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

[dissectionist]

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.

[conuly]

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

[dissectionist]

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.

[minoanmiss]

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.

[dissectionist]

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

[minoanmiss]

of course! beams

[azurelunatic]

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."

[minoanmiss]

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

[dissectionist]

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

[magid]

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