Food... glorious food
Recently USA Today had a short piece which sounded like a lament on the passing of the recipe from people's hands, or perhaps more accurately the replacement of food in people's lives with sandwiches.
The saying goes "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach". As far as sayings go I'd estimate this is probably one of the more accurate ones out there. (I think that I've fallen in love with cumin by the way). All the more reason thus for stubborn bachelors like I to learn to cook.
I still resort to recipes relatively often, yet I wonder if recipes are more accurately a trap rather than a treasure. Here's what Alton Brown has to say: (He's host of Good Eats - watch an episode if you've never seen the show)
Let's say I invite you to lunch. You've never been to my house so you ask for directions. I fax you a very precise list of instructions designed to get you where you're going. Distances are calculated to the tenth of a mile and landmarks are described in Proustian detail. You arrive without a hitch.
But do you know where you are? If a tree had fallen in the road or a road suddenly closed, would you know what to do? Unless you have a global positioning system in your pocket, I'm eating lunch alone.
If only I'd sent you a map instead.
This is what's wrong with recipes. Sure, they can get us where we're going, but that doesn't mean we know where we are when we get there. And it would be a real shame to make it all the way to a souffle without realizing that scrambled eggs are just over the next hill and meringue's just around the corner.
Do you have to know how to scramble an egg before you can make a souffle or how to sear a steak to make a beef stew? No. A halfway decent recipe can get you to either of those destinations. But unless you understand where you are and how you got there, you're a hostage. And it's hard to have fun when you're a hostage.
It's been interesting doing a little exploring, even if I'm still a bit trapped. It's been interesting digging into related topics such as globalization and food, or now a book that seems to provide a history of nutrition science and food politics.