Musings on Recipe Formats… | Sybaritica

The recipe printed above was taken from a cookery book I own (and reproduced here, safely I hope, under the ‘fair use’ exemption of copyright law). Now I should begin by saying that I am not going to be attempting to cook the dish in question… rather, I’d like you to take a look at the text and see if anything strikes you about it at all…

The first thing you may notice is the requirement of one ‘catty’ of minced pork. A catty is a Chinese unit of weight roughly equivalent to half a kilogram and so I probably should point out here that the cookery book in question was published in Singapore and is printed in Chinese and English.

Here is the Chinese version of the same recipe. It is produced first and it is clear that the book was translated from Chinese into English rather than the other way around as some of the English renderings are somewhat singular to say the least. On page 17, for example, we are given a method for cooking ‘Pig’s Funkcle’. It is clear from the picture that the ‘knuckle’ is the intended cut but it is also clear that this is not a mere typographical error as the unusual spelling occurs three times. Obviously, the translator seems genuinely to believe that there is an English word spelled ‘Funkcle’…

By the way, the Chinese title for the recipe (紅燒獅子頭 ) translates into the somewhat more poetic ‘Red-cooked Lion’s Head, which is actually a pretty famous Chinese dish. If you’d like to see a better, and more interesting version, take a look at the one produced by Conor Bofin at One Man’s Meat …

Anyway, the other thing I wanted you to notice (and rather the point of this post) is that actual quantities get specified for only the main ingredients (pork and cabbage). There are no amounts given for any of the secondary, or flavoring, ingredients and, except in a couple of cases, this is true of every recipe in the book.

My wife has a pretty good collection of very old recipe books (old recipes, not old books) many of which date from medieval times and read something like this:

I like reading old recipes like the one above (and it gets fairly easy once you get used to the unusual spellings and so forth), but it may surprise some people to learn that the almost scientific precision with which recipes are recorded nowadays is a pretty recent development. Even nineteenth century cookery books tend to be pretty casual about how much of this or that should be added to a dish, and use phrases like ‘cook until it is done’ rather than ‘bake at 425 degrees for 14 minutes’. It might seem, at first glance, that the modern practice seems a great development but, when I reflect, I am not so sure that is always the case.

It strikes me that in almost 40 years of cooking, I have actually only faithfully followed a recipe on just a few occasions. I read cookery books like novels but generally only to get a rough idea of how I want to cook various dishes, not as sources of culinary formulae. It is true, I must say, that in bakery, scrupulous attention to quantities is usually the order of the day, and I tend to pay attention to amounts when unusual measurements like ‘one cup plus one teaspoon’ are given, but beyond that, I view a recipe as a guideline rather than something ‘carved in stone’, so to speak…

On a related note, it also occurs to me that, in writing recipes for blog posts, it is setting out the quantities of each ingredient in advance that is the most difficult part of the task. When I am just playing around in the kitchen without intending to publish, I can add this or that until it ‘looks right’. Cooking this way (by ‘feel’, so to speak) seems natural to me but it makes determining how much of something got used after the fact rather difficult. I have been getting better at predicting in advance how much of an ingredient ought to be used for any given dish but, sometimes, I think that blogging recipes would be that much simpler of I were to follow the example of the Singaporean cookery book mentioned above. After all, the recipes in there are simple enough to follow and I am sure that the bulk of my readers simply scan my recipes for ideas rather than follow them exactly. What do you think?

I would be very curious to learn about your experience:

Do you, as cooks, routinely follow recipes exactly?
Do you, as food bloggers, wrestle with quantities when designing your own recipes?

Ciao for now…

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