Why Recipes Are Evil!

Evil might be a bit strong, but unless you understand how to cook, following recipes is a path to nowhere. When I decided I really wanted to learn to cook I started out by buying a couple of good cookbooks and working my way through the recipes. I must have prepared hundreds of recipes and learned nothing.

A recipe tell you how to approximate a dish that someone else has put together. It does not tell you why you are doing what you are doing and they rarely give you any clue as to what you should be expecting. When you are done it is not even possible to know if what you have created tastes at all the same as what the person who created the recipe created.

The way a skilled home cook and an amateur look at a recipe is completely different. A novice looks at a recipe as a set of instruction used to recreate a dish. A skilled home cook looks at a recipe as a source of ideas, perhaps a set of suggestions for something new; occasionally as a means of recollecting some of the specifics of a dish. If you looks at recipes written down by skilled cooks, they look nothing at all like you would find in a cookbook. It may list a couple of key ingredients or perhaps a twist on the recipe, a cooking temperature and time. It will also likely list the different results of repeated trials of the recipe with slight changes each time it is made. A recipe does not have to be written in stone, it should live and breathe, change and develop over time.

This realization was an important step for me in learning my way around food. A recipe is no more than an idea for a dish, waiting to be made your own.