Ruminations on Recipes and Cooking

My grandmother and me

If there is one lesson that I learned from my grandmother, it's that recipes are always negotiable; they're more suggestions than an actual step-by-step approach.  That means that every time, it comes out a little bit different.  And it also means a lot of frustration when you are learning how to cook.

I didn't actually attempt to "cook" anything until I was in graduate school. Up until that point, I made things like macaroni and cheese, or frozen meals, or instant rice, and canned vegetables.  But part of me yearned for something more...something better...something that I actually made.

I started to look for simple recipes, and I managed to create some good concoctions. But as an Italian girl, I longed for the food that I would get at home. Good Italian, home-cooked meals. With lots of carbs.  So I would ask my grandmother.  This wasn't helpful.

The problem is that my grandmother doesn't cook with recipes.  Old Italian women don't follow a recipe...they just know how to make it.  Here's how it works.  Basically, she lists out ingredients, but doesn't give amounts. It's not "a teaspoon of basil" or something. It's more like ""basil...get the taste you want."  My problem was always that I didn't know how to get the taste I wanted...I wanted it to taste the same as my grandmother's cooking. 

The famous (infamous?) apple pie of Spring Break 2010.

Consequently, many of my graduate school attempts were complete failures.  But there was one day, over Spring Break, my second year of graduate school, that I think changed everything.  I decided to be culinarily adventurous (yes, I'm making culinarily a word). I decided to bake an apple pie. I followed the recipe perfectly for the dough. It didn't come out at all what I thought it should taste like, so I kept adding sugar, and flour, and water, and a pinch more of salt. Until I finally got it...I had so far completely deviated from the recipe that it was impossible to recollect what I put into the dough.

It was then that I understood how my grandmother cooks...it's not the food that makes a meal magical, it's the chef that infuses the spirit into the food.  This way of cooking, by taste, by instinct...it's become one of the things that I love most about cooking.  Creativity is not just in the presentation, it's in the way you personalize a recipe. 

There's a quote that I love: "A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe." (Thomas Keller)

Bringing soul to the recipe: this is how I have learned to cook. I look at a basic recipe, and then I always manage to tweak it. I rarely follow one strictly; a recipe is more like a guideline, a basic suggestion.  What you do with it, how you change it, how you make it your own...well, that's up to you.