Stop Asking me for Recipes!
Welcome to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by distressed shut-in Becca Thimmesch. This week, I’m losing patience.
If you follow me on Instagram, you might know that I’ve been cooking every night for my small-but-dedicated group of followers and sycophants.
I’m quite careful across most of these videos to specify that I’m not using a recipe. I’ve even gone so far as to state, repeatedly, for my iPhone camera that I don’t cook with recipes.
I’ve explained this multiple times, but I’ll explain it once more for good measure. I like to read recipes and cookbooks, watch cooking videos etc because I enjoy them. I treat recipes like articles, cookbooks like, well, books.
Then, maybe a week or maybe two years later, I might be staring at a can of chickpeas or idling at the fishmonger’s counter and I’ll remember some little nugget about a salad or a piece of white fish poached in tomatoes and I’ll be like yeah babey.
So I’ll buy the fish or the chickpeas and I’ll go home but I’m just gonna cook it however I want. It might end up pretty close to the original recipe, or it might not. I won’t know because I’m not gonna root around my browser history to check.
I’m so sorry or whatever, but I simply cannot and will not sit there like a freakin nerd and read while I’m cooking. I will not go back and forth from my stove to my iPad to make sure I’m doing exactly what Miss Melissa tells me to (and I frankly don’t think she would that for me). I will never, ever do something as truly deranged as getting out a tablespoon to measure olive oil.
I will read and follow a recipe if and only if I am baking, which is coincidentally why I don’t like baking.
People always ask me how I can “just cook” and I usually deflect with something about how my parents used to work in restaurants and always cooked by eye, which is true. And I think that makes me sound a little cool and gourmet but the honest answer, I think, is just that I spent years coming home from school and figuring out how to feed myself while said parents were at work. I know that’s not a particularly gorgeous answer but it’s the truth. I was a bored, hungry, unsupervised tween messing around in the kitchen and a decade or so later I’m an extremely confident home cook with a pretty solid understanding of what I like to eat.
Anyways, that’s me. Back to Instagram.
Despite my best efforts to convey that I am, in fact, just fucking around, I’m getting 4-5 DMs per day to the contrary. Everyone’s blowing up my horn, pounding on my door, rattling my windows trying to get the recipe.
I am, contrary to popular belief, kind of a nice person, so I’ve been pretty polite in my replies. I’ll explain that there is no recipe, maybe list the key ingredients, or reference the dish which inspired mine. And then they’ll reply hmm, can you just write me the full recipe?
No, I cannot!
Even if I wasn’t also a bit of a bitch, I’m not a recipe developer. That’s like, a whole job that people get paid for. I’m just a maniac with a tripod.
And I’m sorry if this reads as rudeness or lack of gratitude. I’m asking you to instead read it as tough love.
I actually really, truly believe in you. I believe that each and every one of my sweet readers, IG followers, street harassers et cetera has the capacity to “just cook”—to riff and to experiment and to sometimes fail, all by that handful of things you have called senses.
I promise. People all over the world have been doing it for basically forever.
Recipes have pretty much always been around, of course, but they only began to hold ubiquity in the average kitchen over the last hundred or so years.
Early collections of recipes, according to my Sunday evening of research, served primarily to record and display the tastes and lifestyle of the wealthy and powerful, and thus a proxy for national culture.
Cookbooks really took hold over the 20th century, none moreso than The Joy of Cooking, which has sold more than 18 million copies across nine editions and 84 (!) years. Other sluggers include Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. These, plus maybe one or two others, took up most of the average home cookbook shelf. Until everyone went absolutely buckwild.
I have no way of confirming this, but I’m fairly confident that, between the boon in cookbooks and the absolute onslaught of food blogs, more recipes have been published between, let’s say, 2008 and now than over the rest of human history combined. Prove me wrong!
Oh, the recipe blogs.
Let me take the present opportunity to say that I am so, so tired of the whining about the little story before the recipe. I think the main reasons are obvious and do not need to be restated, so I will simply add that if you find someone’s food writing intolerable, why would you possibly want to use their recipe?
Also, that’s what you get for clicking on some ungodly link to some ungodly recipe for “better guacamole” from some ungodly website called Mom’s Munchies or whatever. Yeah I’m victim blaming!
So anyways, I’ve spent the last few days trying to ruminate on everyone’s obsession with recipes.
Am I just being really rude?
After much thought, and even though it was entirely possible as I am, like I said, a little bit of a bitch, I don’t think it’s the case this time.
Recipes were, for a very long time, less of a directive for the average person and more a means of preserving some sort of cultural identity through food. For a very select group of people, they represented wealth and status and what that means for one’s ability to be thoroughly nourished.
Then, as recipes became more ubiquitous, something changed. Recipes became more commonplace, but they also became shrouded in mystery. Everyone’s Mom or Grandma had a secret recipe or a locked box of precious index cards containing the confidential details of their famous dishes. Only years later have the children and grandchildren, finally the custodians of these long-fabled recipes, found out that, more often than not, they’re either the recipe from the Toll House bag (plus cinnamon) or they’re like, a packet of gravy mix and a Dr Pepper poured over chuck roast.
But now it seems that we’re reverting to those ancient ways, albeit with a decidedly modern spin. We don’t get our recipes from the back of the bag, we get our recipes from a gorgine blonde in a $200 dress via the swipe up feature on her Instagram. And while our Grandmothers would have rather died than revealed where they got that pie recipe from, we’re tagging BA Andy in our Instagram stories hoping that, if we got the timing right, he’ll put it on his story.
Even I, the infallible Rebecca, am often guilty of this.
(Alison, if you are secretly an Emeril Hive reader, I do have some helpful notes on swapping dairy in your turmeric lemon tea cake)
Cooking is, as I have written in the past, an increasingly aesthetic project, particularly for many in my various demographic cohorts eager to project a very specific type of domesticity (one that is woke, of course).
So my theory is not that recipe-obsession indicates some sort of wide-scale inability to cook improvisationally by my peers, but rather a buy-in to some sort of larger cultural bit in which, much like our Anglo predecessors or whatever, recipes signify our cultural worth.
The beauty, of course, of this modern form is that it’s not just for gout-riddled European nobles in like 1650 or whatever. Thanks to the ole series of tubes, recipes are for anyone with access to a screen. And when you get all your recipes from a screen, why not post the final product back to that very same screen? Seems only fair, no?
Again, I’m really not trying to scold or whatever because I’m at least a little guilty of all this shit too.
Nor am I telling you all that you can’t cook with recipes or that you’re a lesser cook for doing so. But I am asking you to see recipes for what they are: a framework. Something to consume and enjoy and maybe get some ideas from.
But Rebecca, recipes help people get into cooking!
Hmm, do they? Or do recipes just help people get into cooking recipes?
Call me “a little bit of a bitch,” as many have, but I’m going to wager right now that you’ll learn more about cooking from watching a two-minute Youtube video on like, how to sear meat than you will cooking a handful of recipes to the letter. You’ll learn more by going to an unfamiliar restaurant, ordering something delicious, and asking the staff what’s in it.
You’ll certainly learn more by making something up at home with whatever ingredients strike your fancy, seasoning as it feels right. If it tastes good, great! If it tastes bad, you learned something either way!
And learning, folks, is what it’s all about.
Emeril Update
Whew. Another year. No Emeril Updates.