SC - Cooking by "hand"

[Huette von Ahrens]

- --- Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com> wrote:

> As for the unfortunate recipe-bound, it simply means
> they usually have
> no intuitive essential understanding of the food the
> recipe is
> describing. That's all right if you have a good
> recipe. I once made a
> pan of lasagne at a friend's home, and had the pan
> about three-quarters
> full, with enough pasta, fillings, and sauce to add
> a fourth layer. I
> was about to do this when my friend came over and
> asked what I was
> doing. She said lasagne has three layers, not four.
> I told her that was
> ridiculous, and that you made as many layers as pan
> depth and
> ingredients would allow. When you ran out of one or
> the other you were
> done, with the option of making another small pan if
> you had enough
> ingredients to do that. She replied something like,
> "That's not the way
> we do things in _this_ house!" It turns out her
> mother had always made
> three layers because she followed a particular
> recipe in a particular book.
>  
> Adamantius
> -- 
> Phil & Susan Troy
> 
> troy at asan.com

Quite a few years ago, there was a letter to Dear
Abbey
or Ann Landers [I don't remember which], in which a
young woman wrote that after she married she wanted to
have all the family over for Easter dinner and asked
her mother how to do a traditional ham.  That Easter,
her mom came over early and instructed her daughter
in the family recipe for making ham.  One instruction
was to cut several inches off one end of the ham. 
When
the daughter questioned this, her mother said, "This
is
the way my mother always did it, and this is the way I
have always done it."  Rather than blindly follow an
unusual instruction, the daughter called her
grandmother and asked her why she did this.  The
grandmother's answer was that she didn't have a pan
big enough to hold a whole ham, so she had had to cut
off
part of the ham in order to cook it.  The mother had
blindly followed this "tradition" all those years
without any need.

However, I dislike your disdainful attitude about
cooks who follow recipes.  I follow recipes all the
time.  I can pretty much look at a recipe and tell
whether or not it is a good recipe or a flawed one. 
And, yes, I
can create many dishes without using recipes too. 
When it comes to salads, or casseroules, I rarely use
recipes, but with things I have never made before, I
use a recipe the first time, so I can get an inkling
as to what the original cook intended, before I start
tinkering with it.  Call me lazy, but I prefer not to
reinvent the wheel when I don't have to.  And, no, I
wouldn't blindly follow a recipe or a practice if it
didn't make sense or wasn't correct.  I have been
cooking for more than 40 years and received my Laurel
for cooking [amongst other things] 20 years ago.  Just
because I like to use recipes doesn't mean that I
don't
have any feel or instincts for the food I am
preparing.

Mistress Huette Aliza von und zu Ahrens und
Mechthildberg.

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