AN ARGUMENT AGAINST RECIPES

I am not much of a "recipes" person. Sure, it's fun to flip through my sister's cookbooks or the odd food magazine for ideas... most of which I never use. And there are certain cases in which a detailed recipe is indispensable, for example, when baking a fancy cake I've never actually tasted before. In that case I do lug out my batter-splattered Cake Bible (Rose Levy Beranbaum = National Hero), crack the already-broken spine, and dutifully do what I'm told.

For the most part though I feel that formal recipes appeal to the same voyeuristic impulses as the Food Network: they allow us to imagine, in vivid detail, the context in which a delicious dish is prepared and eaten, the very world inhabited by someone else's senses. By assuring a uniformity of product, they assure a partial uniformity of experience.

Thus I find expansive, formal recipes— and the glossy, mass-produced publications they come from— entirely optional. They exist for the benefit of home-cooks-in-training, or wannabe gourmets who don't yet have ideas of their own. (That's not meant as an insult, by the way.) Perhaps more importantly, they allow the accomplished cooks and chefs who write them to earn a living like the rest of us, or at least eat some tasty stuff while trying. These are all honorable pursuits but not really my cup of chocolate.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against voyeuristic impulses and test-kitchen-assured deliciousness. That's all very nice. But does it really teach us anything about food? Does it really teach us how to cook?

I'm partial instead to the directives one finds scribbled one the back of a paper napkin, possibly lacking measurements, perhaps detailed in some ways but obtuse in others; to put it another way, I prefer vague formulas to stepped-out instructions. For example, when my grandmother decided to cease production of her epic Christmas fruitcake several years ago (she was 85 at the time, and I suspect she had started to find the cakes too heavy to lift), I asked her to tell me how she made it. So she furnished, in her shaky 85-year-old's hand, an index card onto which she had summed up a process which I knew to take DAYS in exactly 14 words. It's not that she's a smith of such precision, my grandma. No, she just left a whole lot of stuff out.

I like that. It has become my model for writing recipes. This approach allows — or perhaps forces— the person using the scribbled formula to a) actually know something about cooking and b) interpret a little. For example, my grandmother always used candied citron and lime peel in her fruitcake, those oversweetened, neon-dyed bits one sees at the supermarket each holiday season with a texture vaguely remniscent of shoe leather. Well as it turns out, pretty much no one on the planet likes that stuff. It doesn't't taste anything like fruit, for one, and it's also a choking hazard. However, my grandmother's recipe says only "pound dried fruit." So when I make fruitcake, I use a mixture of rum-soaked raisins, apricots, and dried cherries instead. Intoxicating. I know I'm not making my grandmother's fruitcake when I do it that way, and yet, I sort-of am. We could debate it around our Christmas dinnertable if anyone other than me actually liked and ate fruitcake.

Even better, next time I make the fruitcake I could substitute a different kind of dried fruit entirely. How about currants? Or dried persimmons, with a heavy dose of cinnamon? The result would be totally different, and my own, and possibly revolutionary! Of course it could also be horrific. But there would never be a record of that, since the recipe was never dictated persimmon to begin with. I would simply dump it in the garbage and try, try to forget.

Don't all good cooks take other people's recipes and adapt them anyway, you say? What's the point of actually constructing recipes in a different, condensed form, rather than following the age-old tradition of writing the exact steps and letting the reader do what he or she pleases with them?

For one thing, even if I do make the same dish twice I'm not going to make it the same way twice, whether it'mine or anyone else's. I used to deal with this by manually editing published recipes from cookbooks and magazines using proofreading marks, so that later I'd be able to easily identify which steps and and ingredients were extraneous and where I could innovate. But then I lived in fear of other people finding my marks and realizing, well, what an OCD freak I really am. And the resulting recipes were not really recipes, what with all the crossouts and margin notes. They were formulas, and they didn't belong to the author anymore; they belonged to me.

For another, I do not personally like writing detailed recipes any more than I like using them. I intend to, sure. When I concoct something particularly tasty I scribble my notes onto some errant scrap with the intention of transcribing later, in greater detail, for the benefit of others. Which never happens. I'm much more interested in concocting the next new thing. So there it sits, a sparse note among other sparse notes, to be revisited next time I'm brainstorming what to make for dinner. Isn't that good enough?

One advantage to the "formula" model of writing a recipe is that it can emphasize proportions, as opposed to exact measurements, which are far more educational for the home cook in the long run. The first 10 times I tried to made salad dressing at home, for example, I followed the precise directives of a favorite salad expert (Deborah Madison = Vegetable Genius), and to good effect... but could I have reproduced said salad dressings without looking back at Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone? No, my memory is not that good. And I was not confident enough to invent something on my own. Then one day it occurred to me (sometimes I'm kinda slow) to actually look at the proportion of lemon juice/vinegar/whatever to oil to other stuff in those recipes, and Eureka! I figured out how to construct a damned good salad dressing, using whatever ingredients available, without consulting anyone ever again.

Which leads me to my point: A good home cook does not need to be told in excruciating detail how to make food taste good. He/she already has ideas about that. All he or she really needs to know are the base components of the dish and how it might be vaguely described to dinner guests. The rest is up to interpretation, whim, and a foundation understanding of ingredients/methods. A simple, short description of how to make a dish is, therefore, all most home cooks really need when learning to make something new.

This works out to about 50 words or less, including some indication of ingredients needed and methods involved, units of measure only when absolutely required; call it a Flash Recipe, a Formula, a Redux, a Tweat; call it a poem if you want.

Anything more is, in a way, garnish.