Does following a recipe leave you in a cold sweat?
The earliest written recipes were a means of passing on to another cook what went into a dish. There wasn’t a lot of detail on quantities, or on preparation or cooking. Cooking methods were probably considerably less complex than now: over open flame, in a pot over open flame, or possibly some kind of tandoor style oven.
I love this one that I found here: “Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.” It was inscribed on a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia, so the information must have been important enough for someone to write down.
So how did the modern recipe become so complex? I think many food writers and chefs want to enable their readers to recreate exactly what they envisage. But some times that level of detail can be off-putting. What if you don’t have all the tools? Do you really need to rush out and buy that one ingredient that isn’t in your cupboard?
Personally I don’t think so. I tend to use a recipe as a starting point. The recipe says use lamb mince but I have minced beef in the fridge? I’ll give it a go anyway. Would it work with diced lamb instead of mince? Maybe. With lamb shanks? Maybe not. Can’t find any honey? The maple syrup will do. And vice versa.
Judging by his face, it might have been a switch too far to put coconut sugar instead of white granulated in the BT engineer’s tea, but at least he can go home and say he tried something new!
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