I dare say that both my wife and I are competent cooks. Still, over the years the responsibility for putting that skill to work in the service of weekday dinners has shifted. When the kids were growing up and I was more out and about working, it mainly rested on my wife's shoulders. I would pitch in when I could, but the onus of getting a family meal on the table on school nights fell mostly in her lap. That continued even after the boys moved on, since my projects usually required me to be away for longer hours than her work, and so it just made sense that she still handled the lion's share of the cooking. The pandemic shifted that, as we were both home all the time, and I started to take on more of the load. More recently, as I have streamlined my work schedule, the balance has shifted the other way, to where I am the default workaday cook unless circumstances dictate otherwise.
As a person who is very project oriented, cooking fits squarely within that sweet spot. You need a goal, a plan, certain specific elements and a timeline, and off you go. In musical terms it's part classical and part jazz: you have a leader following a score with each piece playing its part, but you gotta be ready to improvise and follow the beat where it leads. Sometimes you make Bach, other times, well, it sounds more like a second grader with a violin
That approach is more the state of play these days because, like everything else, the barrier to entry is non-existent for both chefs and recipes. In the past you might have learned from your mother or an experienced cook, while recipes were tried and tested, handed down over generations and/or collected in tomes like "The Joy of Cooking." Now food influencers range from an experienced chef such as Gordan Ramsey with millions of followers, to a pay-to-play content creator such as Lorenza Nicholas from South Africa who charges $50 for a post promoting a product. Meanwhile punch in "apple pie recipe" to Google, and you get 241 million results, including ones that don't even use an apple. You better be ready to pivot as the butter sizzles.
Still, since good ideas can come from everywhere, I keep a running file of recipes from multiple publications and platforms. But the more you read, the more discerning you get, and the more discerning you get, the more you realize that most recipes are lying to you. They promise easy, fast and effortless when they are anything but. Or as Christopher Kimball, who created the PBS shows "America's Test Kitchen" and "Cook's Country" put it, "A recipe is a vague suggestion about how to do something. If you had the proper ingredients at the proper temperature, the proper cookware, you've read the recipe and you have enough time." The bottom line? "Cooking times and recipes are utterly totally worthless."
You get that if you read the comments. It's a great recipe if you substitute this, replace that, use a smaller pan, use a bigger pan, increase the temperature, decrease the temperature, cook it longer, cook it shorter. By the time you get even part way through, the caveats outweigh the original instructions. It's back to the musical metaphor: yes, there's chicken and onions and spices and a pan, but it's just a starting point. That casserole you make was never one that Beethoven had in mind.
Perhaps no better example exists than Sam Sifton's "No-Recipes Recipes Cookbook." In it, the founding editor of New York Times offers more than a hundred recipes that contain a list of ingredients without specifying amounts, and some general guidance on cooking. For instance, one includes the instruction "Make rice, as you do." Another says "Add a couple big glugs of milk and a couple drops of maple syrup." The point being: do what feels right.
It's a place to start, but you gotta start somewhere. For me, that generally means picking recipes based around what we have in the house that has been around the longest. I will open the freezer and see what has the oldest date, see what vegetables in the fridge are starting to lose their luster, and off I go. Tonight could be a shrimp and broccoli stir fry with lemon, or a white chicken chili. Should I set you a place?
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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves play around with recipes. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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