How to cut an onion? Let me count the ways. I can chop, slice, segment, sliver or dice. I can cut finely, coarsely or roughly. But how thick is a wedge? How many millimetres make a crescent? Are they the shape of the new moon or the top half of this question mark? Its enough to make your eyes water. Until I came to write my first recipe, it seemed an easy enough business, but the gentle art of recipe writing is a potential minefield of ambiguity and confusion. Its something cooks have doubtless wrestled with since recipes were inscribed on baked clay tablets in ancient Egypt.
The world tends to divide into two: those for whom recipes are mere suggestions or guidelines. And those who unswervingly follow instructions as if they were sat nav systems. Personally, having sweated over the difference between rolling boil and lively simmer on the readers behalf, Id like to request they follow the recipe as written, if but once. At the same time, I issue a disclaimer: if it smells like its burning, then it probably is.
Early instructions, however, were aimed at fellow professionals; it was implicit they knew quantities, timings or techniques when instructed to clean a womb from a sterile cow, roll in bran, lightly grill and serve with liquamen, pepper and spiced wine.
For centuries, most recipes were either aide-memoires for skilled cooks, complicated records of a masterly career or linked with medicinal lore in courtly or manorial manuscripts. One of the earliest printed books was The Boke of Kervynge (1508) which includes glorious carving commands such as Thigh That Pigeon and Disfigure That Peacock.
The recipe book as utilitarian manual really took off in 1747 with The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse. The recipes, albeit largely plagiarised, are written in everyday language for simple souls. Elizabeth Raffald also tried to write in good, plain English, not glossed over with hard Names or Words of high Stile.
By the 19th century, cookbooks had morphed into compendia of household management. Order replaced hazy estimation. Dr William Kitchiner in The Cooks Oracle (1816) bade farewell to the rule of thumb and gave exact measurements, as well as their order of use. He also boasted, The Author has submitted to a labour no preceding Cookery-book-maker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter having eaten each Receipt before he set it down in his book.
Kitchiners ideas were developed by Soyer who stated, all quantities be precisely and explicitly stated, and by Eliza Acton who introduced an ingredients list after the recipe. Mrs Beeton adopted this idea (and recipes) and ran with it, placing it before the method. She added a systematic rubric: mode, time, average cost, number served and seasonality in a format that still works today.
MFK Fisher concurred in An Anatomy of a Recipe (1968), A recipe is supposed to be a formula, a means prescribed for producing a desired result, whether that be an atomic weapon, a well-trained Pekinese, or an omelette, and was rather scathing about charming kitchen talk and the uninhibited school of modern gastronomical chitchat.
In the late 70s, the home economics school of recipe writing shaped the mass market. Former magazine editor Rosemary Stark recalls ferocious women at Readers Digest who measured salt to an eighth of a teaspoon and did their recipes in numbered steps. Taken to extreme, as Elizabeth David pointed out, this prescriptive approach would result in knowing the altitude at which you are cooking.
By contrast, X. Marcel Boulestin was firmly of the view cookery is not chemistry. In 1931, he wrote The dangerous person in the kitchen is the one who goes rigidly by weights, measurements, thermometers and scales. More recently, in How To Cook Without Recipes, Glynn Christian argues that following a recipe exactly, even one of your own, is a guarantee of bad food.
The drizzle n dollop approach both seduces and torments the ethnic recipe hunter-gatherer. It may be the authentic voice of the cook, but is a spoonful a measure of intuition, superstition or mere whim? By the end of the Sicilian field research for my first book, I was pondering pinches, weighing fistfuls and frequently boiling my head.
Elizabeth David understood, of course, the happy medium and, like her heroine Eliza Acton, was both illuminating and concise, never omitting the tiny detail that makes all the difference. In the hands of other literary exemplars such as Jane Grigson, Patience Gray and Norman Douglas, a recipe can also be a work of art. In his account of the Feast of the Three Fishermen of Calafell (1969), Irving Davis memorably instructs the reader to first fly to Barcelona, travel south, find a fisherman and choose the fish as it is landed.
Such exquisite intellectualism contrasts with a more socially aspirational genre. Sir Kenelm Digby mischievously chronicled lifestyles of the rich and famous, and the 18th century, Royal Cookery was a must-read for society gossip, offering dishes for which neither time nor expense were spared.
Cheffy complexity and extravagance, though, was nothing new. Epulario in 1598 gave instructions for pies filled with live birds. In the following century Robert May depicted banquets with paste ships, flags, guns, exploding castles, claret-filled stags pierced with arrows and perfumed blown eggs: Let the Ladies take the egg shells full of rosewater and throw them at each other. Escoffier even choreographed his waiters in a magnificent fin-de-siecle chicken, ortotlan, truffle and foie gras recipe.
Although chefs recipes are now ubiquitous, Rosemary Stark is critical: Chef-scholars apart, often its sheer grandstanding. Their methodology is different, everything is prepped for them so they refer to spoonfuls not numbers of carrots, ovens are hotter, they use multiple pans or heat the oven to finish steak for five minutes. Many celeb recipes wont work unless they have great editors or support teams.
But the question still stands as to what makes a recipe good or bad, whatever its context. According to Stark, recipes should make you want to dash into the kitchen, They should be enticing without ever compromising accuracy, clarity and simplicity.
Poor recipes are muddling or careless ingredients used must actually be listed or, if listed, used (yes, really), and the reader never ambushed by a surprise instruction to whip the egg whites whilst frying the potatoes. Details really matter, says Stark. Spot the difference between 500g apples, peeled, quartered and cored, and 500g peeled, quartered and cored apples. It matters about a quarter of the weight.
Stark is also eagle-eyed on lazy writing. I dont like season to taste how else would you do it? And serve with a crisp, fresh salad as opposed to a limp, stale one? I cant bear words such as crispy, crunchy and tasty. And pan-fried is hateful! What else would you fry it in? A kettle?
In 1844, Nathanial Hawthorne, forced to do his own cooking, wrote about the author of The Good Housekeeper: The corned beef is exquisitely done, and as tender as a young ladys heart, all owing to my skilful cookery; for I consulted Sarah Hales cookbook at every step, and precisely followed her directions. No recipe writer could receive greater praise.
The Gentle Art of Recipe Writing
Financial Times (2009)
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