On Recipes

Teaching to cook solely by using recipes is like teaching a language using only a phrase book.

Phrase books are useful and will help you get by, but will only give a rudimentary understanding and appreciation of a language at best.

Technique is to cooking as grammar is to language. It has rules and concepts and provides foundation and structure. It requires effort to learn and understand, but once you have these foundations, the doors open up to exploration and expression.

Produce and ingredients function as vocabulary.

You start with a few easy and familiar ones... And you spend the rest of your life encountering, experiencing and learning how to use new ones. Some you may abhor, some you may become infatuated with for a short period of time, and some will grow on you with time.

Ingredients are intricately tied with place and memory.

Food, assembled dishes, are sentences.

They are paragraphs; and poems; and novels.

They are limericks, epic love stories, mysteries and dad puns.

They are an expression of time, place, person and context.

They tug at our heartstrings, evoke nostalgia (sometimes bittersweet) and remind us of specific people in particular places in time.

Recipes, as with phrase books, are good introductions and guides into the world of cooking.

But our reliance on them is stopping us from fully grasping how much we can gain from occasionally putting them aside to try and understand the grammar and vocabulary of cooking itself.