THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR COOKING IS YOU.
Strange thing for a purveyor of recipes to say, but people don’t really want a perfectly reproduced recipe, they want something from you.
Ever been half-way through cooking a recipe when you’ve just stared at it and thought wild and wicked thoughts like “I am so going to change this” or “are you kidding?”.
Congratulations, you’ve gone rogue. No longer a follower, you’re creating your own path through the kitchen wilderness and making your food your own.
I’ve spent most of my life telling other people how to cook, dishing out recipes as if they were the holy word and interspersing instructions with details on the exact pan to use, and the specific weight of ingredients and the precise end result you are looking for. All, according to my own taste. Not yours.
Four home truths about cooking
1/ Recipes aren’t like cars, which need all their separate elements in order to run smoothly. You can take a wheel off a recipe, or use a different fuel, and it will still work. Amplify one element that you love, and dispense with another that you don’t. If you have a perfectly good chilli sauce in the fridge, why spend an hour making someone else’s? I have one friend who refuses to cook any recipe for which she needs to cook another recipe first. No ‘see page 78’ for her.
2/ Nigella isn’t going to ring you after dinner and demand to know why you cut her coconut milk in half for her Thai sweet potato curry. Yotam Ottolenghi isn’t going to bail you up in the supermarket to complain you swapped out eggplant for chicken in his caponata. Adam Liaw would be nothing but delighted if you took liberties with his recipes. All good food writers want to be helpful, but not proscriptive. You’re not here to pass a test. There is no score out of 20. So do what you like.
3/ You are being manipulated. Pictures of oozing cheese, squelching mayonnaise and pooling salted caramel sauce are the bread and butter of many a successful recipe developer. If they don’t supply recipes that get digital clicks ( see oozing cheese, etc), then their stats go down. They may not get another commission from the editor. I sympathise (I’ve done it myself), but if you’ve bought good produce and cooked something beautiful, it doesn’t need the extra shit. It just doesn’t.
4/ Exercise a healthy disrespect. Not slavishly following a recipe isn’t about being ‘creative’; it’s about problem-solving. If you don’t like pan-frying sausages, then roast them in the oven instead (and trust me, you will never pan-fry them again - crisper skin, no turning, no burning). If you don’t have pomegranate molasses, use something else that will give you that yin-yang, sweet-sour result, like honey and lemon juice. The thing about cooking – and surprisingly, everything else in life - is that you bring yourself to it. Own it. Make it yours.
Having said that… If you like to follow a recipe, and find it genuinely useful and enjoyable to do so, then good for you; that’s great. We all need to build a repertoire of kitchen skills, and have techniques and flavour combinations we love, and food writers we trust. All I’m saying is bring yourself to the table as well.
(It was the oozing cheese that did it, right? Recipe for garlic cheese toasties here).
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there are any tips, recipes or ideas that you’d like to see.
Copyright © 2021 Jill Dupleix. All rights reserved. I live and work on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging.
Well said. Would have read it without the gooey cheese. You are a must read for me here on the Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada! Thank you for this and thank you for the roasting sausages tip. What temperature do you roast them?