2 April 2009 by
Jean Johnson
No joke, we got coverage in the Wall Street Journal on April 1st. The story consulted many big names, although it danced around the empowerment issue of measure free cooking. Nonetheless, word’s getting out. Momentum’s building. Yes! Leave your measuring cups behind and take back your kitchen!
Here’s the article in all it’s glory–plus photos we inserted just for fun here on the blog. Thanks to Laura Berg and Thea Pyle for posing with our dear, sweet Cooking Beyond Measure:
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“A Shift to Recipe-less Cooking: Some cookbook authors are moving away from the rigidity of recipes and advocating improvisation in the kitchen”
By PERVAIZ SHALLWANI
Since the late 1800s, when recipes as we know them today were first widely introduced, home cooks have been increasingly creating dishes using line-by-line lists of measured ingredients and detailed directions.
[improvisational cooking] Maria Robledo
Sally Schneider, author of “The Improvisational Cook,” with cookbook author Jim Peterson (”Sauces”).
But as people look for quicker and easier ways to make everyday meals, some are moving away from the rigidity of recipes and advocating improvisational cooking, where measurements are approximations and ingredients are interchangeable.
Among them: Marc Matsumoto, a freelance writer and marketing consultant, who launched the Web site NoRecipes.com a year ago. The site’s motto: “No recipes: Cooking is more fun without them.” Mr. Matsumoto focuses on technique and inspiration, rather than detailed instructions, when he writes about his off-the-cuff creations that include spicy lemongrass soft-shell crab, and shrimp and duck gumbo.
“I think 50% of cooking is technique and a lot of people don’t learn the technique and rely on recipes as a crutch,” says Mr. Matsumoto, 32, who first learned to cook from his mother. His advice: “Throw yourself in the kitchen. Learn about ingredients, not just knowing that fennel is green with the white bulbs, but fennel tastes like licorice and goes well with other flavors like citrus and beef.”
Food historian Jean Johnson is also advocating improvisational cooking as she tours the country promoting her measurement-free cookbook “Cooking Beyond Measure,” published in August by Seventy-Sixth Avenue Press. She teaches home cooks to be “fluid” so they can look to their cupboards instead of the grocery store when a dish calls for an ingredient they don’t have. “I find that after the work day, to have to follow one more set of directions before dinner seems to hit a nerve,” she says.
Indeed, improvisational cooking “is a reaction, in a way, to super-programmed cookbooks where everything is legislated down to exact measurements,” says food historian and author Anne Mendelson, whose most recent book, “Milk,” looks at the history of dairy. “Recipes didn’t used to be necessary. They are sort of lab manual cookery in a way.”
The rise of recipes that use precise measurements is widely credited to Fannie Farmer, a student, and later, director of the Boston Cooking School, who published “The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook” in 1896. Until Ms. Farmer’s manual, cookbooks were written in prose, calling for a pinch of this or a handful of that.
“The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook,” which survives today as “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” featured nearly 2,000 recipes that gave detailed instructions using a standardized system of measurement (teaspoon, cup, etc.). Ms. Farmer also included scientific explanations with her recipes, and wrote essays on housekeeping and cleaning. The rising middle-class and subsequent growth in the number of women looking to homemaking as a profession turned Ms. Farmer’s book into a hit — it has sold more than 4 million copies to date.
Today’s recipes are still built on Ms. Farmer’s model of listing level measurements for each ingredient and directions that include exact temperatures and times. But with more people having little understanding of the basics of cooking and how to adapt it, plus the advent of chef cookbooks featuring hard-to-recreate restaurant recipes and stylized photos, some home cooks are overwhelmed by what they call excessive details.
“I think we have gone too far in making recipes too rigid,” says cookbook editor and author Judith Jones, vice president at Knopf publishing house, who brought to life Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” among many other cooking tomes. Ms. Jones says “persnickety” details in recipes, such as asking for a specific size onion, mandating “fussy” ways of cutting vegetables and listing expensive or hard-to-find ingredients, are frustrating home cooks.
