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

[Elaine Koogler]

I guess I overstated a bit.  I do follow recipes, especially if I've 
never cooked the dish before.  I sometimes make adjustments if something 
seems a little off from my own tastes...but typically I do follow the 
recipes.  Once I've cooked it a time or two, I then start experimenting 
with the ingredients.  Maybe.  And there are some recipes where I don't 
follow the amounts of ingredients, but check out the recipe to make sure 
I'm adding things in the correct order.

So no, I don't mean to imply that I ignore recipes....but rather that I 
can "guestimate" amounts of ingredients...and, having learned this so 
long ago that it is second nature to me, it makes it easier for me to 
redact the old recipes.

Kiri
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

> 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
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