The Problem With Recipes

FYI: I’ll be starting a new online No Recipe workshop series on May 1st, in collaboration with a store I love, Seed and Oil. We’ll be practicing the kind of cooking I describe in this post. Sign up here!

You might also want to check out my recipe this morning for vegetable pie. It’s an experiment in recipe format that tries to make more space for you within it.

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Watch me cook. I open the fridge: In the crisper is half a leek, some soft carrots, and a quart container of mixed celery and mini sweet peppers left over from a friend’s gig. I chop everything up small and slide it into the oil-shimmering Dutch Oven to melt together. I mince garlic and add it with a little salt. Once it smells good, I add the bottom of a can of tomato paste and smush it around to let it caramelize. Then a spoonful of Marmite. Then the half cup of tomato soup and the crumbled fried tofu I brought home from a kids’ class. I add enough water to mostly fill the pot, then what’s left in the bags of three different types of lentils. A couple bay leaves and I let time go to work. Lentil soup.

The problem with recipes is that they teach you to cook backward, from dreams rather than reality. You see the meal — on the Internet, in a book, then in your mind’s eye and with your mind’s tongue — you shop for ingredients, you measure and mise, you cook. Consider its inverse. You see the food — in your fridge, your pantry, your garden if you have that sort of life — you think about the dishes you know how to make, you shuffle between what you have and what you want and whether there’s something you could buy to finish the puzzle, and then you cook, maybe without measurement and maybe without a clear image of what you’ll end up with.

When you cook from reality, you are closer to the ingredients and the process. Your focus stays with observation rather than following instructions. You notice that a winter tomato doesn’t taste tomato-y enough, so you slow-roast it or marinate it in vinegar and sugar. You cook food until it’s ready, not whenever the timer beeps. When I teach kids cooking, I ask them what the most important rule is. “Don’t stab anyone with a knife,” they say. “Okay, but while you’re not stabbing, taste!” I say. “You won’t know what you’re cooking unless you taste.” As you taste, you learn something about how ingredients come together and you begin to imagine how to make the dish different or how to make it more of what it is. No one has promised you what you’re going to end up with, so you don’t think so much about success or failure. It doesn’t have to look like that, it just has to taste good to you.

“This is something that's so hard to teach, but I feel like you really learn how to manage your food, whatever food you have on hand,” says Lukas Volger, whose creativity is driven by his aversion to food waste. “But it’s like a muscle, you have to develop it. It's difficult to teach in cookbooks because the recipe is so fixed.” During the cookbook editing process, he explains, editors press for specificity and consistency, which makes it hard to write recipes that are flexible and yielding to readers’ pantries. He’d like to, for example, say that you could use butternut squash instead of beets if that’s what you have. “But it makes the recipe look more complicated. The more information you put on the page, the more overwhelming it becomes.” This means that what we see in the recipe is only a sketch of the depth of information the writer could offer us.

Recipes have been a site for innovation even while the format was being defined. In the 1940s, when old ideas of cooking through body-knowledge were giving way to precise, scientific instructions, M.F.K. Fisher was already exploding the new format with discursive essays about feeding the soul with recipes for soup. Though recipe writing throughout the 20th century mostly proceeded in the style established by domestic science, seeking reputability through repeatability, there were always writers trying to do something different. Today, my favorite cookbook authors are the ones who try to remind you through their work just how much agency you have. Samin Nosrat wrote the best teaching cookbook I’ve seen, which uses science not to scare you into following her recipes precisely but to empower you to make decisions based on understanding. Her book is unique, but there are other small examples. Abra Berens describes three variations at the end of every recipe in her cookbook Ruffage. In Tenderheart, Hetty Lei McKinnon includes a subtle information box that lists substitutions for the main ingredients. Julia Turshen sends out newsletters with recipe “charts” (like a pesto chart, with a range of possible herbs, nuts, cheese, and fats), which comes closest to how I think about ingredients when I cook. Tamar Adler follows in Fisher’s footsteps with books that read like a long phone call with your most loquacious chef-friend, and is eloquent enough to get away with it.

All of these writers are speaking to the creative core of cooking. They’re trying to show you what it feels like to pull things together, which is satisfying economically but also expressively. Could we say that every meal cooked is a singular act of creativity and a recipe its imperfect record? Is this obnoxious, and does saying it elevate the act of cooking beyond its essential role of nourishment? But why isn’t nourishment and every other mundane repetitive task also an act of creativity? No mouth ever chews the same bread twice, or something like that.

In her book Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson happily skewers, roasts, and chews up the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott for saying that cooking from a recipe is uncreative. “His conceptualization of originality is a fantasy of genius unconnected to other knowledge,” she accuses, describing his refusal of Mrs. Beeton’s sausage recipe as a fear of “creative castration.” When she follows Mrs. Beeton’s recipe herself, it is an ecstatic and even erotic act that “jolts [her] back into [her] body.” Her approach to the recipe is one of dialectic, concerning itself with the way the cook translates and enacts the text. She cooks a certain recipe for tomato sauce 1000 times as a kind of performance art (or just a way of eating) and through those repetitions, works the recipe deep into her soul. In my view, she is no longer following the recipe by that point; she has eaten the recipe along with the tomato sauce, and it is part of her now the way my body holds the knowledge of scrambling an egg.

For Johnson, cooking from a recipe is a way of opening to the voice and mind of another person. It’s true that while the problem with recipes is about deferring to someone else as the expert, the magic of recipes is that you can hear other voices at all. Here is a bit of my world, the voices say, that could become part of yours. A cookbook is a fascinating object because it doesn’t merely create a world for a reader to step into, it aims to give the reader tools to make a version of that world themselves. What other form of writing invites you in as a potential actor rather than spectator? I appreciate the care that goes into such an invitation. I know for certain that when I cook, I am filled up with the voices of every person who has cooked for me or shared their way of cooking with me. My food is far from original.

But is originality the point? Not to me. When people who love cooking tell me they’re not creative cooks — Alicia Kennedy did in our interview here — I don’t believe them, or rather, I understand it differently. Creativity doesn’t mean inventing the next gochujang cookie or something else wild and wonderful that everyone will want to make. It means pulling together a lentil soup that is brown and unpostable but perfect for you. It’s in every small decision and every new feeling that Johnson notates as she performs her recipes again and again. The opening is the point, to what is real and what you want. When you cook, you bridge the gap between these two things and that’s where the awakening is.

What I’m Cooking

As I mention above, this recipe uses an experimental format to help you create your own dish. It’s similar in style to this fritter recipe I published in The Washington Post. This is for paid subscribers, so please think about upgrading your subscription if you’re interested in what I’m up to!