[Sca-cooks] Recipe Deal Breakers

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jun 5, 2008, at 10:08 PM, Johnna Holloway wrote:

> The New York Times had an article yesterday in
> the Wed. Food section on recipes.
>
> Recipe Deal Breakers: When Step 2 Is ‘Corral Pig’
> By KIM SEVERSON
> Published: June 4, 2008 NYT
> it begins--
> "I WAS reading a recipe for apple strudel when I came to a sentence  
> that
> stopped me cold: “If you don’t have a helper,” it began.
> If a dish needs a helper, I need to move on.
>
> Although I didn’t end up with a strudel, I did end up on a quest. I  
> began asking good cooks I know about recipe deal breakers — those  
> ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and  
> walk away."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/dining/04recipes.html?_r=1&ref=dining&oref=slogin
>
> One of the things she chronicles is the now infamous Martha Stewart
> beehive cake that appears on the front of the June issue of MS Living.
> (The pan used for the cake has been out of production for years and  
> even
> the suggested substitute Nordicware pan is now unavailable.)
>
> I thought people might enjoy the article. Given what we go through
> in working with medieval and renaissance recipes, most of these  
> problems
> don't seem that bad.
>
> Johnnae

Yes, I saw that and wondered how the responses so quickly became a  
referendum on what foods people don't like, which is the question that  
could have been asked if that had been the intent. In general,  
listening to people talk about their food dislikes is much less  
interesting, but still easily as unpleasant, as a tax audit or a root  
canal.

Okay, maybe I'm being a hypocrite. Soup recipes calling for canned  
soup of the same name as an ingredient (Google bisque recipes and see  
what I mean) are recipe deal-breakers for me. Not that I have this big  
vendetta against canned soup; it just seems sort of fraudulent somehow.

Adamantius




"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter