'What I want in a recipe'

"We live for the wow!" Yotam Ottolenghi

Following on yesterday's lunch I thought I would consider in more detail those words that make up the title of this post - from one of Deb Perelman's recent Smitten Kitchen post. So here are a few random thoughts.

As I wrote the other day I was considering making these Perfect oil-roasted tomatoes for yesterday's lunch party and with the intention of serving them in the fashion shown in this very gorgeous photograph.

I was sucked in by the photographs - there were two more - a before and after of the recipe. I was also sucked in by the simplicity of it all. Gather your tomatoes - cut up - or - not - depending on your size and chuck into a pan with the usual suspects - some kind of alium, garlic, herbs and loads of olive oil - almost to cover. Roast in a slow oven for several hours - and hey presto - what you get is like the above and how hard can it be to make a slice of toast topped with them, look good?

Well they almost did. I mean I knew that my finished dish would not look anywhere as elegant as this - and alas I didn't take a photograp so I can't show it to you. I burnt my toast somewhat - beyond the mildly charred edges shown here. Also I have never mastered that 'rub the toast with a cut clove of garlic 'thing. The toast collapses under the pressure, the garlic remains just a piece of cut garlic, having not yielded up any juice. So a waste of time in my book. And in spite of following the recipe to the letter, only the very top layer of tomatoes and onions, became interestingly wrinkled and caramelised. The rest were just soft and breaking apart. Well, of course, maybe hers were too. They probably selected the most appetising looking pieces carefully, and then artfully arranged them on the toast. I just picked up a slotted spoonful of them and ladled them over the slices of almost burnt toast, finally drizzling a little of the oil over them.

So there were more tomatoes, less toast. And look, they tasted OK. A bit better than OK I guess, but not superbly intense like oven dried tomatoes do. And they were not 'wow' and I guess in one word that's what I want in a recipe. And so does Yotam Ottolenghi as he tells us how much he depends on the verdict of his recipe taster Claudine Boulstridge:

"When Claudine says something is nice, it isn’t very good. When she says wow - when she says extraordinary, the best I’ve ever had - you know you’ve got something. We live for the wow."

Were my tomatoes better than nice? Maybe but they certainly weren't wow.

Alison Roman also raved about how wonderful it was to have a jar of them in the fridge:

"Anything goes. ... honestly, do whatever you want with them, they’re agreeable and impossible not to love."

and I now have that jar - as shown here. I also have a smaller jar of the leftover flavoured oil. And both of these 'extras' can indeed be used in other ways, which I have yet to experiment with.

And perhaps that's something else that I want from a recipe. Ideas for what to do with the leftovers - I almost always have leftovers. And if it didn't turn out to be wow, to look on the bright side, maybe it will stimulate me into thinking of how I could improve upon it. And I can think of three ways, no more, straight away. Slightly less oil - I actually added a tiny bit more than the recipe said, because it didn't look to be enough when I looked at her 'before' picture. A slightly higher temperature and a shallower pan. Maybe a shorter time with the lid on and a longer one for another time. However, I guess this is a making the best of an unsatisfactory outcome rather than a good result.

And is 'wow' what I really want from a recipe anyway?

I could probably count on the fingers of one hand how many recipes in my life have achieved the 'wow' and an immediate 5 stars. This is one of them - Ixta Belfrage's Fish poached in charred tomato broth (Jono and Jules). It was so wow that I made it again some time later, and, you know, it was not quite as 'wow' the second time. Only by a tiny margin I hasten to add, and I shall try again, because perhaps, I did something different the second time. I do, for example, vaguely remember that the paprika aioli that was added at the end was runnier than it had been the first time, although that shouldn't have mattered anyway. Or maybe it was just the fact that I had tasted it before. I knew what I was expecting. There was no surprise.

If I am honest with myself, I do want 'wow' if I am cooking for somebody other than my husband, although on second thoughts, maybe I particularly want 'wow' from him because he is so difficult. "There I said it", as my younger son would say. And if I am even more honest I want the 'wow' because I want the praise and the recognition. And it seems that I don't think I can get that kind of 'wow' with something that I have devised myself. All I have done on these more formal occasions is to choose a recipe from a recipe writer great and then sort of presented it as my own. If you can read you can do the same.

Or can you? Because:

"even following a recipe to perfection does not necessarily build confidence or skills. It is a little like the difference between following Google Maps’ directions, and actually knowing your way around." Katrina Pavlakis

Even following the directions does not necessarily take you to the right place. I'm sure you've all got GPS stories where the GPS told you the wrong thing - like go down this road and you will get to home on the other side of the Yarra, although there is no crossing place. Or drive down a track - not a road - down a steep hillside. A recipe perhaps, doesn't usually tell you the wrong thing, but it can certainly mislead you by leaving things out, telling you things like - peel a capsicum - without telling you how, or being generally vague. And here I will digress and once again lead you to Julian Barnes and his essay on how to make Elizabeth David's Minestra di pomidoro (tomato soup), with reference to the few words 'melt the tomatoes' in the recipe:

Melt? Melt a tomato ? Even a chopped one? The implausibility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you are south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just at that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the anxious pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten-minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe.

For several stressful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt”.

Then with a cookish oath I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them…

It's justifiably famous. He decimates the entire recipe in the same manner, for the recipe is not really very clear. Not for the inexperienced cook anyway. And many are not. I do however think that anyone could have a go at it.

And what an experinced cook wants from a recipe may not be the same as an inexperienced one. But we are talking about me - what I want. Well there are a few things that bug me about some recipes. There are a few cooks who do not give you an ingredient list at the top of the recipe. Nik Sharma is one and Nigel is too sometimes. Nik Sharma maintained that it makes more sense to highlight the ingredients in bold at the appropriate point in the recipe. No, no, no.

