I suppose so, but for some reason that particular saying rubs me the wrong way. With 'the proof is in the pudding', I can get the meaning, and you could substitute any food. It just means (if I understand correctly) that if someone makes good pudding, you can tell it by eating the pudding. Even if someone doesn't like pudding, they know some pudding is better than others, or can substitute some other food-of-choice here for the same meaning. I don't think the craftsman-tools saying works the same way. For instance, it leaves me with questions like: are the tools actually selected by the craftsman, or were they forced on him by someone else? The pudding saying just doesn't have all these complications as far as I can see.
If the specified procedure is incorrect, then we can't make it. It doesn't need to be an elaborate con, it could just be a reasearcher misread a measurement, or recorded the wrong number, or their feedstock was contaminated. Replication ensures that the recipe includes the secret sauce that makes it actually work.
Is this a real thing? I just bought an ice cream roulade cake the other day and was surprised to see in large print that it was "hand-rolled"; I couldn't for the love of god understand why that should be considered a good thing.
Not to single you out for an oft repeated phrase, but I've never like this set of comparisons.
Baking surely requires you to precisely follow recipes in a way cooking usually doesn't, but merely following instructions precisely isn't science. Really, there is an art of and a science of both cooking and baking. Understanding some of the science of baking is actually what enables one to productively modify and create recipes.
> I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.
Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).
If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.
But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.
I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.
> Recipes were passed down generations before any changes would be made by the introduction of new ingredients to the local agriculture.
How can you know that to be true as a fact? Do you have a time machine? And new recipes don't need new ingredients to exist. Changing the way you cook things, the temperature, the process, how you mix them, the tools you use, or even random luck can lead to new recipes.
> The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science.
Cooking is a science. If you fail to evaluate your ingredients beforehand, then you're just not doing the science particularly well. Writing recipes and interpreting recipes are arts.
I'm sorry but what you provide above is not a proof. It's what passes for a "proof" in internet forums. At most it can give you some points in a reddit argument or similar pointless exchange (which I'm glad to note we're not having) but it's really not the same thing as a proof at all. Though I'm always hopeful that on HN users will be a bit more careful with the terminology. To clarify, when you said "proof" I expected a formal proof and I was curious to see if you had one in mind. And I was curious because it would have been very difficult to provide one, given that I didn't make any formal claims.
In any case, I don't even agree that my distinction between baking and cooking is so obviously wrong. If you search the internet for "baking" you will find pages upon pages of results with confectionary items, such as cookies, cakes, bread occasionally and so on- but not dishes like beef Wellignton or sheperd's pie, which are "baked" but not generally refered to as "bakes" or "baking" (not in UK English anyway- we might be disagreeing on the grounds of different interpretations of the same English words).
>> I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.
Actualy, no, on both counts. I never received "precise instructions" as a child. I sure didn't learn to cook from my parents- like the curse of lycanthropy, the ability to cook a decent meal skipped a generation in my family. I learned to cook by watching my grandmothers and by eating the food they cooked. "Watching" did not include taking careful note of the precise quantities of ingredients used in a dish, just noting that certain ingredients are used (without restrictions on what varieties of those ingredients can be used, or what other ingredients may also be used). Later I used my memory of how a certain dish tasted to reproduce it. Occasionally I helped my grandmothers cook so I had some hands-on experience with specific types of processing of ingredients, which I find is much more troublesome for beginner cooks than knowing precise quantities.
For example, I used to help one of my grandmothers make spanakopita, a Greek spinach pie with filo pastry. That was when I was very small, before I even went to school, so too small to know anything about quantities like kilos etc, let alone remember them now. So I would only really help in the part where the filo pastry leaves are laid out in a tray, handlng them gingerly to avoid ripping them, then oiled with olive oil using a cooking brush (an easy job for a careful and methodical child's hands). Equally, when I wanted to make spanakopita for the first time as an adult I'd just use the memory of eating my yiayia's spanakopita to decide how much to use of spinach, leek, fresh onions and feta -the main ingredients of the filling, again from memory. I never looked up exactly how much e.g. spinach to use- first of all, the spinach I get from the supermarket comes in bags of 1kg and it's obvious that my (yes) baking tray would not take, say, 10kg of spinach.
As to new recipes I've never had before, my strategy is to look up some information about the dish on wikipedia, which never gives precise anything when it comes to dishes, and then see whether I can do something like that at home. Occasionally, yes, I've looked up recipes- but I've never followed one. I look up a recipe to get a feel for relative quantities, not precise, absolute values. But most of the time I don't even do that and use the proportions of ingredients that I feel I'll like.
In general, like I say above, eyballing quantities is part and parcel of knowing how to cook. I'm finding that this is hard to reconcile with some peoples' experience, but this really is the way most people cook- and the way that most people have, traditionally, cooked.
