Full disclosure: I love to read cookbooks, but I read them for insights and ideas. I very rarely use or follow actual recipes, and when I do I often alter them as I go.
I grew up in a household of superb cooks. My parents’ recipes are ingredient lists on index cards. It was assumed you knew to cream the butter and sugar, macerate the fruit, fold the wet and dry ingredients, and steam rather than bake the Christmas pudding, and for how long.
I am not talking about the food that the recipe instructs you how to make. I am talking about the structure of the recipe itself. I generally dislike recipes that require you to refer to multiple other recipes to make a single dish. Escoffier is, at least to me, a leading example of this. It refers you to multiple sub-recipes to make fairly straightforward dishes, meaning that if you try to follow one, you really need to use several bookmarks or get tipsy enough to not care. I am not wild about recipes that have a page or more enumerating dozens of steps unless there is some sort of an overview, including the ingredients, at the outset. I am undecided about ingredient lists. Sometimes the ingredients are broken out, such as for the marinade, for the main dish, for the sauce, for the garnish. Sometimes it just lists them once but indicates, usually in parentheses or in a separate phrase or clause, something like “1 1/4 cups of x, reserving 1/8 of a cup for the sauce.”
To me the big differentiators between the recipes I generally like and others are three things.
- I love introductions that provide comments such as history, ideas for accompaniments, and descriptors.
- I like recipes that include technique, especially if the technique employed is critical to success (or failure, if not followed meticulously).
- I like photos. Gorgeous photos of finished dishes suck me in. I also like well done technique photos or drawings. Poorly done ones are a big disappointment.
Timing often gets glossed over. If a dish starts with something that needs to be done well in advance, please say so. Say “This requires three days” or whatever, up front. Ever buy the ingredients for a dish that sounded great and find out too late that you just started tomorrow’s dinner, but the guests are coming in six hours?
Here 's one on which I could go either way. I have a well worn cheese soufflé recipe (Craig Claiborne, original NYT) that my wife and I make together, me getting to shred Cheddar cheese, butter the Charlotte mold, coat it in finely grated Parmigiana-Reggiano, and beat egg whites. The recipe walks you through melting butter, making a roux, making a Béchamel, and adding the cheese to make a Mornay. I could be fine with “make a pint of Mornay,” but I see the value to a wider audience in providing the step-by-step. Just don’t say "make the Mornay on page 23 or, worse still, make the Béchamel on page 22, and the Mornay variation on page 23.
Lastly, I have a few thoughts on ingredients. When the use of a specific ingredient is essential, it needs to be highlighted. I find this is especially true of salt. A given volume of Duamond Crystal, Morton’s kosher, and regular Morton’s will have a wide range of densities and yield very different results. I also love suggested variations. For certain uses like gratins my Béchamel will have the classic nutmeg, and for a cheese soufflé I use a healthy squirt of Sriracha instead.
What else lights you up or tweaks you in a recipe?
Funny!
