agonyaunt | Miss Manners: i have no recipe to give

I found this one interesting because I solved LW's quandary in the opposite way. I like to cook and I often make dishes up. Especially when I'm pleased with the results, or going to share the food with others, I write down what I've done. Otherwise I risk never being able to make that perfect dish again and I can tell people what's in it and how I made it if they need or want to know. Doesn't LW ever want to make those Perfect Duck Fat Potatoes again? Or that Citron Raspbery Ripple Sorbet? I do, so I write it down.

(n.b. have not perfected the sorbet yet.)

That's a great idea, but somehow I never think to do it. If people ask me for a recipe for something I made up, I'll usually try to make it again and write down what I did the second time.

One thing LW might try, if there’s room and if they’re not the sort to be territorial about their kitchen, is to invite a loved one in to observe and record; that’s how a lot of foodways have been transcribed to cookbooks from grandmas who tossed in a glug of this and a pinch of that and measured timing in song verses.

Hahahahah you reminded me of the best part of my childhood, hanging out with my maternal grandmotgher, including when she cooked.

Would you be interested in a recipe (as best as I could recall the specifics, a day after the fact) for a soup that I completely ad-libbed for company?

Totally!

In exchange I just posted a little photoessay about a recent cooking adventure.

I LIKE YELLOW THINGS SOUP.

2½ cups water.

1 tablespoon powdered chicken bouillon.

1 tablespoon powdered vegetable bouillon.

1 cup fideo noodles.

1 Opal Apple, diced into 1/4-inch cubes.

4 ounces Bread Cheese, ditto.

Eight large extra-spicy tortilla chips.

Put the bouillon into a 9-inch circular glass microwave dish, and pour in the water to dissolve it; add the solid ingredients; cover the dish and microwave on HIGH for about eight minutes.

3 servings.

The specific brands I used, as a snapshot of the placetime rather than a decree:

Herb-Ox Chicken Bouillon.

Knorr’s Vegetable Bouillon (note, however, that the powdered form seems to have been discontinued, at least in the Anglo-American market.)

Fideo are fine short Mexican noodles—-less than an inch long—-widely used in struggle and comfort cookery; I probably used Moderna brand. Broken angel-hair pasta would do the job, as would any small durum pasta such as stars or alphabets.

Opal is a trademarked (as of 2024) crisp sweet apple cultivar with warm golden-yellow skin, available seasonally in the U.S. and Canada.

Bread Cheese is a type of cheese named not because it contains bread or is any more recommended for sandwiches than any other cheese, but because it’s pressed into a firm rectangular block and grilled, resembling a slice of toast. I’m told pan-fried Halloumi is similar.

Paqui Haunted Ghost Pepper Tortilla Chips; the company has since folded. Those were pretty ferocious to my palette; note that I used them to flavor a fair amount of liquid that also contained fat and dairy.

Backstory infodump begins here.

This improvisation was committed on a wet wintry March 11, 2022 in Dayton, Ohio. A traveling nurse paying me house calls had been working herself into the verge of a nervous breakdown during COVID, and I'd promised her hot soup; these were the leftovers and pantry staples I had at hand to wrangle into a takeout carton, with some left for myself. Whether it was simply the right gesture at the right time may have had some bearing on her reaction, but she raved about the soup and demanded the recipe, claiming that she and her sister-in-law had fought over it. (I personally see potential for improvement; onions, miso, sweet bell peppers, seitan, and chicken could all fit comfortably here.)

(The soup name was inspired by the song-poem “I Like Yellow Things”, written by Tiel Faulkner and performed by Bobbi Blake: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0507/msr5/01_-_Bobbi_Blake_-_I_Like_Yellow_Things.mp3; the topic of song-poems had come up because I’d played my nurse “City’s Hospital Patients”, a salute to health-care workers written by John Kelly and performed by Teri Summers and the Librettos: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/01/023_04_Rod_Rogers_Teri_Summers_and_The_Librettos_-_Citys_Hospital_Patients.mp3

By way of explanation: there used to be mail-order music studios that would run ads in magazines, soliciting readers' poems to set to original music and dangling the tantalizing possibility that you—yes, you could be the next Carole King or Burt Bacharach! In practice, you sent in your lyrics and money, got back copies of your record, and what happened after that was 100% on you.

There was absolutely no editing, and so results ranged from embarrassing to hilarious to bewildering to astonishingly good. No matter how oddball your subject matter, puzzling your thought processes, shoehorned your rhymes, or awkward your scansion, as long as your lyrics came accompanied by $79.99 or however much, the long-suffering studio musicians at the song-poem company would compose a melody and record them, and the return letter would assure you that you had the next potential Top 40 hit! John Trubee, then seventeen, discovered as much when he sent them the following as a Social Experiment: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LR/spam06/28_-_Ramsey_Kearney_-_Peace_and_Love.mp3)

cheers in delight

More comments soon!

