Best Food Writing 2014 (16 page)

Hang out with any good home cook or professional chef, and you'll see less clock-watching and more poking and prodding, sniffing and tasting, and even listening, as they evaluate the food as it progresses and guide it along the way. (Sous vide cooking, which uses vacuum packs, is one exception, which is one reason I've resisted it.) I remember shadowing baker Renee McLeod at her Petsi Pies café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one morning many years ago, and there was no timer in sight. Instead, right in the middle of answering one of my questions, her nose went into the air and she sniffed, then whirled around to her convection oven and pulled out a tray of coconut cupcakes, which were perfectly done—by a matter of mere seconds. She doesn't have to be in such close proximity, either. She told me, “I'll be sitting in the office and suddenly I'll call out to my people, ‘Cookies are done!'”

Some people's senses seem born stronger than others', of course, but there's no doubt that much of this kind of skill comes from experience. McLeod adapted some of her cupcake recipes from her grandmother's instructions for larger cakes, which means that the first time she made them she would have had no idea how long they would take. She had to watch, sniff, and learn. In a professional setting like McLeod's, where recipes are standardized as they are made over and over again using the same equipment, and the equipment is professionally calibrated, the variability lessens and timing can become
more consistent. But ovens can rarely be calibrated to within 25 degrees, and most home ovens are far more inaccurate than that. Moreover, when you're following someone else's instructions—someone who was using different ingredients and equipment—it's folly to depend solely on the clock rather than learning to evaluate your food and make adjustments as you go.

Take the simple sautéed onion. It's all too common for recipe writers to tell readers how long it will take to get it tender, along with that garlic or carrot or celery that might also be in the skillet. But an onion is not an onion is not an onion. Even if a “large” onion is called for and used, the actual size will vary; and it could be younger or older than it was last time, meaning juicier or tougher. And even if you call for a medium or large skillet, one person's medium is another person's large, and a heavy cast-iron one is not the same as a thin aluminum one, especially when the onion actually starts cooking. Sure, a writer can try to specify as many of those variables as possible—the number of cups the chopped onion should be, the exact size of the pan, even its materials—but who knows the age of an onion, unless you grow it yourself? All those factors will affect the cooking time, and yet too many writers, even as we acknowledge the variables, act like the timing is the one thing we can specify with some certainty.

Onions, as it happens, were the subject of some scorn heaped on recipe writers last spring, when Tom Scocca wrote a piece in
Slate
about the woefully short time so many recipes say it takes to caramelize an onion, something that, when done properly, can occupy the better part of an hour—or more. But as
Chow.com
editor John Birdsall wrote in response, “The thing that went mostly unnoticed in the scramble to accuse or save face was Scocca's larger indictment, which is that professional recipe writers' work can seem as far removed from actual cooking as a cognitive study in the testing lab with subjects wired to electrodes is from actual thinking. Recipe writing occurs under unnatural conditions, conducted by professionals with laptops and clipboards. They pretend they're doing stuff that ordinary home cooks might do, but they're not ordinary home cooks, and many are definitely not cooking at home, under ordinary conditions.”

It was not always thus. In her fascinating book
The Cookbook Library
, Willan says that it wasn't until the twentieth century that writers
started regularly listing precise timing, mostly because until then most cooks had wood stoves with no consistency of temperature whatsoever. Cooks would test the heat of wood stoves using their hands, or they would put in some newspaper and see how long it took the paper to scorch: thirty seconds was very hot and good for baking pastries, for instance, then as the temperature came down it was appropriate for bread, then roasts, then stews. “In Catholic countries, they would time it by saying a rosary,” Willan says. “And of course if the paper didn't brown or scorch at all, then the oven wasn't hot enough for anything.” Even when she went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in the 1960s, the equipment was so antiquated as to make timing estimates pointless. “The ovens had top heat, bottom heat or both together, and we controlled the heat by putting a wooden spoon in the door, propping it open,” she said.

Exceptions to Willan's twentieth-century observation abound, naturally. Fannie Farmer's
The Boston Cooking School Cook-Book
of 1895 is largely credited with introducing specific measurements, times, and temperatures to recipe writing. When I scoured through some other antiquarian book, I noticed that
The Improved Housewife
of 1846 would include timing in one recipe and not in the next. For parsnips and carrots, you just “boil till tender,” but for beets that same instruction is followed by “in summer one hour, in winter three.” Don Lindgren, co-owner of Rabelais Books in Biddeford, Maine, says that even Mary Randolph included some timing in her influential 1825 book,
The Virginia House-Wife
. But the most entertaining outlier I saw was an excerpt from
The Nonpareil Cook Book
, an 1894 collection by the Ladies' Lend-A-Hand Society of the Baptist Church of Worcester, New York, that Lindgren sent me. The book includes a chart for vegetable boiling times that by today's standards are comical, including a half-hour for potatoes, an hour for squash, three hours for string beans, and four hours for beets. (The latter in winter, I presume.)

