Your kitchen, your rules

Short disclaimer. I haven’t published or sent anything via this newsletter in a while. If you’ve been reading my stuff: nice to be back! How have you been? And if you’re new here: Welcome! I hope you stick around. And if not — no hard feelings.

I remember facilitating a workshop once, where during the “My name is Bill and an interesting thing about me is…”¹ activity one participant said something along the lines of “I really hate it when people don’t follow recipes. The recipe is there for you to follow step-by-step”.

Now, I love recipes. You might even say it’s my favourite literary genre. After hitting thirty, I even grew to enjoy the long intros on recipe websites. Especially the ones where the author serves you their life story first, childhood memories infused with spices. In a world obsessed with replacing meals with Huel (or some other type of gruel), I’m more than happy to read a mini-essay on why eating mayak eggs makes you think of your Grandma.

Answer In Progress, one of the few YouTube channels that are worth watching these days, made a fantastic video essay on the subtle value that those short (well, not so short) food essays have:

When cooking something novel, I typically try to follow the recipe, at least in spirit. In part, out of respect to the generations of home cooks that came before me. In part, to see what different stages of the process add to the dish. But there’s something discouraging about getting to a point in the recipe that calls for an ingredient that I not only don’t have, but have no way of obtaining.

There’s a running joke in the comments section of NYT Cooking that goes like “add a week to the cooking time for fetching the products”. You could always substitute, but wouldn’t make whatever you’re making less TRVE²?

Well, that’s what many a culinary influencer would want you to believe. Watch any Uncle Roger skit (I found them funny at first, before most humour got reduced to fuyioooooh). You’ll quickly learn that it’s actually frowned upon to swap one hard-to-find type of chilli for another hard-to-find type of chilli. Basil instead of Thai basil? Forget about it! Ginger instead of galangal? Are you crazy ?

Although sometimes adherence to a set recipe is—to put it lightly—fetishised online, I completely understand the desire of people to preserve the purity of certain dishes. Does the world really need chocolate hummus?

But there are consequences to preservationism. By trying to preserve a specific type of dish, we run the risk of creating an etalon, an Aristotelian ideal that never existed. In a video for the BBC, the Turkish food influencer Refika mentioned that there are at least 600 types of köfte meatballs in Turkey. Imagine choosing ONE type of köfte and making it the only kosher köfte, making all the other köftes inferior, wishing they were the one and only Köfte (R). What a sad sad world that would be.

So go on, make mistakes, cook whatever your heart desires. Make a köfte that people will call after you. I, for one, would love me an Oleg köfte. Just don’t put chocolate in hummus. There are, after all, lines you should never cross.

1. After watching Severance, I don’t think I’ll be running this particular activity ever again.

2. Lame-ass way of writing “true”. Blame my metal years.