Recipe Rant

True confession. I was a recipe slut, creating close to 1000 recipes for anyone who’d have me. That includes my own books, as well as hundreds for the short-lived 2000 version of Joy of Cooking, a complete revision of the 1971 classic.  

I once developed five soups a day for three months in our charming, but painfully rustic, 1810 home. Word got out, and I generated smoothies for a city shop; restaurant-style chicken dishes for a corporation in the Midwest; healthy snack foods for kids; and theme-shaped cakes for recipe cards, sold by subscription. Each recipe was accurately recorded in its time and place, always using the measuring spoons that hung by my stove. I adjusted to using those spoons, so that a stranger in Topeka could follow my recipe for, say, summer corn pudding with fresh tomato salsa, and get solid results.

But in the process of testing a multitude of recipes, I began to understand the fallacious goal of uniform results. While the same ingredients may lend themselves to a similar outcome, food like authenticity; it can’t be locked in a moment. It isn’t consistent by nature, but has a time and place. Besides, if ingredients were timeless — like the mediocre eggplant sitting on the supermarket shelf twelve months a year — why bother? Watching the seasons ebb and flow from our rural kitchen began to secure a culinary sanctuary for me. I learned that harvest would always be there in its time. Summer was easy, but even during our endless winters, root vegetables and local cheeses were on the ready. 

Meanwhile, I still earned my bread developing recipes. Increasingly. I blamed the modern passion for consistency on old Fannie Farmer. She frowned on garlic and rejoiced in white sauce. She was precise: mother of the level teaspoon. Sadly, more than a century later, as recipe developer, precision become law for me too. But it couldn’t capture the endless variations every cook experiences facing the stove: the size of the pot, the temperature of the room, the strength of your garlic or jalapeño, the intensity of the flame. How can standardized recipes account for the seasonality of produce? Should an August tomato recipe receive the same treatment as a rock-hard tomato from afar?  

This realization put me at odds with modern recipe standardization. Worse? Precise recipes are often coupled with the desire to belittle its follower. If you stick to a recipe exactly, it has to turn out perfectly, right? If the results stink, it’s your fault. It doesn’t matter that a peach pie is baked with odorless peaches, in a kitchen too hot for rolling out dough, or that the jalapeños are twice as hot this week. It’s your fault because you followed the recipe, every measurement leveled. 

I sometimes wonder how we got here, to a place where it’s assumed everything’s replicable. It’s like trying to relive last year’s Cape Cod vacation by combining the same ingredients. Stir together the same family members, rental shack, date of arrival. But this year, a storm kicks up, so you watch old Marx Brothers movies instead of going to the beach. A new joint offers better-then-ever Wellfleet oysters, which taste of salt and sex. Your last day it hits 100 degrees, so you exult in cold beer as never before. But your vacation will never be the same.

Does it have to be? 

There are no replicable experiences, nor “authentic” dishes that can be frozen in time. They’re ruled by place, season and things beyond our control, just as we are.

Ain’t life grand?  

Adding Salt

I think of salt more than I should. My explanation of salt’s use in cooking is based on a radically simplified history of recipe development. It goes like this: In the beginning, there were no recipes. Younger people, family members, apprentices, indentured servants and slaves worked with older people and learned. Any recipes for us common folk were mere suggestions. This is because it was assumed we knew how to crank meat over a flame or to simmer tough foods in a pot until tasty. Centuries later, I became a recipe creator, codifying what really couldn’t be captured, not exactly. Another problem? I couldn’t add salt to my written recipes in the way I used it.

Forever Soup

I lived in a charming but run-down colonial house in New England, where I begin work on the soup chapter for Joy of Cooking. The giant hand-cut beams in my kitchen stood above my head as I cooked. Sometimes our cat, Honey, crouched on them, watching while I stirred our soups: Tortilla, Georgia Peanut, Hot and Sour, Mulligatawny, Split Pea, Grape Gazpacho, Senate Bean and dozens more soups for the new century.

I was born to the task. Soup’s so much a part of me that my husband says my headstone should read, “One Hundred Years of Soup.” My great-aunts grew up nurtured with bowls of thick mushroom barley and a sour sorrel soup called schav. As girls, Gussie, Ray, Ida, Fan and Grandma Rose rode the subway north to the Bronx, where they tied bows for hats all day, paid by the dozen. Standing up on the way home in a crowded train, one of them often fainted and then quickly revived. But after climbing the tenement stairs home, they sat down to bowls bigger than their heads, simmering soup ladled inside. Like them, I’ve always wanted soup.