In response, she’s writing an upcoming book, “The Pleasures of Cooking for One,” to be released in October, which will feature simple recipes and give tips for different ways to use extra ingredients or leftovers over several days. She plans to address some of the basic tenets of cooking, such as understanding what a teaspoon of salt feels like in your palm so you don’t have to measure it every time. “You get a freedom and it gives you a feeling to be more creative,” Ms. Jones says.
But the reason cookbooks are loaded with details these days is not without warrant. Home cooks more than ever today don’t know the basics of cooking — once learned by watching parents or grandparents in the kitchen. Frozen entrees and instant meals have left many needing exact instructions when trying to cook a dish from scratch.
“The food editors had to educate,” says former chef Sally Schneider, who has written two books on the subject of improvisational cooking. “The way they did that was to be more explicit with their recipes.”
Ms. Schneider focuses on teaching cooks to deconstruct dishes into their basic tenets: know how different ingredients taste, build on successful meals and be okay with making mistakes.
“Once you learn to look at recipes, you can see that there is a structure to them,” Ms. Schneider says. “That might be the thing to respect until you learn the variables. Suppose you see a recipe that has peas in it, and you go to the market and don’t see peas, but you see lima beans. Using similar ingredients is a way to start.”
Ms. Johnson also suggests experimenting with variations on a dish. “Cooking starts with building a foundation, for example, taking leftover steamed quinoa and dressing it with fruits, nuts and honey for breakfast,” she says. “Add vegetables or a cooked piece of meat and a little salad dressing to make a light lunch or a hearty dinner.”
But improvisational cooking may not be for everyone. Mark Bittman, author of “How to Cook Everything,” says that for someone who doesn’t have some grounding in basic cooking methods such as roasting a chicken or properly heating a pan before searing a piece of meat, recipe-less cooking will probably be a loss. And baking, which often requires more precise measurements and temperatures, can be difficult to execute off the cuff.
“I think beginners want and need recipes,” he says. “You do have to know some things when you start cooking.”
Thomas Griffiths, associate dean at the Culinary Institute of America, says that even his chefs use recipes as a guide. But he teaches formulas that allow them to adapt existing recipes.
“When I teach a cooking class, I leave lots of blank pages for notes,” Mr. Griffiths says, “because when you cook a recipe, there is so much gray area. You make a change by experimenting.”
Five Tips For Improvising in the Home Kitchen
Taste
Figure out what flavors you like, and also which ones pair well together. But remember that not every ingredient tastes the same each time. Also, know what ingredients taste like before they are cooked — it will help you to spot the flavor in a dish. “Taste real sour cream and low-fat sour cream and describe the difference,” says author Sally Schneider. “A whole world of senses opened up,” which helps one know how to improvise with a dish.
Focus on Techniques
Using the right kind of oil or heating the pan to the right temperature is going to result in a better piece of meat than any amount of fancy spice rub or marinade, says NoRecipes.com’s Marc Matsumoto. Learn some of the basic skills, such as how to beat eggs or sauté vegetables, which you can apply to multiple dishes. Also, cook different vegetables and meats so you get a sense of cook time for various ingredients – this will come in handy when throwing together a sauté or adding extras to a pasta.
Learn to Make Versatile Bases
Most stocks and sauces that come out of a jar are easy and cheap to make. Cook yourself a big batch at home, and you can freeze it use in a variety of dishes. For example, instead of throwing away chicken bones, turn them into a broth that can then be made into a soup or used to make risotto or a flavorful pot of rice. Or make a marina sauce that can be used in a variety of pastas, pizza or egg dishes.
Substitute Ingredients
Beans are often interchangeable, cauliflower can usually take the place of broccoli, and chicken can many times replace pork. This is how new dishes are often created. Experiment!
Don’t be Afraid to Make Mistakes
Most every dish started out a mistake somewhere along the road, where someone threw ingredients together and adjusted to meet his or her own tastes, says cookbook author Mark Bittman. If you don’t make mistakes, you’ll never know what works — or not.
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