Miss Manners: i have no recipe to give

[minoanmiss]

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Cooking is one of my passions, and I love to share my food with others. And while I love positive feedback, I am sometimes taken aback by the automatic request for a recipe as soon as someone compliments something I've made.

Unfortunately, I do not use recipes. I am an intuitive cook, who many times throws things together. I have explained several times to these people that I do not use recipes, but continue to get asked.

I am not a curmudgeon, and not trying to keep my creations' ingredients secret; I just don't have the time, energy or memory to remember everything that went into a dish. What would be a good response to the constant, "This is delicious. Recipe, please!"?

GENTLE READER: "I made it up and don't have one. But I'm flattered that you liked it so much. You'll just have to come over again and I'll try to re-create it."

Comments

[azurelunatic]

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

[minoanmiss]

laughs in delight and fellow feeling

[katarik]

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.

[minoanmiss]

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.

[full_metal_ox]

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!

[minoanmiss]

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

[azurelunatic]

oh, oh nooooooooooooooo

[full_metal_ox]

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