was P Re: [Sca-cooks] Plentyn Delit, now taught to cook

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Elaine Koogler:
>I think you're right.  I know a lot of people have trouble redacting 
>recipes, but it sort of came naturally to me as well...but then I 
>cook using the "a dab of this and a 'glunck' of that" method.
>Kiri
>
>aeduin wrote:
>
>>I was taught by my mother and grandmother to cook by eye and taste. 
>>It certainly annoyed the people at Cal Poly's restaurant school 
>>when I cooked like that instead of blindly following the recipes.
>>
>>AEduin

>>>I'm a traditional 'by eye' cook, and I often find that reading the
>>>original recipe (in translation, if necessary) is a lot easier than
>>>following someone else's modern style recipe. I wonder if it has to do
>>>with the way people's brains work or just the way we are taught to cook?

This is all very well. I also don't bother with modern-type recipes 
in period cookery, although a pre-conceived (even if conceived by 
you) notion of ingredient proportions will help if someone other than 
you is preparing the dish, and when you're shopping.

But as homey and warming as all this intuitive cooking-by-eye is (and 
I'm not criticizing what I do myself), there is something to be said 
for using and following recipes as well. If the dish is something 
you've never cooked before, aren't sure whether it's a pottage, stew 
or casserole (because ingredient proportions often largely determine 
or at least indicate this), it helps to have a recipe, and most of 
the great cooking-by-eye cooks of my experience have worked from 
recipes which they've pretty well got memorized, measure by eye (or 
some other not-very-obvious unit, such as a lump of butter the size 
of an egg) only after considerable experience using more traditional 
tools.

To be honest in a situation where honesty in this may not be taken 
well by everyone, the fact is that some people who cook by eye simply 
aren't interested in reproducible or consistent results, if taking 
the time to measure stuff and wash the little spoons and cups is what 
that costs. Sometimes I fall into that category.

And then, some of the most gosh-awful cooking (and especially baking) 
I've ever encountered has come from people who not only cook by eye, 
but who frequently use the dread expression, "Been there, done that." 
Often they add, "Bought the T-shirt," when in fact they have not been 
there recently, if at all, obviously not done that often enough, and 
ought to reread what it says on the T-shirt for their own good.

Recipes exist as either a memory aid or a teaching tool, and if the 
cook who is supposed to be receiving input from the recipe is simply 
taking the ingredients list and throwing the ingredients together in 
whatever way they feel like at the spur of the moment, the results 
may be good, but not necessarily what the original cook intended (is 
it in the first edition of Pleyn Delit or maybe To The King's Taste 
where mortrews ends up as meatloaf?).

I get a little tic in my left eye whenever I hear the word "blindly" 
used in close proximity to the phrase "following recipes"; it almost 
invariably is an implication that following recipes closely is 
considered by the speaker a bad thing, that it is limiting and 
uncreative. Now, it's possible that following the recipe can be taken 
too far, (as in the case of my friend, who, after having made three 
layers of lasagne, sauce, cheese, etc., stopped because the recipe 
said to add the third layer, and then ended, while there was still 
room in the pan and ingredients left over, a sort of "end of file 
error"), but recipes exist in large part to teach culinary theory as 
well as practice. When you've followed enough recipes to get a sense 
of what'll happen when you do Thing X, as opposed to Thing Y, then 
you've probably learned everything you can from the recipe, and why 
it is the way it is, and then it's time to move on.

But restaurant cooks, in my experience, are not really cooking by 
eye, in the way that most people mean it, even if they appear to be, 
and are not blindly following recipes, either, at least not always 
(Stouffer recipe kitchens notwithstanding). And if I were a culinary 
instructor for a food-service venue (instead of just teaching people 
to cook so they can eat) and gave a student a recipe to follow, and 
they told me they'd done it intuitively or by eye instead of 
following the recipe, you can be sure they'd be graded on absolutely 
everything I could find "wrong" with it, no matter how tasty it was. 
Final grade would be something like, "Beautiful presentation, sublime 
flavor, but not what I asked for. F."

For period cookery, though, while I agree that it can be a better 
re-creative experience to simply follow the period recipe as written, 
filling in the missing details as best you can, instead of following 
someone else's opinions on the matter. But that's not the same as 
thinking the original cook, who did not include this information, did 
not care what was done, or that anything goes.

Adamantius