Edit: for the sake of having a honest debate, I confess that there are recipes that I've looked up, specifically recipes for emulsions like bechamel sauce, mayonnaise or a Greek sauce called avgolemono. Those require some precision (though not absolute) because, well, they're emulsions. But those are about 1% of my cooking. If I summarised my approach the other 99% of the time it would be thus: I reverse-engineer the recipes of dishes I've tasted and approximate those of the ones I haven't.
It really isn't. Like any physical craft, it takes practice, patience, some failure, but a competent home cook should be able to recreate most of the classics from a recipe book.
> Look, you can reject Received Wisdom and do your own thing in the interests of rigor, or you can cook the way your grandmother did. We all know which produces better food.
Hypothetical grandmother cooks well because she perfected the technique over a few decades.
That's great and all, but recipes are communication, and if they can't communicate _how_ to achieve grandmother results to a new person, then what in the hell is the point?
It'd be better off if the recipe just said "figure it out" then, instead of trying to imply certainty where none can exist due to stove differences.
> Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.
Except this supposed recipe isn't tolerant of anything. Eggs are still over or under done based on a minute here or there, and which way is a guessing game without the context of which exact stove.
If that were the best possible, then fine, but there's other recipes that are actually repeatable in this comment page, so what's the benefit of the grandmother recipe again?
> There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust
I strongly agree with this. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cook, I've been cooking since I was tall enough to see over the table, but one of the big things that helps is that I will take the time to find the right recipe, mostly by looking at the recipe itself and being able to visualize and taste the food before I make it, but also but reading what the author writes and deciding if I trust them.
Yes, and in many cases he's simply wrong. There are scads of cookbooks, cooking segments, and cooking shows with a "this may sound hard, but it really isn't" approach. The only thing "lacking" in their approach is the patronizing attitude of the roasted chicken recipe.
> If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.
That's not fair, I practically never follow a recipe to the letter, and mostly don't use one at all. But I read them for ideas or the broad strokes behind something I haven't made before.
> I'm not trying to pick a fight but I'm genuinely curious to see how you would disprove my statement. Like, a formal (counter) proof etc.
You've proven it yourself:
> That's cooking- not baking, btw. Apparently that requires precision, but I don't really bake.
How is baking different from cooking that baking requires precision whereas cooking "does not"? It's the same process: raw ingredients are subjected to chemical and thermochemical reactions to achieve a result. Their recipes are in the same cookbooks. They have a significant overlap in ingredients.
Where do you draw a line?
Is Beef Wellington coking or baking? Or do you go by feeling? "Today I'm baking, so I'm going to do a precise beef Wellington recipe"?
What about Shepherd's Pie? Baking is defined as "to cook by dry heat especially in an oven" [1] Exactly what's being done to the shepherd's pie (as is done to any other pies). Precision or "it's not a proper way to use it, you have to wing it"?
Or mince pie? If you have meat in it, then "it's pointless to give such precise instructions", but if you remove meat, then "apparently that requires precision", is that how it works?
> And yes, to be honest, "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire and cook them" is how I cook all my meals. There are very few things I actually measure
I am not you. And many people are not you. I presume that you learned how to cook as a kid from your parents? It means that you did receive quite precise instructions at one point until you learned how things work. And I bet that for any new recipe that you've never tried before you will look for and work with precise instructions.
Read my response: I think the point is that a recipe implies perfect ingredients + perfect preparation = predictable results, which is far from true. You can follow the recipe to the letter and still fail. You can't judge a recipe by successes, but by its repeatability (I don't care about someone else's feast when I'm trying to make MY meal based on the recipe they followed)
Skilled people without a process will always find a way to get things done. Skill begets process. But process doesn’t beget skill. Following a recipe won’t make you a great chef – it just means you can make a competent bolognese. Great chefs don’t need cookery books. They know their medium and their ingredients so well that they can find excellent combinations as they go. The recipe becomes a natural by-product of their work.
Here's an argument against using the term "ingredients" for arguments: in the real world, if you bake a cake, its ingredients are gone. In your language, they still exist (if you write a recipe for eat in mu, you can have your cake and eat it)
From that observation, I think one should conclude that using analogies from cooking, as you do with recipe in the kitchen sense is not the best idea.
>> Which is provably false for the vast majority of recipes.
I'm not trying to pick a fight but I'm genuinely curious to see how you would disprove my statement. Like, a formal (counter) proof etc.
Just to clarify, I mean that a recipe might be written as if it was a precise set of instructions, but that's not the proper way to use it. And yes, to be honest, "grab ingredients in the quantities you desire and cook them" is how I cook all my meals. There are very few things I actually measure, for instance I have a little dosimetric spoon that I use for spices, mostly beause I like the spoon though, not because I really need it to figure out how much I need of each spice. Everything else I eyball, because I know what makes sense to cook. Everyone I know who knows how to cook more than basic stuff cooks that way.
That's cooking- not baking, btw. Apparently that requires precision, but I don't really bake.
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