A ramble about cookbooks and implicit knowledge
Recipes have evolved over the years to include more and more detail. In the Middle Ages, cryptic and elliptic were de rigeur. Take this one, 45 words including the title:
Frytour blaunched. Take almaundes blaunched, and grynde hem al to doust withouten eny lycour. Do þerto poudour of gyngeuer, sugur, and salt; do þise in a thynne foile. Close it þerinne fast, and frye it in oile; clarifie hony with wyne, & bake it þerwith.
Go to the website I got it from, and you'll see the recipe translated into 211 words of modern English, which are still well short of modern standards of specificity, neglecting to indicate any quantities, the temperature of the oven, or the duration of baking.
Now I welcome modern cookbooks. They are based on the idea that with adequate detail, a cookbook can be more than an aid to the memory of a cook who learned the basics from another cook but cannot quite remember whether the "hony" was to be clarified with "wyne" or ale. It can be a guide to self-study, the sort that still requires trial and error, but no one-on-one apprenticeship. I particularly cherish an old, batter-stained copy of the "Blue Band Kinderkookboek," a Dutch language cookbook targeted to children that is exemplary in its attention to detail and the careful attempts to replace use of the big chef's knife with child-safe, if cumbersome, use of potato peelers, food mills, and such like.
But we are often tempted to think that modern cookbooks are even more than a guide to study. They are, their authors like us to believe, a step-by-step guide that explains all the details, and therefore you cannot go wrong if you follow the recipe.
Bullshit.
Here's a dish I cooked today, described in the sort of mnemonic style I would need to reproduce it:
Heat frozen French beans over high. Cook roux of flour and roasted garlic infused olive oil until it barely browns, add milk, cook some more, season with Chachere's and Parmesan.
Sounds simple (and delicious, I promise). But let's look at the implicit knowledge here.
It turns out that to make a roux, you need a pan that is hot enough overall without any particular part of it being so hot as to burn the roux. This means, in practice, that you need something kind of heavy. If your saucepan is the stamped sheet metal variety, forget it. Or at least, be prepared to work very slowly over very low heat.
All right, so the pan needs to be kind of heavy. That, of course, is just a heuristic. Really what it needs is good thermal conductivity.
And yet, there are many people who can make excellent sauces who have never heard of "thermal conductivity." All they know is that for sauce, you use the old saucepan from the second cabinet from the left, and it works. Besides, this sort of implicit knowledge depends on the type of heat source, and it is a source of much frustration to experienced cooks switching from gas to electric or vice versa, because there are all these details that you didn't even know you knew that are now different.
Or take the phrase "cook some more." I mean, by that, of course, "cook until the taste suddenly switches from nasty porridge to tasty béchamel." Good luck if you don't know what béchamel tastes like. "No more raw flour taste," as the cookbooks often say? Bleh, doesn't work. Dirty little secret is that even when it's done, the sauce still tastes a little bit like raw flour; you need salt to mask it.
Or "add milk." By which of course is meant "add milk slowly, while stirring fast enough to dissolve lumps in the sauce, but not worrying about lumps of the sort of consistency and size that you know will dissolve just fine later."
Or even the simple "heat frozen French beans." That means "heat frozen French beans until they are just a little bit crispier than you want them to be, because of course they cook some more once you take them off the heat." And "if they are the kind that are clumped together, you need to pry them apart once they defrost a little bit, lest the cooking is uneven." And "it helps to put a lid on the pot, to keep the steam inside so it will defrost and cook the beans on top, but don't leave the lid on too long lest so much water accumulate at the bottom that the bottom beans cook to mush." Et cetera.
Then there's the issue of exactly how a roux is to be stirred, and with what utensil. The process really has two goals: to keep any particular patch of the sauce from drying out and burning, and to dissolve (strictly, to cause to go into suspension) any remaining undissolved flour. It's a lot easier with a balk whisk than with a wire whisk, or, if you prefer a wooden spoon, it's easier with the kind that has a flat side (so you can get into the corners of the pan.)
Now these are details that I know consciously. But my experience is that once you try to teach this sort of thing to somebody else, you suddenly become aware of more details yet.
And there's the real point of this post: it's hard to write teaching material if you haven't attempted to teach from it.
And that was a simple recipe.