Cooking soup again and again is like revisiting an old friend over the decades. No need to catch up; we take off where we ended without a hitch. A sauté, followed by my liquid of choice, then a simmer and puree, or not. I slip into this easy rhythm, adding ingredients as one might reminisce. 

Soup’s malleable and tolerant, unlike life itself — or so it seemed at a time when my husband was out of work, our home needed repair and the lure of parenthood beckoned. Its liquid can be anything — stock, tomatoes, coconut milk or that oft forgotten ingredient, water. Thicken by bubbling it off; thin by adding more. Fill a dollar mug and sip to turn a nasty day right again. Soup asks for so little and gives so much. Simmering water with a slivered leek and diced potato, followed by a pat of butter and plenty of salt, make a meal.

Work on Joy was not the way I was accustomed to cooking soup, through-sickness-and-in-health-till-death-us-do-part. My laptop waited open on the kitchen table, away from those bits of minced onion that might fall on its keys. The kitchen island was filled with little bowls, each with colorful ingredients on the ready, cubed tomatoes and carrots, slivered basil. The top of the funky but powerful Vulcan was covered with clean pots in varying sizes, all waiting.

I would start by imaging the taste in my mouth that each soup required to become fully realized. Nothing fancy, something seminal, it was Joy after all. Why mess with a solid spit pea soup because I could? Rather, I wanted to produce the most classic diner split pea ever. Sure, I remembered my spoon slipping into an almost solid version in Amsterdam that was redolent with the aroma of coarsely ground pepper. And I knew that crisp croutons were a critical topping. But those touches could be optional. The soup needed to be seminal first.

I would begin on my computer. Procedure and key ingredients, a few suggested ideas below, formed the armature that I filled out once cooking commenced. That was the time for precision, when those leveled spoons and cups where vital. The days were long, but each night four or five soups greeted my husband on his return from work. We were lean on funds, and the soup was cooked. So, like it or not, soup was dinner. Then soup was dinner again and again — a buffet of soup for four months until, like Max with the Wild Things, he screamed, “NOW STOP,” before driving off in the snow to buy a steak. But the next day, little bowls of ingredients spilled out onto our kitchen island, waiting to stir into soups once more.

Why do I always want soup? It runs in my veins not by heritage alone, but for stability too. Truth is, it makes them happy with hydration, and so I remain upright. Or so my doctor told me after I fainted more than once. More liquid, more salt keeps my blood pressure from dipping too low so I don’t pass out. So, as ever, food keeps me conscious. Like my aunts, I need soup in more ways than one.

That’s always been true and my mom knew it too. Instead of the pearls my sisters inherited, she gave me my great-grandmother’s ladle, its deep silver bowl at one end, a curved flourish at the other. Slightly tarnished, it stands upright with my stirring spoons in a crock by the stove, ready.

Let me backtrack a bit. I didn’t start out with a proper respect for salt. That’s because there is so much salt in restaurant food that, after an otherwise stunning meal, I’m up all night swilling water. Maybe there’s too much salt added because it’s the easiest replacement for good, simple seasoning. Maybe I’m just sensitive, but I tend to use less. When I was young I lost a job working for a famous cookbook maven because I refused to pour salt from its box right into the pasta water while counting slowly to ten.

When I started developing recipes for a living, I began to notice how I cooked, because I had to write everything down. The hanging measuring spoons and cups next to my battered Vulcan stove were there to warn me: Measure! So, I noticed how I naturally added salt. And I never added it just once, as mandated in my recipes.

The only way to cook with salt is to layer it. (Yes, this works well with other ingredients, but we use salt in all our food, so it’s especially important.) When you add salt in the beginning, as you might add it to a soffrito, the onions and oil or butter used to start off a risotto, or to lightly floured meat you’re searing for a stew, it becomes one with the ingredients, integrating into their flavor. Later, as you’re cooking, another small addition continues to build on the initial foundation. To finish, salt’s an adjustment to taste, the cherry on top, adding balance to the dish, giving treble to that dark stew, or the squeal of delight atop your brownie.  

I can’t very well tell my recipe readers: Add a touch of salt here, here, and here. And if I did, my editor would cut it out. So generally, I have to specify the amount in the recipe and then mum’s the word. So, ignore your recipes and integrate salt. Go lightly, very lightly, as less salt is needed when you layer it. More importantly, your food will taste better.

Amy Cotler's short pieces have appeared in various publications, including Guesthouse, Hinterlands (UK), The Rambling Epicure and Bright Flash. Before turning to creative writing, Cotler worked as food writer, cooking teacher and cookbook author. Currently, she lives in Mexico. Visit her at amycotler.com.