A Line Cook's Rant About... Recipes

The poetry of lived experience

Hello and welcome back to The Recovering Line Cook, the home for my recipes, personal stories, and essays on all things food.

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This week, it’s the next in my so-called “rant” series. This time it’s all about recipes…

Wil

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I’d like to tell you about a type of recipe most of you pleasant, well-mannered folk probably haven’t come by. They come in several different forms.

Some consist of cryptic lists of ingredients printed out on laminated paper stained with butter drips:

Some are organised well enough to be saved to a greasy iPad for easy access to all who need them:

Some (see below) are hastily written into little notebooks warm from being kept in the back pocket of sweaty chef trousers all day.

These are the recipes that form the collective knowledge of the restaurant kitchen. They are full of gaps, as you’ve seen, often missing a “method” entirely. The spelling is a crime against writing itself. And, when there is a method, the vocabulary used is often indecipherable to those lucky enough to have never worked in such a kitchen.

I mean, look at this personal favourite I was called on to work from early in my career in London.

Step 4 - Pass? Pass what? Is that an action or did the writer give up at that point? Step 8 mentions a “filmed” tray. Using whose camera? Who even is step 9’s Bain Mare? I took this picture in the first weeks of my cooking training.

I very much had follow up questions of the head chef.

Over the past few months I’ve read some really interesting articles from food writers discussing their own relationship with recipes. This from Will Cooper elaborates on the limits of recipes and why he doesn’t focus on recipe writing himself. And then this from the fantastic Teresa Finney that gives a personal insight into the impact striving for algorithm/SEO success has on today’s online recipe developer. It was through Teresa’s article that I found this brilliant piece by the superlative Alicia Kennedy who writes about the value in food writing that isn’t the product of recipe development alone, but also recipes that “emerge… through life”.

I found that particular description meaningful to me as someone whose recipes are largely “autobiographical”, and come from dishes I’ve learned through my restaurant cooking career and being an immigrant in Finland learning about a new food culture and history.

That idea of recipes as a reflection of lived experience really appeals to me. I am one of those strange people that enjoys recipes for themselves, not necessarily with a view to cooking from them. I have a particular soft spot for recipes that don’t shy away from leaning into memoir (a genre I know a lot of online readers can find frustrating).

I’d not given a great deal of thought to the importance of photography in cookbooks before I read some of my favourite writers (including some of the aforementioned) discuss the topic this past week or so.

A debate of sorts (I mean, hardly a heated one, we’re not talking about whether pineapple belongs on pizza here¹) has emerged over the relative merits of pictures in recipe books. I think the reason why this got the attention of so many food writers is because, though they both consist of recipes in books (or online), the two styles are really entirely different cultural artifacts. It’s like comparing apples and pears. I’ll go as far as saying that though both photography-led recipes and text-only recipes both aspire to the same thing, helping someone re-create a dish, the forms through which they achieve this are as different as a cookbook and a TV cooking show.

At the risk of betraying the fact I might have really over-thought this, I’d say it’s not unlike the way both Picasso and Manet give insights into the essence of guitar-playing people, and do so through very different means.

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What we mean by photography in recipes and cookbooks is also worth being clear about. I’d say a majority of photos that feature in cookbooks are the perfectly styled “final product” images of a plated dish. Personally, such pictures don’t strike me as particularly helpful. Even with the written method alongside them, such beautifully styled and lit pictures seem to me not unlike an aspiring writer being handed a copy of Shakespeare and told “there you go, read this and write something as good.”

Totally different in utility are those step-by-step images that detail the process of making a dish. For technical things like puff pastry, boning a chicken, or, say, depicting the look of meringue during its increasing stages of firmness, there’s no question how helpful these can be for a reader hoping to get the recipe right.

I’ll admit now that pictures in cookbooks or recipes online aren’t a deal-breaker for me. When it comes to those final product shots, well, I like plating and presenting things my own way.

And as for the step-by-step pictures, I suppose they get in the way of what I love and long for in recipe writing. The unique, personal, lived impressions that a writer poetically employs to evoke their experience of cooking a dish.

Here’s a few examples that I think demonstrate this and show how relying on words alone can amount to a form of poetry that is personal and profound.

