"Until it's Done."

Times, Temps, and Sensorial Tendencies

Cookbooks as puzzles, and vice versa—a treat to myself from Porter Square Books.

This past Friday night, I was preparing a meal for a birthday celebration, and was preparing to put some duck breasts—the skin lightly scored and seasoned with kosher salt and minced sage a few hours prior—into a cold pan. The guest of honor, who makes exceptional duck confit at home yet hasn’t had much luck with duck breasts, stepped into the kitchen and asked me how long I planned to cook it. Immediately, and far more snark than I intended, I retorted, “Until it’s done.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, and I’m grateful he chuckled at my knee-jerk response—after all, anyone who appreciates the process of cooking wants to know the formula for how to do things correctly, how to ensure that the results come out exactly the way the recipe writer or dish creator intended. And certainly recipe writers often try to provide as much precision as possible for charting a path to success—giving you cooking times and temperatures, internal temperatures, visual, aural, textural or olfactory doneness indicators, or a combination of all of the above so that you can check off all the necessary criteria to know that a dish is completed. Timing is an important part of the culinary process, but the unit of minutes or seconds can feel fairly unreliable and often secondary in importance to the home cook. Time is a unit that can mean hugely different things depending on your relationship to the stovetop—for some five minutes of simmering can feel like a short but bracing walk around the block, or it can be a time, as the cookbook author Peg Bracken once wrote, best used to “light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”

A duck breast may only take about 7-10 minutes to fully render and crisp up its skin on one side, and so the cook wants to be standing at the ready to intervene, lest it overcook and start to smoke. We look for multiple sensory indicators that the duck is ready to be turned—its shrinking in size and muscle fiber contraction, the steady flow of rendered fat in and around the meat, the degree of effort it takes to lift a corner of the crisping skin off the pan’s surface, the powerful smell of hot fat and melting salt and sizzling sage. Time feels inadequate as an indicator of doneness when I have these other cues to go by—I trust myself and my senses far more than any quantified indication. In this way I honor the generations of women before me who cooked without a reliable temperature indicator or mechanism for controlling cooking heat, apart from the fuel they fed into the fire. I also love pushing against the presumed equity of the culinary experience, in part because I know that no two people approach the kitchen or the dish in exactly the same way. Precise temperatures and times in recipe writing are done with the assumption of universal replicability and access—that anyone, anywhere can achieve success if working with the right tools and ingredients. Nowadays there is a tendency to write recipes with an air of relaxation, encouraging the reader to “season to taste” and leave room for their own subjectivity, but it’s often hard to buy what those purportedly “low-maintenance” headnotes are selling. Authors can claim to leave room for subjectivity, but only if those experiential, improvisational, utterly unpredictable aspects of cooking are the garnish on top of the sound execution of culinary principles…right? If the formula works, then everything else is gravy?

As I work through my own intellectual understanding of cooking, I’m constantly surprised by my own tendency to defend some things at the stovetop that I would find insufferable in other aspects of my life. (As I also discovered this weekend, the “until it’s done” philosophy doesn’t quite work for me when I’m trying to apply it to a toddler’s potty-training journey. Surely there must be a formula and a specific timeline for that, but so far none of the ones I’ve tried have worked.) Perhaps I love cooking because it is a process in which I completely trust my own actions and preferences—where I can lean into what I can only know by dipping a spoon into a sauce, adding a dash of this or that, and then dipping and tasting once more. I’ve never been to culinary school, so I don’t know if such impulses would be beaten out of me in that process, but until they are, I love the fact that, as the cook, I am the arbiter of my own excellence. And, thankfully, even my shortcomings are edible.

After searing off the duck breasts on both sides (maybe 12 minutes per batch? I didn’t pay attention, but as the experts I trust the most on wild game say, time isn’t the essence of the thing), I grated an onion into the rendered fat, added a few glugs of white wine and heavy cream, a generous spoonful of crushed pink peppercorns and a few grinds of salt, and whisked until it came together into a thick sauce. It wasn’t a perfect emulsion, or even terribly pretty, but it tastes spectacular, and that was enough for everyone (including the guest of honor).

Recommendation: It’s a bit dense to go into detail here, but for more on the essential epistemology of recipes, I strongly recommend this excellent article by the philosopher Andrea Borghini, “What is a Recipe?” This is the second time I’ve assigned it to students, and I think it lays out perfectly the way recipes instantiate the cook, reader, and intended foundational knowledge of a given cuisine and level of culinary expertise. A wonderful read that will make you think deeply about every recipe you encounter.

The Perfect Bite: After crossing the submission threshold on an overdue paper (How do you know it’s done, you might ask? Who knows?), I treated myself to a glass of the Signature Martini, from the Via Carota line of pre-made craft cocktails I had purchased a few weeks prior. (I’ve been to VC and sampled said martini in person, which I was told was laced with a small amount of grappa. I couldn’t detect grappa in the bottled version, but haven’t been able to replicate in my own experiments at home. So until a generous soul from the restaurant sends me a recipe, this is as close as I’ll get.) There aren’t a lot of cocktails that lend themselves well to pre-bottling, and I don’t think there’s any true substitute for having a freshly made martini, ice-cold and poured daringly close to the lip of the glass. But this, and the delicious white negroni, were excellent stop-gaps for a quietly celebratory weekday night.

Cooked & Consumed: Thankfully we did a lot of cooking this past weekend, which gave me a chance to visit an old standard. Back in my earliest cooking days, my copy of Ina Garten’s Barefoot in Paris (her fourth title in the Barefoot Contessa series) was heavily thumbed and generously flecked with olive oil stains, and I would make her Moroccan Couscous recipe at least once a month. (Ina is one of the few food celebrities for whom I have unmitigated respect—in part because I saw her drink horrible coffee out of the PRH office machines on multiple occasions and not even flinch once.) This is the kind of recipe that truly lends itself to improvisational cooks—one part roasted vegetables, one part broth stepped with spices (and a decadent spoonful of saffron), and one part dried couscous (though quinoa would likely work just as well). Then you stir it all together into a big bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let it sit for 15 minutes—a dish that can be truly made to order as your dinner guests walk in the door. I paired it with another fast DIY dish—two cans of chickpeas, drained and heated in tomato sauce from a local Georgian restaurant, and heavily seasoned with paprika and cumin—and served it with yogurt on the size. If only I’d thought to enjoy it this much when I was 22…