How Hard Can It Be to Follow a Recipe?

By Bill Knott
Viva
Nigella Lawson. Picture / Supplied.

As an idea, it was a recipe for disaster. Take one much-loved website, thoroughly cleanse it of all useful material, add a spoonful of public outrage and 200,000 signatures on a petition, then backtrack furiously.

Whatever the motive behind last week’s suggestion that the BBC Food website be closed, thus removing 11,000 recipes from the public domain (and one theory holds that the BBC knew it would provoke a backlash), it has highlighted the status that recipes now enjoy in public affections.

Recipes, of course, have been around as long as cooks. They are our friends in unfamiliar terrain: precise lists of ingredients and instructions we can use to create masterpieces that will amaze family and friends; that, at least, is the plan. In practice, things frequently turn out very differently.

The frustrations of the home cook are nothing new. The first recorded recipes were inscribed on wax tablets in Babylonian cuneiform, around 1,600 BC. And, ever since recipes have been published, there have been recipes that don’t work.

Sometimes, the fault lies at the recipe writer’s kitchen door. Mistaking teaspoonfuls for tablespoonfuls, imprecision (how big is a “medium” onion?), or even the complete omission of vital ingredients: all have baffled home cooks for centuries. It is no surprise that our most popular cookbook authors - Delia, Jamie, Nigella - are renowned for their triple-tested, trustworthy recipes.

When a recipe in a popular cookbook strays from the tried-and-true, it can create pandemonium: the River Cafe’s Chocolate Nemesis, for example, had 1990s Middle England in turmoil as attempts to bake the “best chocolate cake ever” resulted in leaden cowpats (tip: the recipe works if you halve the ingredients).

The River Cafe cookbooks were the first to tell you how to make your favourite restaurant dishes at home. In the past, recipes were written by home cooks for home cooks: today, a dinner party just isn’t a dinner party unless you start with Ottolenghi’s seared cuttlefish, move on to Pitt Cue’s pulled pork and finish with Le Gavroche’s Delice glace au Tokaji.The trouble is, domestic and professional kitchens are different places: knives are sharper, pans heavier and ovens hotter. And simply scaling down quantities does not guarantee the same result: you cannot turn gallons into teaspoons.

Even home cooks with shelves of books often only use a couple of dozen recipes: Gordon Ramsay, The Hairy Bikers and Rick Stein beam down from the kitchen shelf while you cook lasagne from a recipe you first used at university. But this has not slaked our appetite for books. On top of the 3,000 books published each year, the unstoppable rise of food blogs and cookery websites now offers a bewildering choice. Just how many ways are there to roast a chicken? Five hundred and nine on the BBC Food site alone.

Many “new” recipes are simply embellished versions of other people’s recipes, a noble tradition of culinary larceny that goes back to the 18th-century cook Hannah Glasse, if not further. If you don’t want to be accused of plagiarism, you can always chuck in a superfluous ingredient and claim the recipe as your own; that many of these recipes do not work is hardly surprising.

It is not always the writer’s fault, though. Some people just shouldn’t be allowed near a kitchen, let alone a recipe. A friend in Greece hired a local girl to cook one summer, gave her a pile of recipes and left her to it. Later on, she was startled to find the girl in the garden, pouring tomato sauce on to the compost heap. My friend asked her what she thought she was doing.

“But,” she protested, “the recipe says ‘reduce the sauce by half’.?”

The Sunday Telegraph

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