The Online Photographer

A comment from a few days ago. I don't know how valuable Pete's insight might be to cooks, but it was enlightening for me as a non-cook.

psu: "A few notes that turned into a long rumination.

"There have been a few recent cookbooks that concentrate on technique rather than recipe much like good darkroom books concentrate on technique and process rather than a rote combination of steps to take blank film to pictures.

"One such was Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat which ultimately gives in and gives you recipes for things. Another was Julia Child's last book, The Way To Cook, which is broken up into many different categories, with master techniques for each kind of food.

"For me, Chinese food has always been organized this way, which is nice because you only have to learn one 'recipe' for a wide range of dishes...which is why those Chinese takeout menus always have hundreds of dishes on them.

"I think people who like cooking and cook a lot inherently get into a state where they don't really need recipes for most things, and also have most of the ingredients they use a lot on hand and don't need to worry about the cost/waste of obtaining them just to cook one thing.

"I think the hardest thing for cooks to understand is that people who don't cook don't end up in this kind of state. And the hardest thing for people who don't cook to understand is that when people who cook say something like 'oh, that's an easy dish, you just X, Y, Z, W,' there are a lot of assumptions in there about the state of your world that the cook is making that might not be true.

"For me most recipes are too complicated and fussy because they are trying to ride a line between the enthusiasts and the not interested/beginner, and so tend to have too much information for the former group and not enough for the latter, while also giving everyone too much work to do and too many ingredients to buy. Almost everything in the NYT is this way in my experience.

"Ultimately, really, the secret to getting good at cooking is the following very unsatisfying piece of advice: you have to cook a lot. Then you'll get good at it. But that's hardly helpful for people without the interest.

"I have occasionally been guilty of unfairly making fun of people who don't like to cook for not liking to cook and for complaining about recipes. It's one life regret that I have. I should have known better.

"Also, random notes from skimming the comments: Peruvian food knows how to make quinoa delicious. Interestingly there is also a fantastic genre of Peruvian/Chinese crossover food that is incredible.

"Parboil just means to drop the thing in boiling water for a small amount of time so that it soaks a bit of the water in but doesn't actually cook. In my humble opinion vegetables taste better this way than raw or overcooked. A lot of Chinese vegetable dishes are really just lightly steamed/parboiled. That's why they are better than both raw vegetables (salad) and other vegetable dishes that cook the vegetables to death."

Thanks to Pete and the rest of our excellent Commentariat!

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

psu: "Wow. Thanks for the shout out. This humble commenter is flattered and humbled. 🙂 "

Moose: "Re 'For me most recipes are too complicated and fussy because they are trying to ride a line between the enthusiasts and the not interested/beginner'.... Also, in the case of ATK and other generalist sites, they lean toward bland, perhaps fearful of offending and losing folks with old-style 'Midwestern' tastes. I always up the garlic, aromatics, etc.

"There's something else, too. I can't speak for all of us who have been home cooks forever, but I'll bet a lot are like me. I can usually "taste" in my mind how different things will go together. During a period when I was cooking for two adults and three tween to teens. I thought much of the best I did was made up from combining leftovers. I can read a recipe and see how I may alter it to my tastes. Not much use to you, Mike, except to know that other folks have different skills, and thus different experiences."