SC - Standard recipe (was Crab Rangoon)-OOP

[Mordonna22 at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/1/2000 8:20:08 AM US Mountain Standard Time, 
LrdRas at aol.com writes:

<<  it appears to me that although certain combinations of 
 ingredients and cooking methods might be defined as 'standard recipes', I 
 find little evidence that there is any standardization regarding the names 
 for those combinations. 
 
 Thoughts? >>

This phenoimenon is another reason for my belief that cooking is an art 
rather than a science.  It is a human thing to give things names.  If we 
produce something we feel is special, we deem it worthy of a name, and give 
it a name.  If we've never heard of Crab Rangoon, and we discover a recipe 
for crab and cream cheese dumplings, we call it Crab Bundles, or Crab and 
Cream Cheese Dumplings.  
A salad with apples, nuts, raisins, and other crunchy or chewy bits in a 
bland-sweet-oily dressing is thrown together by many a housewife who does not 
know she's making Waldorf Salad.  A paste of flour and water dropped into 
boiling water can be called dumplings, noodles, pasta, rivel, and hundreds of 
other names, names which sometimes denote actual variations on the theme, but 
sometimes not.  
The thing is, that it is the artist's touch that makes a standard recipe into 
a work of art.   Look at the simple thing called a biscuit in the USA.  
Simple, standard recipe.  Flour, milk, fat.  Mix into a thick dough, shape, 
and bake.  Mine are edible, even good, but my grandmother's were true works 
of art, light, delicate, just the right texture and taste.  My sister's are 
often inedible, and she is as good a cook as I.  She is an artist in her 
kitchen, too, but her medium is not dough.  If cooking were a science, we 
would be ablle to quantify what makes the difference, and anyone who could 
read a recipe could reproduce it.

Mordonna the Cook,
SunDragon's Western Reaches
Atenveldt
(m.k.a. Buckeye, AZ)
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