The kitchen, meaning the global one that is us all, is divided into those who do and those who adamantly do not.
The Harris kitchen in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side is divided. Deeply. Beth, lawyer, wife, mother of three, indisputably does. Duncan, lawyer, husband, father of same three, and the guy who does most of the cooking, definitely, undeniably, without doubt, does not.
Follow recipes, that is.
Case in point: “Just the other day,” Beth says, “I was making my salad dressing–you know how everyone has their dressing, the same one they make all the time? I’m standing there following along on my index card, and Duncan says, ‘What are you doing? You’ve been making that same thing for years. Why are you reading the recipe? You know it by heart!'”
Duncan has been a proponent of the Winging It school of cookery since his college days, when he had two variations on pasta: pasta with mayonnaise or pasta with ketchup. But his reasons for not being “a slave to recipes” have changed a bit.
“Now that I’m wearing glasses, I have to take ’em off, put ’em back on,” he says. “I can’t find where I am in the recipe, everything is so little and precise. I can never keep track of the big ‘T’ and the little ‘t,’ whether it’s a tablespoon or a teaspoon; I can’t find where that measuring cup went; the spices look all the same anyway, I always get them mixed up.
“Life, to me, is not conducive to following recipes.”
Case closed, counselor.
But the recipe file is not.
Here at the dawn of a new century and millennium, armchair anthropologists find that the recipe box is a rich place to rifle. We can see what our recipes say about who we were as a people and who we’ve become, especially in the last quarter century, when the chance that we’ve sat down to a home-cooked meal any night of the week has dwindled.
And if recipes are a measure of who we are as a nation, a culture, a people who eat, then where we are is afraid, overwhelmed and anywhere but in the kitchen.
Our grandmothers might have owned, oh, maybe one cookbook. Maybe they had one or two recipes scribbled out on a little card, maybe for the fudge cake they made for company, maybe for that batch of holiday cookies the little ones couldn’t live without.
Now we have shelves and shelves of cookbooks. We might even read them like novels, cover to cover, marking our place along the way. But we have no one whose shoulder we lean over, no one giving us tastes along the way, so we can refine our palates and know when there’s just a tad too much salt or not quite enough vinegar.
The best recipes today, say those who write them, cook from them, teach from them, aren’t simply the ones you can trust to lead from 2 1/2 cups flour, sifted, to a fine angel food on your cake plate. No, the best are the ones that make you feel that you’re not alone as you cook.
“Recipes are very important because people today don’t have a role model in the kitchen,” says Pam Anderson, former executive editor of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and author of “The Perfect Recipe” and “How to Cook Without a Book.”
“They need more than the list of ingredients. They need that little voice guiding them. They need a little education.”
So the irony is this: The less we cook, the more we need recipes. And the more we need them, the more likely we are to be overwhelmed by all but the most precisely written.
For the legions of cookbook writers out there, that poses some sticky issues that would be hilarious if they weren’t so pathetic in what they say about our, um, kitchen no-how.
Cookbook legend Marion Cunningham, the author picked to revise “The Original Fannie Farmer Cook Book” that first appeared in 1896 and launched a nation of housewives into the precise world of level tablespoons and teaspoons, never ceases to be amazed at just how flummoxed Americans can be in the kitchen.
She can pull comic tales from her vast apron pockets. Like the one about a young friend who, when he read that the apple slices were to be tossed in a bowl, set the bowl across the kitchen and threw from the cutting board. Or the acquaintance who exhausted herself going from store to store in search of “soft butter” because the recipe called for it.
Despite the pitfalls, Cunningham, now 80 and a professed “boring preacher” in her crusade to forge civilization through the sharing of food, is convinced that “you can get better results from a good recipe than from winging it.”
You have to develop a critical palate before you can trust yourself to improvise successfully, she says. And most of us have nothing close. Until you reach that level, “a recipe can guide you.”
The opposing view
Even if would-be cooks shouldn’t be making culinary leaps without parachutes, Sally Schneider, author of the 2001 book “A New Way to Cook,” implores people to loosen the recipe ropes.
“Recipes are great guides; that’s really what they’re meant to be,” she says. “In this country there’s a real fear; people stick to them religiously.” Schneider, who grew up hanging out in the kitchen, says she spent 10 years on her book so that virgin cooks might come to understand the possibilities and the thinking behind food and thus feel liberated rather than constrained by ingredient lists and the step-by-steps.
“Recipes, I feel, have become more formulas for people rather than ways to understand food,” she says. “They reflect a disconnection with cooking. Few people grew up with a mom cooking and teaching you.
“People are a little bit more timid in the kitchen. They have very sophisticated taste but they don’t have a global sense of food.”
What she set out to do in her behemoth of a book (4 pounds, 739 pages) was to give an approach rather than a recipe. Instead of a step-by-step formula for, say, basil oil, she lays out a “template for improvisation,” she says, in this case teaching how to make an oil flavored with any soft-leaf herb. The cook walks away, she hopes, with an understanding of how to apply an idea and with the ability to gradually stack variation upon variation to come up with something complex and, as she puts it, “chefly.”
Last night, only 48.9 percent of us sat down to dinners in which at least one of the dishes was “assembled,” a term that takes into account anything from a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich to a home-baked lemon meringue pie, according to Harry Balzer, vice president at NPD Group, a market research firm in Park Ridge.
The way to the table
Even Anderson, a woman who grew up in a Southern family “where cooking and eating were second nature,” who has tested recipes for a living, runs into the same wall that separates so many Americans from their kitchens: She has no time for recipes.