LW sounds like they would feel constrained by trying to follow a prior recipe, even if that recipe brought down the house, ended a neighborhood feud, and solved inflation. They're not seeking to create and then reproduce perfection; they're vibing. If they achieve Perfect Duck Fat Potatoes one day, then they're happy about that day; but the next day, they're more interested in exploring something new, not revisiting the past or chasing a perfection that might never recur.

That makes a lot of sense -- I was sussing out the difference in Cooking Philosophy between LW and myself, and I think you've hit on it. I cook by vibes sometimes but I like making note of my discoveries.

Me, I write my "recipes" down in the manner of extremely old "receipts", thus:

Fry some bacon. Pour most of the grease into a jar for later. Add the correct amount of water and dried instant hash browns. Cook for a while. Meanwhile, find the rest of everything in the freezer. Throw in a few vegetables. Season to taste. Five minutes before done, add a generous handful of cheddar cheese. Serve with pickles.

Which, some questions along the lines that my partner (who is not an intuitive cook) might ask:
What temperature are you using? (The correct one)
How much bacon grease do you leave? (enough)
how much water is "correct"? (you'll know)
I forgot to mention that the water needs to be boiling, but surely you know that based on the hash brown carton, and you need to add the Montreal steak seasoning at the hash brown step to remove the cardboard flavor.
How long is "a while"? (until you've found the rest of everything in the freezer, and then a while longer)
What is "the rest of everything" and why does it have to be frozen? (Because it is, not because it has to be.)
Which vegetables? (the correct ones, and you have to wait to add the snap peas until the last 5 minutes or so also)
Which seasonings? Eh, the ones that taste good.
How do you know when it's five minutes away from being done? (when the bubbling sound stops sounding watery and starts sounding crispy/oily)
What pickled vegetables (yes)

But none of those things go into the written recipe! Not unless I actually try to retrace my steps, which takes so much energy. And memory.

This made me cheer aloud. :D

The recipes I write for myself are similarly 15th-century, but (since I like thinking about food) when I think them over and rewrite them for other people I add measurements to the best of my ability. the other day I tested myself on my Ability To Eye An AMount and was pleased to find I was correct to within a half cup (and am equally delighted to mention it to someone who will understand, ahahahahaha)

when I say "a teaspoon of garlic" that's the food service jar of minced garlic, and the "teaspoon" is a long-handled iced tea stirring spoon, heaped three times higher than a basic understanding of physics suggests it should be able to be heaped (it works because the garlic bits are essentially cubes) so the amount is somewhere upwards of a tablespoon :D

laughs in delight and fellow feeling

Oh, you mean the correct amount of garlic!

(My partner is not an intuitive cook. When trying a recipe for the first time, if I disagree with a step, I will do what I think is the best option, or I'll add seasonings or steps it doesn't call for (what do you MEAN you didn't include deglazing with white wine in your chicken soup after sauteing the aromatics and veg, obviously that was an error), and my partner will Follow The Recipe Exactly and, after making it that way approximately ten times, will tentatively make one (1) change.

There's a cooking show we rewatch occasionally, and at one point the cook is like 'how much flour do you use to make this pasta? quanto basta, the right amount!' and they physically growl at the screen.

ahahahahhahahah "and they physically growl at the screen"

The thing about familiarity with food, like any field of study, is that one learns when a change can be minimal and when a change can be catastrophic, but without experience, one doesn't know that, say, adding some chopped parsley won't make the soup explode. I was very lucky to learn to cook as a latch key child so I could experiment freely.

One occasion when I physically growled at the screen: when Food Network first aired Iron Chef Japan in the US, shiso (Perilla frutescens, sometimes known in English as “beefsteak leaf”), was an ingredient unfamiliar to a vast majority of Anglo-diasporic North American viewers.

The original English translation referred to it as “beefsteak tomato leaf”—-a linguistic imprecision that could’ve gotten somebody trying to duplicate the dishes on the show killed!

Oooh yes I would have hollered at the screen for that one. Dangerous mistakes get no passes.

oh, oh nooooooooooooooo

Fortunately, enough viewers squawked for that goof to be corrected in future translations.

One of my favourite 15th century recipe moments was a friend buying a cookbook at a used book store while he was visiting Malaysia, and the first recipe he showed me had an ingredient like “ten cents worth of lime leaves” where to guesstimate how much he needs is not only guessing how expensive lime leaves are in Malaysia, but guessing how expensive they were in the 1970s and how much quantity ten cents of leaves is (I think he has since tried varying amounts from 1 tsp to a couple tablespoons, he is a mathematician by trade but happily cooks by vibe)

That is beautiful.

