Going Off Recipe

Jun 8 2018

Nothing lies so innocently, and so completely, like a recipe.

Their first words are lies.

“Prep time: 20 minutes” - except you’ll be slaving over a cutting board for an hour. “Serves 4” - prepare to be hungry, or to run out of tupperware.

Their instructions double down. Almost mocking.

“Dice the tomato,” read: “smash your mealy tomato into pulpy bits.” “Sautée until slightly softened” means “make hot until still too crunchy or hopelessly limp, or even better, a little bit of both.”

But the worst recipe deceit is the photo.

A glistening, perfectly cross-hatched steak, dusted with maldon salt crystals like snowflakes, pristinely plated on stoneware on top of linen on top of rustic upcycled acacia.

Your meal will not look like this. Your Ikea place setting is not the canvas for this masterpiece. And carefully plating your food just before you eat it is like making your bed just before you sleep in it: you wouldn’t regret it, but who’s got time for that.

I love to cook, but my cooking has admittedly always been firmly rooted in recipe. Robotically parsing instructions from some food blogger like they’ve been handed down from on high. Cooking should be an act of creation, but following a recipe becomes an exercise in replication - where the best you can do is not screw up. You own your work to the extent a scribe, or a forger, owns their facsimile, but there is always a hollownesss to cooking from an anonymous recipe.

There is safety though in following the recipe. Recipes let you strive for the platonic ideal they depict, while providing a safety net for when it inevitably doesn’t all quite work out. The timing is never right for an experiment - you don’t want your “personal touch” ruining a dinner party. And the last thing you want, after sweating over a hot stove for an hour, is to throw in an additional element of risk.

Diverging from the recipe means fully shouldering the burden of your creative success or failure. Going off recipe takes technique, taste, experience, and a bullish sort of confidence - to think “I can do better than this.” And it requires truly understanding and appreciating why the recipe is the way it is in the first place.

I believe that cooking well - that being able to create rather than replicate - is one of a privileged set of skills that directly leads to a richer, fuller life, for you and everyone around you.

That cooking well and living well are one and the same. That we follow recipes in our cooking, in our careers, in our lives, bland simulacrums of some long-forgotten seed of truth, lacking the confidence or wisdom to venture off the well-trod path.

I also like collecting diplomas.

So I’m spending the next six weeks at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, in their Intensive Basic Cuisine program. I have absolutely no idea what to expect. But I’ll catalog some of the things I pick up here.

And hopefully when I leave, I’ll be a little more comfortable going off recipe. But nothing really ends up looking like the picture.