A woman with two children and a full-time job, “I would come home at night, after having tested recipes and written recipes all day, it’d be 6 or 6:30, and I’d open the refrigerator door and I’d just stare.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to cook,” she says. “I could fry a chicken by myself at [age] 10, but the cooking I’d grown up with didn’t fit my lifestyle. I needed to develop a new set of techniques and formulas, just like my mom had, so that you’re not recipe dependent.
“Because, in fact,” says the recipe writer, “I think recipes are a hindrance, a stumbling block to weeknight cooking.” Recipes can even get in the way of the more important goal: having everyone around the table, eating, yes, but talking and sharing too.
“The table is really powerful,” Anderson says. “The food is simply the prop around which people experience the most basic experience, the most powerful experience.
“People make memories around the table.”
As American as `pompion’ pie
Believe it or not, there are recipes older than your grandmother’s.
They date all the way back to one for braised turnips from ancient Mesopotamia, and another one for beer from ancient Babylonia. A seven-volume set, “The Philosophers at Dinner,” describes a single banquet in A.D. 250. (And you thought today’s foodies went overboard.)
The Renaissance, followed by the printing press in the mid-15th Century, unleashed a great flood of books of cookery for the common people.
Before that, only the wealthy could look into a hand-lettered manuscript for, say, stuffed pheasant stew with quail chaser, says Jan Longone, proprietress of the Wine and Food Library in Ann Arbor, Mich., the oldest antiquarian cookbook shop in the country. Longone also is the curator of American culinary history at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.
The first printed cookbook was published in Rome in 1474 by a chap who used the pen name Platina, Longone says; he called his work “De Honesta Voluptate,” meaning, essentially, “living a good life.”
“It was half recipes, half how to live a good life,” Longone says, “written by someone at the Vatican. The man who wrote the recipes was a famous Renaissance chef who cooked for kings and popes,” making it the first book that included recipes by a professional chef. “After that, doctors wrote cookbooks, literary men wrote cookbooks, housewives wrote cookbooks.”
In 1742, the first cookbook was published in America, but like all that followed in the next 50 years, it was merely an English book that was reprinted here.
Amelia Simmons, a young woman from the Northeast, changed that in 1796 by writing the first American cookbook, saying she was writing for Americans using foods indigenous to the New World. She included five corn recipes. She suggested serving roast turkey with a cranberry sauce, and she included a yummy recipe for something she called “pompion pie,” a.k.a. pumpkin pie.
“You could serve your Thanksgiving dinner from the first American cookbook,” Longone says.
In the beginning of American cookbookery, recipes didn’t list ingredients at the top. You more or less stumbled your way through blocks of text, discovering midway, perhaps, that you needed five hen’s eggs in your batter.
The Civil War put the country on a more serious recipe track, says Longone, who points to four major changes that followed.
Women began organizing to do charity work, and one of the great fundraisers, then as now, was the charity cookbook. Longone knows of at least 6,000 charity cookbooks published in the U.S. between the 1860s and 1915, “and my suspicion is that number could be doubled again.”
With the dawn of the Industrial Age, companies began advertising their products with recipes. The Kellogg’s and Jell-O’s of the world, Longone says, “began to issue millions of culinary ephemera,” the little pamphlets that promised 101 Jell-O salads, or, thank heavens, Rice Krispie treats.
The Civil War also prompted a cooking school movement, as women whose husbands were away at war looked for ways to make money.
Fannie Farmer, the once sickly daughter of a Boston family, is the most famous of these cooking school mavens. She has a reputation–not wholly deserved–as the mother of level measurements. Longone argues that since measuring spoons and cups were manufactured before Farmer’s cookbook of 1896, she can’t truly be the first to espouse the practice. But her cookbook did do away with the previously casual suggestions to “use a teacup” or “one wineglass.”
But it was the launching of so many women’s magazines around the turn of the century, with their serious devotion to recipes, that cemented this country’s step-by-step kitchen approach.
“Recipes absolutely became part of our lives,” Longone says.
–Barbara Mahany
The old and the new
Recipe writing has changed dramatically through the decades. Here’s a comparison of recipes from the original Fannie Farmer book and the revised book 100 years later. Each of them turns out a homey, delicious but very different chicken pot pie.
Chicken pie
– From “The Original Boston Cooking-School Cookbook” (first edition, 1896), by Fannie Merritt Farmer.
“Dress, clean and cut up two fowls or chickens. Put in a stewpan with one-half onion, sprig of parsley, and bit of bay leaf; cover with boiling water and cook slowly until tender. When chicken is half cooked, add one-half tablespoon salt and one-eight teaspoon pepper. Remove chicken, strain stock, skim off fat, and then cook until reduced to four cups. Thicken stock with one-third cup flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Place a small cup in center of baking-dish; arrange around it pieces of chicken, removing some of the larger bones; pour over gravy, and cool. Cover with pie crust in which several incisions have been made that there may be an outlet for escape of steam and gases. Wet edge of crust and put around a rim, having rim come close to edge. Bake in moderate oven until crust is well risen and browned. Roll remnants of pastry and cut in diamond-shaped pieces, bake, and serve with pie when reheated. If puff paste is used, it is best to bake top separately.”
Chicken pie
From “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook” (13th edition, 1996), by Marion Cunningham.
6 tablespoons butter
6 tablespoons flour
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Salt
4 cups large chunks of cooked chicken
12 small white onions, cooked
3/4 cup peas, cooked
1/4 cup carrots, cooked
1/4 cup celery, cooked
1 recipe basic pastry for 9-inch shell
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Slowly add the broth, cream, pepper and salt to taste. Cook for 5 minutes, until thickened and smooth. Put the chicken pieces in a deep pie plate or casserole, cover with sauce, and stir in the small onions, peas, carrots, and celery. Place the prepared pie crust over the casserole, allowing enough overhang so that edges can be crimped. Cut vents in the crust to allow the steam to escape. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned.
