You are the cook
For the past few weeks, I’ve been gathering online with a small group of intrepid home cooks to explore what we can do with a selected seasonal vegetable, the contents of our kitchens, and an hour of our time. The workshop, No Recipe, that I introduced about a month ago, has been a really warm and lovely time to experiment and share ideas and come up with dishes that are wholly our own. We’ve had plenty of small failures; beets need par-boiling before cooking on the stove; red cabbage takes a lot longer to cook than radicchio; someone’s rutabaga began bleeding red last week (it was a beet). But accommodating surprises is what cooking is about. We’ve also had successes. Brilliant innovations like sprinkling shin ramen seasoning on mushroom bacon, or using kefir in a mushroom gravy. A couple who said they wanted to feel more comfortable making pancakes has made okonomiyaki several times now, and the first time they grated in too much sweet potato but ended up liking their cabbage-latke even better.
No Recipe, or something like it, is the cooking school that I would have liked to have attended. I’m finding as I move through the food world that, just like outside of it, many of the great cooks do their interesting baking and cooking experiments as side projects to whatever their real work is. It’s not what you learn in school and it’s not what most jobs entail. Maybe it’s a given that if you want to be a chef, that you have a cultivated palate and culinary creativity, but where do you get the confidence to begin that experimentation? Most of us are lucky to have the time and access to a kitchen to start at any moment, but just like learning dance or movement, if it’s not a practice that you incorporated early, it can be difficult to begin. Creating a space and some support for experimentation is what I aspire to.
Recipes are good training wheels for developing confidence in the kitchen but can also be barriers to imagining what you can do with an ingredient. It’s useful to remember that there’s nothing intrinsic about them; they’ve always been an approximation of what really went on during cooking. Old recipes look nothing like modern day lists and numbered steps. They’re densely packed paragraphs of text that read more like narratives, descriptive rather than prescriptive. Instead of saying, here is what you do it’s like they’re trying to tell you, here is what happens when I do it. And just try to ask someone from an older generation to tell you how to cook a dish. They’ll probably give you an extremely simplified set of steps or maybe they’ll talk with their hands or props because it’s hard to describe without demonstrating. These elders of ours aren’t always the most experimental in the kitchen, but if their food comes out better than ours, it may be because they’re paying more attention to it or to different aspects than what’s emphasized in recipes. And that attention is all that’s really needed for making excellent food.
When I jabber on about experimentation, it’s not that I think it’s so important to make dishes that are original or innovative. I think it’s great if you have a particular dish that you make in a particular way and basically eat all the time. The experimentation is important insofar as it helps you find what you like. And that’s why recipes will always be insufficient; nobody can tell you how to make something exactly how you like it. Some people have some pretty good ideas that are worth exploring, but it’s always up to you adapt them to your circumstances and make them taste good to you. It’s always up to you to do the cooking.
I’m hoping to do another run of No Recipe workshops soon, especially because we’re about to get into spring vegetables like artichokes, asparagus, morels, and ramps. I’m going to take a couple weeks break though as I settle into my new schedule. I just started the 12-8am graveyard shift, which at a bakery is really the period of creation. I have a lot to report, but it’ll be coming at you next week!
What I’m reading
An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler
Julia Child instructs tasting water periodically as it climbs toward 212 degrees to get used to its temperature at each stage. Her advice might be overzealous, but it teaches an invaluable lesson, not about boiling, but about learning to cook: if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it. You don’t need to know how the properties of water differ at 100 degrees and at 180, but by tasting it at those temperatures you may learn something about your pot or your stove, or the spoon you like best for tasting.
Once your water reaches a boil, salt it well. The best comparison I can make is to pleasant seawater. The water needs to be this salty whether it’s going to have pasta cooked in it or the most tender spring peas. It must be salted until it tastes good because what you’re doing isn’t just boiling an ingredient, but cooking one thing that tastes good in another, which requires that they both taste like something.
All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.