Cookbooks to Cure Recipe Brain

And also: what recipe brain even is, that you should want to cure it

A Dutch Kitchen Scene, Joachim Beuckelaur

I’ve talked a lot of shit about recipes, but they’re basically an incredible memetic development. The fact that we can describe food preparation in text with precision should not be taken for granted. The “dish title/optional preface/precisely listed ingredients/numbered instructions” structure is so familiar it feels more obvious than it actually is. It’s a pretty recent writing structure: a customer at my bookstore (she was there to hunt down spiral-bound church cookbooks) told me about an Amish cookbook where the blueberry pancake recipe didn’t mention blueberries at all, because the writer assumed you would know from the name that you needed to add blueberries. Also, it feels much less obvious from the writer’s end than it does from the reader’s end. When I tried to write a 1000 follower pasta (‘nduja, kefir, parsley) I said stuff like “you know better than me how much parmesan you want”—& if you’ve ever tried to learn a new dish from a cook saying stuff like “you know better than me how much parmesan you want,” you know that the precision of a recipe is a blessing. But the recipe writing structure is not perfect.

On the one hand, the recipe structure could stand to be more precise. On Cooking for Engineers, they have detailed instructions & a picture for every step, but at the end they distill everything into a beautiful little graphic, eg this recipe for dirty rice:

On the other hand. If you’re learning to cook some particular new dish, then the precision of a recipe is great. But if you’re trying to learn to cook, in general, and recipes are your main tool for doing that, then you might end up kind of recipe-brained. You might end up thinking about cooking, in general, as a series of discrete projects that each take about an hour (& at least half an hour longer than the recipe tells you to expect), which either produce a single meal, or (possibly worse) leave you with leftovers of exactly the same meal, only worse.

Recipe brain will either prevent you from cooking regularly, or, if you’re more disciplined than me, it will make you miserable while you cook regularly.

If you have recipe brain, you probably have it because you learned to cook (or are learning to cook) from information instead of from people—which is happening more and more, because of smaller families, living farther apart, people spending more time in school, the social disruptions of covid, the feedback cycle of less people cooking meaning less people to watch cooking meaning you cook less meaning less people see you cook, etc etc. So, while the best preventative for recipe brain is learning to cook from people, if you already have recipe brain, that means there were reasons that you couldn’t learn to cook from people—so we will have to fight recipe brain with more cookbooks.

These are four cookbooks that attempt to convey something much more difficult than making a single recipe: they want to teach a whole decision-making process, a whole workflow. If you’re new to cooking, or new to non-recipe-brained cooking, a lot of it won’t make sense until you’re in action—kind of like board game instructions work (at least for me). Books like this require more thinking from the reader than normal cookbooks do.

But un-recipe-braining yourself is well worth the trouble, not least because, perversely enough, it will make normal recipes more useful to you. You’ll be able to look at recipes with a better eye for which parts can be replaced, pre-prepped, scaled up or down. Once you’re un-recipe-brained, “cooking science” stuff also becomes much much more useful. If you’re starting from a recipe-brained perspective, then learning about maillard reactions, or how ginger flavor comes from gingerol and/or zingerone and/or shogaol in different specific circumstances, can tend to make you cook even more fussily. But outside of that paradigm, food science can help you predict the results of changing your dish on the fly.

So, even though these books carry a higher interpretative/learning burden than recipe-brain compatible cookbooks do, I think they can be a gateway to enjoying cooking more forever.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat & An Everlasting Meal

These two books share a section because both have been so extensively and so justly praised that I don’t feel a need to add much to the chorus.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a chatty, approachable book about how salt, fat, acid, & heat enhance & potentiate flavor. Very good for helping you improvise on a dish-by-dish basis.

An Everlasting Meal & its accompanying leftovers cookbook are basically about getting rid of the “one meal at a time” mindset (or its metastasized form, the “one meal all the time” mealprep thing) and instead seeing cooking as a continuous, almost factorio-like process of combining weekend batch cooking with a little of last night’s leftovers and a tiny bit of new cooking today, so that you can always feed yourself well, with whatever ingredients/time/executive function you happen to have. Adler would absolutely not use the factorio analogy, though: her writing style is sensual, elevated, and a little bit purple.¹ I especially love the roasted veggie salad.

