If This Is A Cooking Blog Why Don’t You Have Recipes?

This is a good question that has been asked of me by nobody.  I’m making an assumption that if you’re checking out My Life In Spice you might be frustrated by the lack of recipes.  I even have a category called “Recipes” but if you click on it, all you’ll find are a few recipes that represent my Menu Project from culinary school…not exactly a rich resource of material!  So what’s the deal?  Am I just being lazy?  Am I being guarded with my “secret” recipes?  Do I even have any real recipes of my own to share or do I only know how to cook using recipe books?  These are all good questions and I want to attempt to give an honest answer, so here it is in a nutshell…

I DON’T LIKE RECIPES!  There I said it!  Now it’s pretty reasonable to ask why a person who doesn’t like recipes has just completed 100 recipes from a Martha Stewart book?  If you look carefully at what I’ve written I’ve made clear that I seldom follow Martha’s recipes exactly.  I use them as inspiration and a starting point toward trying new things.  I also have a particular affection for Martha’s American Food because it traces the rich history of American cooking and the immigrant roots that inform it.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a total food history nerd.  So with that said, what’s the chip on my shoulder concerning recipes about?

I think recipes are alienated and fetishized.  How’s that for an esoteric answer?  Let me try to explain that in a more concrete manner.  This post will delve into the issue of alienation and the way recipes are created in a way that doesn’t necessarily translate for the person who is trying to replicate them in their own kitchen.

Most of the recipes you find on cooking shows, books and online are worked on in test kitchens.  People who work in test kitchens are paid to try out recipes that have been created by a particular cook to determine how well they work.  If the recipe is a flop, it’s back to the drawing board, complete with an analysis of what went wrong and how to improve the results.  That sounds very precise and scientific, doesn’t it?  But here’s the problem — professional test kitchens are set up to achieve the best results possible.  The temperature of the room will be neither too humid nor too arid.  The equipment used is of the state-of-the art variety.  If the testers need their stove at 350, it will achieve that temperature on the nose.

Test kitchens are the perfect environment for cooking.  But your kitchen is not.  Test kitchens are to real world cooking what fit models are to real world clothing.  What’s a fit model?  That’s the person who clothing manufacturers use to mass-produce attire.  The fit model, whether modeling for small or plus size clothing, has proportions that are considered perfect.  This is why it’s so hard to find clothing off the rack that fits you correctly.  Because the odds are that you are not built on that level of so-called perfection.  Your arms and legs are too short or too long.  Your breasts and hips are too big.  Your waist is too long.  You’ve likely spent a lifetime feeling insecure because your attempts to buy decent clothing have always led you to those conclusions.  But the reality is that your body has nothing to do with it!  It’s the cookie-cutter approach to mass production that limits our choices and makes shopping for clothing a humiliating pain in the ass.

Following a recipe exactly and not getting the desired results is also a humiliating pain in the ass.  Just as that trip to the clothing store leaves you feeling like something is “wrong” with your body, the failed recipe leads you to believe that there’s something “wrong” with your ability to follow simple directions.

Here’s an example of how environment can trip up even the most skilled and professional chefs.  Have you ever watched one those ubiquitous cake or pastry contests on The Food Network?  The pastry chefs selected for the shows are world-class artists. Making cakes into works of art not only takes a great chef, but it also helps to be a skilled mathematician and architect as well.  I once had the unique pleasure of watching in person a very famous pastry chef preparing one of the elaborate cakes you see on those shows.  Her work was slow and meticulous and she approached her task much like a brilliant artist approaches the block of marble that will become a great sculpture.  These shows, which are for entertainment purposes, don’t begin to cover the amount of work, detail and laser-sharp focus that goes into these creations.  Part of the drama of these competitions is watching how the chefs deal with working under the time constraints and pressure of a televised competition.  One theme that shows up over and over again is the way their best laid plans go off the rails because they hadn’t anticipated how hot the television studio would be.  Think about that for a moment.  These people are the best in the world at what they do.  They are frequently geniuses and I don’t use that word lightly.  But they can’t make their recipes work under the blazing hot lights and the heat generated by all the equipment.  They usually recover and move on to Plan B.  But my point is that environment matters!  And if the greatest chefs in the world are tripped up by issues pertaining to humidity and room temperature, why wouldn’t these same things have a negative impact on a home cook?

I’m not anti-recipes.  I think that recipes can be one of many helpful tools that can push our creativity in cooking.  But the very creation of recipes is alienated from the real life limitations that come up in our own kitchens.  That’s why you can’t truly be a great cook until you learn how to improvise and learn some basic cooking science.  If you’re making a bread dough and the 2 cups of flour the recipe calls for leaves you with something that’s the consistency of sticky glue, you’re going to have to add more flour.  And you’ll need to keep adding until it’s the right consistency.  Being able to do this means breaking out of the recipe box and thinking on your feet.  This isn’t easy to do, which is why I’d rather use My Life In Spice as a tool that can bring the home cook that kind of independence and not simply share recipes.  If that’s what you’re looking for, there are thousands of other resources out there and I even link to some of them.

My next post will cover the issue of how recipes become fetishized. How words written on a piece of paper can become larger than life and viewed as nearly “godlike” in their importance. I’ll tell you some interesting stories from my time in culinary school, where I observed some very talented chefs turn into total basket cases over things like a teaspoon of water and a single gram of flour.

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