The Endless Torment of the ‘Recipe?’ Guy

I believe you. I have a whole hand-written recipe book from my mother that I was told not to use the quantities from because she made them up so I’d have something to refer to. So, basically, it’s a book of ingredients :rofl: (I laugh, but it’s exactly how I cook now, and also how I exchange recipes with friends - what’s in it, not too much of this, more of that, and so on: a roadmap not a formula.)

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Me too.

That’s how my mom cooked as well, both at home and at our restaurant.

And that’s how I learned how to cook. By feel, touch, and taste.

Measurements are for scientists.

We are cooks.

(This is true for baked goods as well, but it’s usually ratios (e.g., two parts liquid to one part dry ingredient) and never precise grams of this or tablespoons of that).

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I have done the same notebook for my daughter. I guesstimated the amounts of spices and seasonings and it’s awful how off I am and she and DH have to keep editing the notebook. I keep telling them to use the recipes as a rough guide, and to taste as they go and adjust accordingly.

My hand shakes or pinches the correct amount by muscle memory now. I also cook by look and taste.

I am in awe of recipe authors whose measurements are exact and yield great results. Endless recipe testing I guess.

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For baking i would say that precise grams of this and that are how I get the desired ratios.

But this is probably because i have a heavy hand with the flour and measuring by cup I’m almost certain to be 2-3 Tbs over.

The other thing is charcuterie making. I got a “drug scale” as one daughter called it because my regular scale doesn’t do gram fractions and if I need 2g Prague #1, I definitely don’t want it to be in a range from 1.5g to 2.5g.

But then, I am a scientist, too. Or was at one point.

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But you can tell them the ingredients and the method. Unless you can’t remember whether you put beef and broccoli in the beef and broccoli.

Yes, that’s exactly how I read it (and it’s why I used the word “whining”). And some of the people quoted aren’t in the food business. One of them is a middle school teacher who posts as “a creative outlet” and says “But this isn’t my job, I can’t just pump out recipes for you.” The obvious solution is to turn off the comments. But then - and I said this earlier - no one can “ooh” at what you post.

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And if your family had a strong tradition of cooking, and time in the kitchen as communal, etc. then great! You have developed, through YEARS OF PRACTICE, an instinctual feel for the food you make, just as a musician, through years of practice and refining their technique, no longer has to think “How do I play an A#?”, they just play.

Some of us, though, didn’t have that sort of home life. My mother’s mother was a very good cook, for your average 50’s-60’s housewife. She could roast various birds and meats, did a killer chicken soup and latkes (as all Jewish mothers are required to) and ESPECIALLY had great chopped liver and (I’m told, I can’t stand the stuff) gefilte fish. My father’s mother was utterly hopeless in the kitchen. The only thing she every learned to make were those 60’s-70’s “swedish meatballs” you made w/ grape jelly, which my younger brother LOVED.

My mother was a competent, but generally unenthusiastic cook. The only things I knew how to make heading off college were basic pastas, mac 'n cheese, and how to bake a chicken.

Shows like Alton Brown’s Good Eats and America’s Test Kitchen that broke cooking down into steps with at least SOME of the why behind what makes it works was a way for folks like myself, all math and science and process (I do computer code for a living) as a way in that didn’t depend on you having your Bubbe or Nonna or NaiNai to turn to for help.

And hey, after a few YEARS of making bread and pasta, I now know about how dough feels when it’s right. But it took me measuring cups and scales and 1/4 teaspoons and grams to get there.

One approach is not more valid than the other. And both, given sufficient time, can result in excellent cooks, and even an actual chef or three.

“Bah, you MEASURE?!? Can you even feed yourself without a recipe?” screams of gatekeeping and elitism, the same way that, in contrast, you have “You add salt to your autolyse!?! Let me explain why your bread sucks…” screams of the same things in the other direction.

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You do that and then the conversation evolves (or more like de-evolves) into something like this:

[Say the question is how do you make fried rice]

Q: Can you give me your recipe for fried rice?

ME: I use some day old rice (cold) and stir fry with some eggs, chopped veggies, and a bit of soy sauce, just a bit.

Q: How much rice? What do you mean by day old?

ME: As much rice as I have on hand, or as much as rice as I want to eat. Day old? You know, rice that has been made at least a day before hand? That’s day old, just like the term says.

Q: Hmm, um, ok, then what about the eggs? How many eggs?

ME: Not too many, just enough.

Q: Huh? Enough for what?

ME: Enough for the amount of rice you are using.

Q: Well, but you never told me how much rice I needed …

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No, it’s not really about elitism (certainly not from my perspective).

