Cooking With A Recipe Is Highly Overrated

One of the first things I learned when I was beginning to cook was that trying to get my mother to give me a recipe was near impossible. My mother was taught to cook and bake by her grandmother. My great-grandmother was supposedly an amazing cook, but she never really stuck with a specific recipe. Her favorite phrase, which my mother will say any time I ask what to put in a recipe is “What you put you find,” meaning, put in whatever you want to taste. She will then give me an excessive and minimally confusing list of ingredients I might want to find in my food, along with some random ratios. A rice pudding recipe that has been passed down for 4 generations is as follows:

 1 cup of milk for every egg. Put in as much as you can fit in the pan, while leaving room for the other ingredients.

Enough sugar to make it sweet, but not too sweet.

Add rice, but not too much or too little or you’ll ruin the texture.

Orange zest- enough to smell it a little, but not enough to overpower the cinnamon.

Cinnamon- enough to smell it a little, but not enough to overpower the orange zest

Cook in a water bath at 350 for however long it takes to be done.

            Needless to say, asking for help doesn’t do me much good while cooking. While my mom’s method of teaching recipes has resulted in me preparing some impressively putrid dishes, over time it has helped me become a better cook. Instead of relying on measurements and ratios of ingredients, I have learned to rely on my senses. I pay attention to textures and smells of food to see what I need to add, and can accommodate recipes to my personal taste. While reading Elizabeth Perez’s book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, I saw similarities between how I learned to cook and how uninitiated members of Lacumi learned to prepare meals for the orisha. Perez writes “In such situations, where the uninitiated were told “Don’t ask questions: do,” unforeseen error often had a greater role to play in learning that flawless execution.” Learning the measurements and steps of a recipe is much harder than learning what the dish needs to look, feel, smell, and taste like. Accidently cutting or burning oneself is a more memorable teacher of how to handle knives and heat than being nagged to be careful. Cooking with explicit instructions requires only the ability to follow steps, while being given less instructions helps build skills and knowledge transferable to other recipes. Particularly with cooking, allowing mistakes to be the primary teacher leads to a more skillful learner, and much tastier foods.