Here's Elizabeth David on making lemon curd in “I’ll Be With You in the Squeezing of a Lemon”, from the collection An Omelette and a Glass of Wine:

“Stir until all the ingredients are amalgamated and the whole mixture looks rather like thick honey, with about the same consistency.”

And Jane Grigson on an important step in making spicy prawns from her stone-cold-classic book English Food:

“Fry the garlic in oil until it begins to waft delicious smells at you.”

Grigson again from the same work describing the correct way of cooking dumplings:

“The water should never boil. A few bubbles should hiccough to the surface in a desultory kind of way.”

“Desultory”. I just love that.

And once more from the same book, because I really am a fan, when discussing her recipe for mange tout cream:

“The puree is on the point of setting when it has the consistency of an egg white.”

And another favourite example demonstrating the range of senses great recipe writers make use of from Nigel Slater in his A Cook’s Book. To really understand if his Marsala Almond Chocolate Slice is appropriately cooked, he suggests his reader:

“Listen to it. The cake should be making a very faint crackling sound. (If it’s silent you’ve overcooked it.)

Remember those painfully incomplete restaurant kitchen recipes I showed you earlier? These examples from Grigson, David, and Slater are the kind of human, lived impressions that the sous chefs and head chefs I worked under would share to help make sense of those basic ingredient lists and make certain we line cooks made their recipes satisfactorily. Not just step by step actions to take, but feelings and sensory guidance as well.

It is through such writing, I believe, that even decades of experience can be effectively shared.

The cliché suggests a picture is worth a thousand words. But there is no richer, more multi-sensory image than the one a handful of elegant, considered, and choice words can paint in our mind’s eye.

Take another example I think of often from my culinary school days. On a handout recipe I have tucked away in a folder somewhere, I have a recipe for making a classic French white sauce. The recipe, as you’d expect, includes guidance on accurately judging when the roux, a paste of flour and butter, is sufficiently cooked that milk is ready to be added.

The roux should look and move in the pan, so this recipe says, like “wet sand on a beach”.

Having known the touch of wet sand on visits to cold English beaches as a boy, what still photograph can equal the one I see in my head having read those words?

Not only does such prose give us practical insight contributing to good cookery but, like a great poem or cubist painting, delights us through its artistry.

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What’s stopping us having both, pictures and such evocative text? Are they mutually exclusive? I suppose not. But discounting the economic implications of funding photography for cook books, it seems to me as though having such rich, evocative writing alongside a photo that bluntly “spells out” what the writer described is like someone butting in to a conversation to explain why a joke you told is funny. It defeats the impact of it somehow. Similarly, no sensible publisher would put a photo in a work of fiction to help clarify a particular item, place or person a passage has described.

Nor does this kind of writing come easily. I consider great recipe writing a true form of poetry that, like all forms vulnerable to being supplanted by a more modern type, must be valued, nurtured, and protected as they are.

Alicia Kennedy is convincing on this. Here she writes:

“What I’ve noticed about contemporary cookbooks is that the instruction in text can be a bit lacking, a little less descriptive than I’d like, and perhaps the heavy reliance on photography is causing that—along with perhaps small advances, out of which comes the money for styling and photography, not to mention agents and taxes.”

Kennedy’s point reminds me of the habit book publishers have of rewarding big name social media “food creators” with book deals and elaborately photographed cook books despite little or no writing talent. The sense I get is that, lacking the literary skills of a Slater or Grigson, photos really can patch up the holes. As I said here, I do lament the recipes and writing we don’t see in print due to our generation’s Elizabeth David not having a big enough social following to merit a big enough advance to support her food writing.

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Like Picasso and Manet’s treatments of the same idea of a human holding a six string instrument, both multi-media recipes and those using words alone can both be as necessary and enjoyable. Apples and pears. I know which one excites and means more to me though. And I hope such food writers, writers I feel are closer to poets than content creators, continue to find the platforms and opportunities they need to pursue their art in an increasingly visual world.

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A final note before I leave you. A few days ago I published the first entry in my Diary of a Line Cook. This is a new series for paid subs that gives a first-hand, behind the scenes look into my working life as a cook in a restaurant kitchen. You can find it below:

Diary of a Line Cook: Entry 1

See you next time,

Wil

1. It does, don’t @ me.