It’s just the way we cooked and learned to cook.

Asking my mom for a recipe would be akin to asking nudist for a bathing suit – it’s just not part of their culinary vernacular or bandwidth.

I mean the reverse could be true as well. “What, you don’t measure and keep recipes? Are you still a neanderthal, have you not yet evolved to use your opposable thumb to pick up a writing instrument and document your endeavors?? Do you even have an opposable thumb? Good grief!”

I would be fine with your first sentence. But my fried rice is almost always a failure. Not enough heat, or too much oil, or whatever.

Most people are not, unfortunately.

It always sounds like it is, though, to me (and at least one other person). Maybe not elitism, but “I already know so much that I can confidently predict the way anything I throw together will come out. Also, I’m super-creative and can’t be confined by someone else’s instructions! And I have a memory like a steel trap.”

Like I said in my OP, I find a lot of things annoying.

At some point, an experienced cook should at least have some idea how flavors go together.
I think the elitism comes from the attitude and not the execution.

see, what stands out to me here is not “how much rice?” but “How do I ‘stir fry?’” Someone who didn’t grow up with folks that REGULARLY stir fry probably won’t know even the basic technique beyond “well, I guess I need a wok, and some oil…” DO you do the rice and veggies and egg seperate? do you put it all in the same big pan at the same time? How do you know when the oil’s hot enough? How hot should the oil bem anyway? Does it matter what oil you use? Do I HAVE to have a wok?

All that is in ‘stir fry’, a term some people just understand, and some folks will haven’t the foggiest clue how to approach.

I don’t think you meant it that way, but the phrasing, in isolation from the context of past messages, let it be read that way. “We’re cooks, not scientists…” Depending on the tone of voice in your head, you could simply be describing, as I think you were, different approaches to cooking, and saying that someone who learned the ‘watching-mom-and-honing-instinct’ couldn’t imagine how to begin quantifying how they know when things are ‘right’.

But it COULD be read as “Food is about LOVE, not recipes!” or similar dogmatic pronouncements that we all love to argue about here.

I probably went a little to hard, so for that, I apologize.

For the record, science-y cooks get really dogmatic, too. You can find no shortage of folks who will yell at you for not following the One True Way of making any particular dish.

Now, would you like garlic in your carbonara? :slight_smile:

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We are way off topic now, but to me it seems pretty clear that it’s not @ipsedixit’s burden to teach you (or the person who asked the question) how to stir-fry.

There is plenty of instruction available for that elsewhere, and expecting an explanation of what it means to stir-fry when you ask “so how do you make your fried rice?” seems a bit much.

Me too :rofl:

But in this case, I’d say it’s really not elitism or overconfidence (some brash word usage aside), but by habit – because it’s the only way some (a lot?) of people know how to cook (maybe there’s a culture of how one learned to cook – not culture as in country, though that plays in, just methodology of learning).

(Off-topic but related, in a parallel conversation on the good/bad recipe thread right now there are people talking about how “modern” recipes “should” be written and also how cooks everywhere learn to cook from recipes with weights… except that might exclude everywhere but the US and Europe…)

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This one? I didn’t notice that!

ETA you are right; “there are people”.

My first “lessons” were from The Galloping Gourmet, and Gourmet magazine, I consider myself a a middlin’ scientist AND a middlin’ cook, I use tsp and Tbs, ounces, and “cups”, but I also love my scale that lets me zero out each ingredient by weight.

Yeah, the Selectric! After that, I graduated to the Brother word processor. The Selectric was fascinating, though. That ball could really move.

I know some people just ask to kiss ass. Dass okay, tho, cuz kissin’ ass is polite, if disingenuine. The friends I know who would make it, I’ll fill them in on deets.



Too funny! I was re-working our “work-out room” (got a second-hand home gym for my son) and one of the old boxes down there held our 30 year old “Brother” word processor!

I didn’t bother trying to plug it in to see if it would still fire up. I should have, but instead I just pitched it in the garbage. I was too busy dismantling another 1996 relic - a Nordic Track “Ellipse” elliptical runner that had slipped a cam 3 years ago.

Good Lord that took a while to break down. What engineer in their right mind specs all of these?

  • T40 Torx
  • T30 Torx
  • T27 Torx (kind of hard to find)
  • T 35 Torx (super hard to find!)
  • 9/16 bolts
  • 5/8 bolts
  • 1/2 bolts
  • 9 mm bolts
  • 11 mm bolts
  • 13 mm bolts
  • Multiple SAE Hex heads, plus multiple metric hex heads