The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen

I literally just found out that Bee Wilson is A. N. Wilson and Katherine Duncan-Jones’s daughter, along with Emily Wilson. Wtf.

I loved Wilson’s other food writing, especially Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, about cooking technology; First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, about how we form our tastes and how we can reform them; and The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change. The Secret of Cooking is as practical, clever, healthy, veg*n-friendly, and modern as her other writing had led me to expect. She wrote it while cooking on maximum hard mode: kids, covid, fresh divorce. Because she has kids (I don’t think Nosrat does, and Adler didn’t when she wrote An Everlasting Meal), Wilson is especially helpful in talking about timing. Sometimes you need a hot meal to already be waiting in the oven, ready to be served the second that your family gets home, even though you yourself haven’t been home since 2:00—or you need a meal in fifteen minutes—or, alternately, you need a meal where every step can be stretched indefinitely and/or left to itself while you get the baby out of whatever little baby quagmire they’re tangled up in. She has strategies for solving any timing problem.

I especially loved her five-minute butter-poached carrots (you set up the pot whenever you get the chance, then turn on the heat five minutes before the rest of dinner is ready, very convenient and very buttery) and her magic pasta (cook the pasta and the sauce at the same time in the same pan). I added spinach and peas to her mushroom, wine, and garlic version; with green fusilli, the results were swampy and murky; I think Erienne called it Shrek pasta; she also called it delicious.

Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave)

Like The Secret of Cooking, this is a pandemic cookbook. David Chang found himself trying to cook in a home kitchen for his family, like many people do, instead of Momofuku’s kitchen for fans, like very few people do. He and Priya Krishna wrote a relentlessly practical, high-flavor book about it.

I have to mention an aspect of this book that was kind of weird for me. The authors talk a fair bit, disparagingly, about white, western, European, or eurocentric cooking paradigms. But these white/western/European/eurocentric cooking paradigms are not what I was expecting them to be. Normally that kind of thing describes, like, using a lot of mayo² or underseasoning chicken. Here, it usually means fussiness, recipe-orientation, eating expensive cuts of meat, insisting on perfect technique: what I would tend to call yuppie cooking. Honestly, it’s pretty flattering. But it’s a little strange to read, because it’s not really how white people cook, in my experience. I kind of wish it were. But homeschool moms of six are not carefully seasoning and searing tenderloins daily with measured portions of spice. They’re cooking rump roast with a glug of this and a glug of that, serving it with heaps of rice & gravy to stretch the meat out, reheating the debris in gravy later for poboys, etc etc. What this book describes as western cooking seems to me much more like restaurant cooking or rich big-city professional cooking.

I think the segment of my audience that is most likely to be really annoyed by this, are the rationalists showing up from the Astral Codex Ten link (welcome, thank you, etc etc). Fortunately, we’re high-decoupling enough to just ignore that, and focus on two other things: the book offers unpretentious cooking strategies that will get you and your family fed regularly (heavy use of microwaves, repurposing leftovers, etc), and the food is literally mouthwatering. I read cookbooks a lot, front to back, like novels, for fun, and even great bookbooks rarely leave me as consistently drooly as the savory, sour flavor profile in Cooking at Home. One of the best concepts was a bowl of leftover rice, leftover brisket, and kimchi. Kimchi is juicy enough to revitalize leftover rice & beef, which both tend to get slightly parched in the fridge; it’s brightly acidic & high in antioxidants, which both make leftover food taste less leftovery; & it’s funky enough that you can kind of pretend that funky leftover flavors from the brisket are from the kimchi instead. This is easy, delicious, and something I never would have come up with myself.

1. In an herb soup recipe in a different cookbook, she says “If you like the queasily rich taste of garam masala, add the full teaspoon. I waver.” I love garam masala, but I waver a little bit at the richness of her prose. “Waver” is not a polite synonym for dislike, right now I’m reading two of her cookbooks at the same damn time and loving it, but I can’t review this book without saying the writing style can be a bit much.

2. Chang rightly loves mayo.