Recipes are teaching us the wrong things

My parents used to let me help cook dinner from when I was very small. Likely, this was incredibly exhausting for them both: I doubt I was being particularly helpful and they were now supervising a 6 year old with a sharp knife/flaming hob/glass bowl, as well as having to get dinner on the table. As I got older I like to think I got slightly more helpful in dinner preparation (or, tea as we call it in The North). Sometimes, though, I'd ask my mum how long the onions needed to cook on the hob - I was often given the low-risk job of stirring onions. What I wanted to hear was a definitive number, but without fail, my mum would reply “Until it’s done”.

This was the most infuriating thing I could possibly hear. I would ask her how I was supposed to know if it was done or not if she wasn’t giving me a time, and she would look at me, stirring my practically raw onions, and ask “Well… Would you like to eat them?”. It took me much longer than I’d like to admit to understand that she was teaching me much more than how long onions took to cook every time she replied with that phrase.

She was teaching me that onions look a certain way when they’re ready, that they smell a certain way, taste a certain way. She was teaching me that no hob, no pan, no onion is the same. You simply can’t rely on a number of minutes to tell you when something is ready when there are so many variables at play. My mum taught me how to be an intuitive cook: knowing when a sauce needs more salt; when something is on the verge of burning because the kitchen is starting to fill with an acrid smell; and when a dough is done proving by its texture.

Most people coming to university and having to cook for the first time didn’t have my parents as their personal cooking tutors. Learning to cook by seeing and doing is the most effective, but I recognise how lucky I am to have had this. For lots of people when it comes to learning how to cook, that help comes in the form of recipes. Now, let it be known that I don’t hold anything against the people who will always follow a recipe.

Recipes are a tool to teach, but I think they’re often being used to teach the wrong thing. Cooking isn’t an exact science, it’s an art. Cooking isn’t rigid and bound by rules. We can make substitutions, use a different cooking method, or make it vegan. I don’t deny that following a recipe down to the letter will produce something worth eating, but I'd liken it to painting by numbers. It’s delicious, but is it yours?

Techniques and processes are the paintbrushes of cooking, and they can be used however the cook wants to create a different masterpiece of a meal. While my mum taught me intuition, it was my dad that taught me these specific processes and techniques. There’s a picture of me, very young, rubbing butter into flour for scones with my dad. While I don’t remember that moment specifically, I remember the countless other moments my dad told me to come and watch him do something so that next time, I could instead.

Recipes are enlightening for teaching us how to cook new things and I use them regularly when I’ve never made something before. But I’m always trying to learn new techniques from those recipes and keeping them for what I cook next, rather than regurgitating the recipe ad infinitum and never changing it. A good cook, in my opinion, is one that can look in the fridge and create a meal out of whatever is kicking around, using a few things from the store cupboard. With intuition, and the right techniques in your arsenal, you can make anything under the sun.

Not everyone needs to be a good cook, though. Because we all have to eat, there’s this assumption that everyone needs to be able to be a good cook. I don’t think that’s true: cooking doesn’t have to be your hobby, and using a recipe is fine by me if it stops you being hungry. But, cooking is my hobby. Luckily, that means I’ve cooked enough for all of us. Lunch, anyone?