Now that’s a way to measure! I have to put that into a story sometime.

I am a science type and approach foodmaking as organic chemistry, which means I am very good at things like making ice cream recipes and baking bread, but recipes like what you describe will literally leave me stress-crying (I’m not kidding - it provoked anxiety even reading your description). I try to avoid cooking food whenever possible, unless I can find recipes that are precise down to the last detail. Even “salt and pepper to taste” is not good for me. People’s tastes in salt and pepper vary wildly! I can’t trust that my tastes in salt and pepper will correspond to a high number of other people’s tastes, so I might well put all this effort into cooking and then fuck it up at the end by adding too much or too little salt or pepper. I just need an exact amount - say, 1/8 tsp or 1 tsp or whatever - and then everything will be fine and I won’t have to feel panicky.

Who cares about other people's tastes? If you're cooking, it's your food, and you may as well like it.

If I’m feeding myself, I’m making a PB&J sandwich or heating instant ramen. There’s no way I’m going through all the hassle, mess, and stress of cooking just to feed myself. So in my case it’s automatic that if I’m cooking, it’s because there’s others that will be eating it. As the only reason I’m going through that stress is for them, I feel a lot of pressure to make food they can enjoy.

And this is why I write down my recipes. If I were writing a recipe for you I'd specify every detail I could envision, down to the salt and pepper (my personal Salt and Pepper to Taste is 1 tsp table salt and 1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper per pound of main protein). I would never give you the medieval-style notes.

Cooking is both an art and a science (my cooking improved greatly once I took organic chemistry). I cook primarily because I enjoy it, but feeding people and making them happy is a very close second.

That made me smile so much! Thank you for this. 💜

of course! beams

Like minoanmiss, if I was writing a recipe for you I would get as precise and direct as possible, possibly with glosses about any cooking techniques I wasn't sure that you already knew.

I had a lot of the same anxiety when I was starting cooking for others! I had no idea either. I still perpetually under-salt my cooking, because I know my taste in salt is more than most people like (which I have calibrated using restaurant food: if everyone else is eating it unsalted, and I am adding salt, that means that I am the outlier, especially because restaurant food is generally saltier than home recipes).

1. Salt is one of the spices that is easiest to add after the fact and it usually makes very little difference in the end taste -- it's served in small crystals that dissolve easily into the liquids of sauces, soups, and small discrete items of food. (In large non-liquid chunks of food it makes much more difference, but salting the surface before taking a bite will make up for that substantially.) So if there are insufficient directions, under-salting is the way to go because it's harder to correct out over-salting except by adding more unsalted mass.

2. It's also better to under-pepper for some of the same reasons -- it doesn't dissolve like salt, clearly, but the chemicals release easily onto the tongue without them having to be steeped like the herbs that you add near the beginning of many recipes. The extra big reason that I learned early on is that pepper extracts like woah in slow-cooking. I added a bunch of peppered pastrami to a slow-cooked dish and while that amount of pepper would have been absolutely fine if you'd put that pastrami on a plate with a fork and knife or had it in an appropriate number of sandwiches, but the dish was SCORCHING. Never again.

If a particular spice is not one that I know intuitively, I do a survey of popular adjacent recipes in a scientific process that you might be able to relate to. (I did this for pączki -- I'd made some one Mardi Gras after searching down a recipe, they came out great, and then I promptly forgot to make a note of the recipe. Two years later (I'd frozen some of the first batch) I was going to try making them gluten-free and couldn't find the recipe again. So I found something like seven different recipes and put the ingredients into a spreadsheet with a row for each ingredient, and then adjusted them to come out about the same size, and compared, and figured out how I wanted to do them.) So if this particular "serves four" recipe says I should use a teaspoon of chili oil, and that one serves three and says I should use a half-teaspoon, then I should probably be using about a quarter-teaspoon per serving. (I am biased towards believing the seasoning calibration in larger recipes to scale down well, versus smaller recipes scaling up.)

I also look at the seasonings in the recipes and add them up into a seasonings-mass, and sometimes more than one seasonings-mass by function and pungency. If I'm making an Italian recipe, I would add up the herbs into one cluster, onion powder and garlic powder into another cluster, and all the peppers into yet another. I think that a person could drive themselves to distraction by looking at all the seasonings individually across certain types of recipes that have more than one or two, but going "okay, so about a tablespoon of these spices combined per dozen cookies" and then breaking down that tablespoon into a ratio of cinnamon : ginger : cardamom : pepper for each recipe, that makes more sense to me.

Now that my partner, who also has a certain amount of seasonings-anxiety when going off-book, has started cooking for the household more and using techniques based on my freehanding, we've started calibrating between ourselves. I like things saltier, so I salt things less; they like More! Flavor!!! so they will add things with wild abandon and we have learned that my "idk, add a whole bunch" is their "sprinkle lightly with caution". They also haven't spent as much time cooking as I have, so I'm learning how to specify methods like "when the hamburger is done" into "flipping every 5 minutes on 50% heat, poke the meat and examine the color of the juice that comes out; if it is red or pink and cloudy, flip it again. If it is clear, make a cut to look at the color of the inside of the patty."

This filled me with DELIGHT. I do the seasoning mass thing too!

You are a blessing. I mean that with full sincerity. 💜

I agree with this, except one can add not enough salt to bread dough (ask me how I know :-) ).

This comment is tangentially reminding me of the comments to an article I once read on the phenomenon of gravestone recipes.

The cited recipe in the article is a cake recipe, and one line runs "Alternate flour cream". Well, every letter costs $$$$ on a headstone, so every word has to count.

One dude in the comments said something about old fashioned recipes that only make sense if you already know how to cook the particular dish in question and boy was he pissed when several people popped up to say that if you've ever baked anything ever then this is a standard line and perfectly clear - put the flour and cream into the batter in little bits, alternating between the two and starting and ending with the flour. It's no mystery, and even if all you have to go on are basic recipes for beginners it isn't too hard to work out if you've ever baked cookies or cake.

Why did he make the effort to be pissed? He was half right, but overspecified, and was corrected. It's not like he belongs to a societal group which can Never Be Publicly Wrong or they lose status.

Foolish dude.

(I have definitely noticed as I get better at cooking I get better at interpreting elliptically written recipes, but it's the general experience that helps.)

(also I am contemplating putting a recipe on my cenotaph, hahahah)

also I am contemplating putting a recipe on my cenotaph, hahahah

Better start saving! I'm not kidding when I say it's spendy.

Hahahah maybe I can have someone laminate some cardboard then.

Perhaps a QR code to a website?

I'm in this letter and I don't like it!

For me, I don't really plan meals or shopping & just buy what is cheap. Then I make something based on whatever is in there... Even for savory baking, I tend to go by vibes & make a lot of substitutions.

I also made some spice blends and forgot what is in them, so even I am a victim of my disorganization (& obviously mainly use that for myself + people I know well enough to know they are okay with Mystery Seasoning)

Cooking By Vibes is totally valid. Especially when seeing What Ingredients One Has and working from there, rather than shopping to a recipe. I spent many years starting from What Did X In My Household Buy/What Was Cheapest At The Store and it was almost always worthwhile.

And I also make a point of memorizing a retail calendar and waiting for key items to go on loss-leader. Cabbage? New Year’s and Saint Patrick’s Day. Tofu, bok choy, and water chestnuts? Lunar New Year. Avocados? Cinco de Mayo, mid-September (when several Latin American countries’ Independence Days cluster), and major sporting events such as the Super Bowl and March Madness. Seafood, dairy, egg, pasta, and legume proteins? Lent.

oh that's very organized! I haven't yet managed to remember that.

And then there’s the local seasonal agricultural cycle—-which I’m having to relearn, having moved into a vastly different climate from the city where I’d spent 90+% of my life. Michigan-based Meijer’s annual autumn Bulk Apple special(1) ain’t happening on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Conversely, I have now had an opportunity to learn that dragonfruit, in season and grown locally, actually warrants the hype.

(1)Ohio Meijer’s stores have been known to advertise the apples as sourced from “That Place Up North”; apple season overlaps with football season, which is Serious Business in the Great Lakes area.

You aren't obligated to use, have or offer recipes, I usually treat them as more guidelines, but please do your best to remember the ingredients (especially if you're cooking for people outside your usual household.) It could be very important to know that later!

I riff based on what's around/what came in the farm share/ what looked good or was on sale at the supermarket. Sometimes I look for recipes, look at a handful of versions, then use that as the basis for a dish.

I'm happy to describe what I did, but I just don't measure (how big is that bunch of kale, or that glug of EVOO? who cares, as long as it tastes good!).

I like the strategic way you contemplate your farm shares. :)

Thank you!

If I didn't, I'd waste a lot. As it is, I'm already behind on all the greens, and I have another pickup this afternoon....

I did have a new idea for the already-dying salad greens from two weeks ago that I hadn't gotten to in time: put them as green mulch on some of the potted plants I have on the porch, specifically the ones with dirt showing, so they can subside into dirt over time, and protect the surface in the meantime. I'm hoping this will get me to figure out better solutions before they get to this point again.

That sounds like a good idea. The plants will need all the help with the temperature rising.

Miss Manners: i have no recipe to give

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Recipe first, followed by backstory.

Re: Recipe first, followed by backstory.

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