For me I want the ingredients listed in the order in which they will be used, together with a measurement - be it spoons, weights, or other measuring tools, and also with instructions as to how to prepare them. Then I can assemble them all in their 'ready to go' form. And here I add in a plea to separate out the same ingredient into it's two measurements, if some of it is being added at the beginning and some later. Otherwise you may fall into the trap - and I often do - of adding all the oil, or all the butter - or whatever - the first time you come to it. Even if I have read the recipe through at least twice before beginning I still do this sometimes. I did it yesterday!

Then I want step by step - separated by paragraphs or numbers or something - instructions, with ovens being turned on at the appropriate point, tins greased at the beginning - and so on. Timings are useful, but shouldn't be exclusive - temperatures vary as does the resilience of the ingredients - are your tomatoes squashy or solid? It's more useful to know what your dish should be looking like or smelling like. If there is a tricky process an illustration or photograph would be useful too.

"the second-most important advice in cooking (and life): just look, really look." Rachel Roddy

They do say to taste, taste, taste as well, but I'm not sure of that. Sure you might know enough to know that something has to change - something's missing, it's not the right texture ... but it takes experience or even real skill to know what to do about it. Although it's uncanny how a squeeze of lemon often does the trick.

Yesterday's pudding was undercooked in the middle - it was a sponge kind of topping to some apricots and marmalade. I did know that it was undercooked the skewer test did not pass and it was very wobbly However, I really had to serve it. It was getting late, and some of my guests were probably wanting to go home - they had long drives to confront. So serve it I did, and it tasted alright, but obviously not good. Slop not sponge. Here we have a mistake in the recipe of a definite time - 35 minutes - more definite than, say 35-45 minutes. So stupidly I took that on trust and did not put it in earlier. I should have now that I think of it, because I had made a 1 1/2 quantity of the recipe. I also think the temperature should have been higher.

What about my main dish - another Alison Roman recipe - Braised chicken piccata. I suppose mine did look more or less like this one, and I do think the dish benefited from having been cooked the day before and then reheated the next day. My chicken was not as gloriously browned - it would have taken much longer than the suggested 8 minutes to achieve that, but that's really down to my impatience than anything else. My capers did not crisp like they should have. I don't know why but the garlic slices with which they were cooking were on the verge of burning so I had to cease the cooking. It might have been better to cook them separately. Really though this was an example of something that turned out - as usual - better than average, but not 'wow'

I probably cook from a recipe only once a week or so. Mostly I am either just reheating something - as tonight - quiche - or I am cooking something from what's in the fridge or what I've picked up from the supermarket today, or been gifted by Monika. It's a different kind of cooking. No recipe involved, although indirectly everything I cook has been informed by every recipe I have ever followed in my life. And I definitely began cooking from recipes and from the years of observing my mother and those French ladies cooking. Simon Hopkinson had a rather more romantic notion of this kind of cooking:

“It is important to cook in the right frame of mind (we are not talking everyday chores here) and to do things in the right order. Ergo: feel hungry; go out shopping with pen and paper and money. See good things, buy them. Write down further items that will accompany previous purchases. Come home. Have a glass of wine. Cook the food and eat.”

It's also a bit more pedantic in that I certainly don't 'Write down further items that will accompany previous purchases'. Nor do I have a glass of wine - that's for when I'm eating - and then only at the weekend or on special occasions.

As I said it's a different kind of cooking and I don't think has ever achieved a 'wow'. Maybe once - a smoked trout and beetroot quiche that I thought was an original 'me' recipe at the time, but which was, of course, not. I do achieve a great deal of satisfaction however, if it is tasty, which is probably in part because I am not trying to reproduce somebody else's idea. I have no image of what I am striving for.

So are recipes a bad idea. Dan Lepard - one of the UK's big baking celebrity chefs - said of recipes:

"One agent told me, “forget recipes…no-one’s interested. They can Google for that. What readers want from a cookbook is lifestyle, an enviable homely lifestyle that they might in their dreams aspire to one day”. Ouch." Dan Lepard

Which perhaps is another thought for another post sometime.

I do think that recipes are important however - for beginners in particular. And I have to say here that the cookbooks that most annoy me are those that are supposedly telling us how easy it is to cook and how we shouldn't be hidebound by instructional stuff, and then they give you pages of scientific diagrams and background about Maillard reactions and the like before you even get to anything that remotely looks like a recipe. Much better is Elizabeth David's vaguenes,, Nigel's brevity and Ottolenghi's precise instructions and clear layout.

Elizabeth David may have been vague, but look - Julian Barnes had to think and devise his own way to melt tomatoes. And I bet the soup turned out to be delicious anyway. When I was a novice cook I probably made that recipe too. And yes it was delicious.

For us mere mortals I think a recipe is probably the only way to achieve 'wow'. We are unlikely to achieve 'wow' from a fridge-raid. We don't have the inspiration to add that one little ingredient that makes all the difference - like the crushed cardamom seeds in last night's pudding. My pudding was not good - far too undercooked, but the subtle flavour of the cardamom was indeed there - and noticed - and I would never have thought of adding it on my own.

And we need 'wow' in our lives every now and then.

“When I test a recipe, I’m looking for great ‘wow’ flavour, clear instructions, beautiful results and a method that feels easy. Simple means someone can cook with confidence and get great results with no stress.” Claudine Boulstridge

There will be none of that tonight. Just reheating quiche, which unlike braises and stews, does not benefit from reheating.

YEARS GONE BY

November 3

2025 - Recipe problems - they still exist - what a coincidence - sort of the same - even including Elizabeth and Julian. Different enough, I hope to warrant a read of today's post.

2024 - The rule of 1-2-3 - spritz

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Just a thing?

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - So much cheese - muhlama and pide kaseri

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Nothing