Michael Pollan and the Luxury of Time Adam Chandler It’s like trying to learn a language only by copying down others’ sentences, instead of learning the grammar and vocabulary needed to put to paper lines of one’s own. The downside of learning to cook primarily through recipes, then, is that these small eurekas-which, once hit upon, are instantly applicable to nearly any other dish one prepares-are most often arrived at via triangulation. Any one of these recipes offers a fix under specific conditions, but after cooking through enough of them, those isolated recommendations can congeal into a realization: There are many clever ways to thicken a sauce, and picking an appropriate one depends on whether there’s some leeway for the flavor to change and how much time there is until dinner needs to be on the table. Another might recommend rescuing a too-watery sauce with some flour, and still another might suggest a handful of parmesan. Maybe one recipe for marinara advises reserving some of the starchy pasta water, for adding later in case the sauce is looking a little thin. Take, for instance, the basic skill of thickening a sauce. This means that for most novice cooks, kitchen wisdom -a unified understanding of how cooking works, as distinct from the notes grandma lovingly scrawled on index-card recipes passed down through the generations -comes piecemeal. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it.
But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. And they can be an excellent inspiration for even the least ambitious home cooks to liven up a weeknight dinner. To be sure, they are a wonderfully effective way to approximate a dish as it appeared in a test kitchen, at a star chef’s restaurant, or on TV.
#ON COOKING A TEXTBOOK OF CULINARY FUNDAMENTALS SET OF BOOKS HOW TO#
It’s a shame that the standard way of learning how to cook is by following recipes.
0 kommentar(er)
