg the next time you make ramen. As Julia Child noted, “If you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?” In your kitchen, you’re the authority. So have it your way.

A lot of this may be intuitive already, and if it is, good for you. But it was a humbling experience to remember that, no matter how many dishes I’ve tested and how many things I’ve tasted, I can’t put myself on autopilot. Home cooks are smart, capable, and most importantly, eager to study new techniques, ingredients, and dishes. But not all textbooks, or recipes, are equal, and all students have earned the right to ask questions of their instructors. That’s how we learn, and learn to learn better.

Recommended Reading: You might have heard about the demise of Tupperware, how the brand had to file for bankruptcy earlier this week, and as Amy McCarthy writes at Eater, it’s not entirely a surprise given the changing retail marketplace for home goods. However, Tupperware’s place in culinary history will absolutely endure. For a deep, richly researched dive into the story of Tupperware, check out this amazing story from SAVEUR contributor Betsy Andrews (and then go to Etsy in search of the super-retro 1970s releases).

The Perfect Bite: We started weekly Italian lessons as a family last week, and I’m looking forward to spending each Saturday walking through the North End after class. (Future post coming on this front, to give the neighborhood the non-touristy spotlight it deserves.) For our inaugural visit, we popped into Ernesto’s Pizza, an old-school establishment that offered enormous slices of freshly baked pizza for an unbeatable price. Both the standard cheese and pepperoni were excellent, but my vegetable pizza, loaded with roasted broccoli, artichoke hearts, and fried eggplant, was over-the-top delicious.

Cooked & Consumed: Despite this week’s focus, I’m delighted that at least two of our home-cooked meals turned out beautifully. First, a slightly tweaked (tweaking is fine!) version of Hetty McKinnon’s chickpea and halloumi stew, which I filled out with shredded cabbage and carrots, doubled the spices, and sweetened with a spoonful or two of honey, made for a great impromptu Sunday night dinner with neighbors. Second, Eric Kim’s amazing Radicchio Caesar gave a much-needed boost to our workday lunches, especially when topped with leftover roast chicken.