Ultimately, recipe writing, like so many other things, is an idiosyncratic discipline, with writers taking all sorts of approaches in getting across their own interpretations of a dish, and teaching it in their own style. To this day, charcoal grilling calls for an approach similar to the rosaries Willan mentioned; many Southern recipes instruct cooks to count how many “Mississippis” they can utter while holding
their hand over the grate, while many of those same recipes still attempt to say how many minutes it then takes to char an eggplant. In a recipe for baked red snapper with grapefruit in
The New York Times Cookbook
of 1961, Craig Claiborne wisely leaves out the minutes it takes to accomplish of one of the first, most basic steps: “In a skillet heat four tablespoons of the butter, add the onion and cook until it is transparent.” My style exactly. And then he specifies that the stuffed fish should be baked “until it flakes easily when tested with a fork, about fifty to sixty minutes,” a crucial step for which he gives the reader a good testing mechanism. By 1979, though, his friend and frequent coauthor, Pierre Franey, was going in the opposite direction in his
60-Minute Gourmet
, deemphasizing descriptive cues and listing a time whenever possible. It makes sense; as more and more women were leaving domestic life behind in favor of the workplace, our cooking culture was becoming ever more focused on speed and convenience. Perhaps Franey's approach was to some degree a way of helping readers count the minutes and see for themselves that they wouldn't add up to more than the all-important hour he was promising.

After a long downward trend in home cooking, recent years have seen a rediscovery of the kitchen. That's nothing but good news. Yet the standards are different when the target audience includes less experienced cooks, and trying to account for this is where I think we've started to really go off the rails with recipe timing. When I called Sally Schneider, author of
The Improvisational Cook
, to talk about the issue, she said that as much as she tries to write recipes that include many other descriptive cues in addition to timing, she still gets emails and calls from readers asking shockingly basic questions, such as how to tell when that simple sautéed onion is done: “The problem is people these days don't have basic structures in place in their heads.”

Writers and editors often think that to make recipes doable by less experienced cooks, they must attach time cues to each and every step, however small, and to weigh or otherwise measure every last smidgen of every last ingredient. The irony, though, is that by trying to account for so many variables, the recipes can become so long-winded that they run the risk of intimidating the very cooks they're trying to appeal to. Even worse, they might be doing a disservice by not helping even the most inexperienced cooks learn what I think
they need to learn most: How to make their own judgments. How to interact with their food, to roll with the punches, to develop instincts. How to make mistakes, and recover. How to learn. How to be free. Schneider echoes the old “teach a man to fish” adage when she says, “If you tell somebody how something works, if they understand the workings of it and what its end point can be, it gives them more confidence.”

Technology has long tried to come to the rescue of home cooks (most of them women) who had their hands full, whether with other household chores or work outside the home. Generations of slow-cooker devotees have loved the fact that they can close the thing up, head to work, and come home to a meal. That Ronco rotisserie oven hawked on TV has sold gazillions on the promise of its earworm of a slogan, shouted out by Ron Popeil and the audience in chorus: “Set it and forget it!”

But should we forget it, really? As Willan said, cooking has always been about multi-tasking. Nobody's asking you to stand there and do nothing except watch the cake rise in the oven. “But you still have to have it in the back of your mind while you do other things,” she said. “It's a skill to be acquired.”

I'm no Luddite, but I can't ignore some of the tradeoffs we've made in our dependence on technology. For example, I'm as addicted to my smartphone as anyone I know, and am especially dependent on the built-in GPS to overcome my lack of a natural sense of direction. So when I'm walking or driving and staring at Google Maps rather than at the streetscape around me, I don't really learn where I'm going, I just get there anyway. What's the harm in that, you may ask? Well, putting aside the possibility of running into a parking meter on the sidewalk, or heaven forbid into oncoming traffic, the harm is that this is just one more area where I'm getting a little bit dumber, a little less independent. More than once I've run out of battery before I see where I'm supposed to make a turn, sending me into the nearest gas station or Starbucks to do the old-fashioned thing, and ask for help.

There are countless cooking apps, too, and many feature built-in timers, not to mention voice commands to move from one step in the recipe to the next. Maybe one day Siri will teach everybody to cook, or perhaps she'll do the sautéing herself. But in the meantime,
when you're in the kitchen, why not just . . . look up? As author Tamar Adler puts it, learning to cook by interacting closely with your food is a little like learning to drive on a stick shift rather than an automatic. You feel more connected to the process of driving, and therefore you understand it a little better.

Adler's book
An Everlasting Meal
calls for a return to instinctive cooking, and she tells audiences and students and readers that they can make their own decisions about recipes, that they don't need to be slaves to any instruction, timing included. And she says they are surprisingly quick to respond. “At first they feel incredibly unmoored and unsupported, and they say, ‘That's all well and good for you, because you know how long everything takes, and the processes, so you're not nervous, but what about me?' I always say, ‘I learned this by standing over the pan and paying attention.'”

You may have heard this before, but I'm going to say it again: Recipes—mine and everyone's—are road maps. Throw away the stone-tablets idea, and you'll eventually be a better cook.

The more I think about this issue, the more committed I become to making sure my own recipes give readers something more than just a bunch of numbers. I have long insisted that my own recipes in the
Washington Post
put the time cue last in a sequence, the hope being that if readers read that the eggplant should be baked “until it blackens and collapses, about an hour,” rather than the other way around, they'll be more attuned to the blackening and collapsing part of the equation. When I initially sent the recipes for this book to testers, I asked for feedback on the plethora of time references, to make sure as much as possible that the ranges I was giving were working for others, and I used that feedback to make sure they did. But then I made another decision: in many of the instructions, particularly the ones about sautéing an onion or anything else that happens relatively quickly—and exceedingly variably—the time references have come out altogether. In their place, I'm trying to describe to you as best I can how to tell what's happening with the food and, therefore, how to really cook it.

The result, I hope, is that you might find your own cooking rhythms and realize the point of all this: that what you see, hear, smell, and feel happening is the only thing that matters. I think it
might be easier for single cooks to get there than others. If your primary consideration is your own craving and nobody else's, you can learn more naturally to listen to your instincts as you cook, and to let them lead the way—hopefully to something that satisfies you. No matter how long those onions took to soften.