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.

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.

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.

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 make bread. Every time I make bread that is better than my standard it's because I accidentally deviated from my standard recipe. When that happens I will sometimes make a note of what exactly I did and then try to do it again, but I never got the same results that way. In fact I never get the same results with my standard recipe either. There is always variation, even when I use the same flour from the same sack.

I don't think baking is like you say at all.

I think there's a ton we can learn from chefs. Personally, I've learned a few things from Alton Brown, particularly about reproduce-ability; being able to reproduce a recipe that you cooked once that turned out well. In an interview with him (I think it was on Radiolab but not sure) he mentioned increasing the accuracy of your measurements: use a thermometer to measure heat and measure your dry ingredients by weight, not by volume.

I'd argue that recipes themselves are why a lot of people's cooking sucks. The recipes tell you what how much and how long but fail to account for the basics of seasoning, preparation and tool selection.

If people apply a formal or acquired training to recipes they'd usually vary a lot from person to person much less the original recipe

You’re missing that this is a lot of work, and far from everybody is even remotely interested in doing that. Most people would rather be doing useful or entertaining things, not cooking the same thing a thousand times to discover how much salt “to taste” means. Do not assume that everybody’s hobby ought to be cooking.

Funny timing on that simile. Right now I'm watching a Cutthroat Kitchen episode where contestants almost have to do that very thing.

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.

Well there is no mythological singular way to cook a cultural dish. Notwithstanding many regional differences, the myriad of recipes out there tend to vary in some way even if it's minimal. e.g. curry, chili

Then consider a lesson in putting yourself in the shoes of others. When I make the decision to not cook, I am not you. Capture that, and it will make sense. Unfortunately, more often than not, I found people are just looking for someone to consider below them, rather than understanding that some people just make different choices.

I think cooking takes as much time as it does modulo your skill level. Obviously someone who cooks a lot will have lots of tricks up their sleeve. Their confidence level will be high. They won't make dumb mistakes. It doesn't take them forever to chop an onion. My cooking skill level has never been high. For example: I'm really bad at coordination. If I am doing two things at once (boiling + frying), I tend to mess up timing. Something ends up overdone underdone.

Another: logistics. When did I buy that broccoli? What if I can't find good broccoli? What if it spoils? Now my plan is in ruins. This is probably the hardest part of cooking for me, is deciding on ingredients, buying them at the right time, and not letting them spoil.

Whenever I do make food, say, for potlucks, it's a sufficiently advanced process that I don't really want to repeat it every single day.

Also, I'm used to tasty food. I'm not used to bland food. Boiled pasta with store sauce is just not going to cut it, I tried. I'd need to, at minimum, add cheese to it. And boiling pasta is hardly cooking anyway.

But don't you have to start by looking at recipes before you have fully acquired this skill? It's not like anyone is born with the ability to know what temperature to cook things at.

This is really interesting and it's very much an under-appreciated discipline in cookery. Despite the whole nouvelle cuisine thing which fetishises it.

There's no reason a meal has to have loads of ingredients or loads of steps; both of these things put people off thinking they can ever learn to cook.

And despite a lot of ill-advised dogma there's no reason any particular individual meal needs to be nutritionally complete unto itself; you don't have to worry so much about X amount of protein, Y amount of starch in each and every main meal, as long as the meals you make for yourself average out as good enough.

I think at some level we self-sabotage and deliberately overcomplicate what we expect from our own cookery, or build up a need for food tradition or cookery as a traditional role for just one person in a family, as an excuse not to do it at all.

It's like deciding against playing guitar because you'll never be Hendrix.

Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.

I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.

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.

When I want to cook something new I'll grab several recipes and compare the ingredients and relative measures to get a meta-concept of what constitutes the fundamental essence of that dish. I use that as a base reference but actually cook by intuition/taste.

For me a recipe is mainly a list of ingredients, with the execution being a matter of personal preference.

See eg http://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/d...

That's how most professional cooks I've known have learned to cook, initially. Those sorts of experiences certainly help form your personal taste.

> sometimes, I know there’s a better, or more reliable, way to achieve something, but I lack the theoretic background to go there.

I think a lot of people are in this boat, but probably underestimate the utility of that theoretical knowledge. I think it's akin to being a musician-- while many people who play instruments in their spare time can likely play a few songs that are quite appealing to most people, there's probably a vast gulf in the raw, general-purpose capability of an experienced, dedicated professional or a degree-trained music student.

> High quality restaurants always seem to combine simple ingredients into an elegant „pattern“ of aroma (you see I notice good terms), something I never quite manage. I bet there’s some simply chemistry involved, some generic rules broadly applicable. I’d love to read that!

Sadly, that pattern doesn't exist. While the fusion chefs from a few decades ago tried their best to codify this (and came up with some pretty tasty food in the process, even if it is a bit passe,) it's just not that simple.

So how do they do it? Imagine your five favorite dishes... now imagine how much you might learn about them if you cooked them repeatedly for 1.5x to 2x the number of hours in a standard office job for a week? A month? A year? A decade? Now imagine that in this process, you'll have worked with dozens of other people who've dedicated their lives to creating and reasoning about food and flavors that are all also cooking your 5 favorite dishes with you? And on top of that, you're serving them to a fickle dining crowd who will throw it right back at you if it doesn't delight them? To boot, restaurant food is WAY more labor intensive than home cooking because economies of scale allow it. You have professional prep cooks that will simmer that beef stock for 16 hours to get it exactly like you want it. Things like that add so much to the final product, but you just can't put your finger on how.

When it comes to things that tongues sense-- saltiness, sweetness, tanginess, glutamates, bitterness-- there are pretty straightforward ways of reasoning about them even if the rules are a bit nebulous. Saltiness tends to tamp down bitterness which is why it's lovely with chocolate and dark caramel, for example. Sweetness tends to round out tanginess really well which is why many things from citrus glazes to high quality candies to many cocktails are so much more delicious than something that is either merely sweet or sour. When people say your sense of taste is dulled because of a cold, they're mistaken. Your tongue senses everything just as well as it did before-- but you can't smell anything. If you take a cherry hard candy and a lemon hard candy and put them in your mouth with your nose totally blocked, you won't likely be able to distinguish between them. As soon as the aroma hits your olfactory bulb, they're as different as different can be. When you sense something intensely with your olfactory bulb AND your tongue is activated, that is when your brain says "there's something in my mouth right now." That's why it's so difficult to eat in the midst of unpleasant smells, and why under-salted food tastes so boring. Playing with things sensed by your olfactory bulb-- pretty much anything you consider part of flavor that isn't one of the broad-stroke things sensed by your tongue-- is dramatically more complex.

These do it so well because a) they've spent years, if not decades, deliberately training their palate, personal taste, and understanding of these interactions, b) spend 60 or 80 hours per week cooking and understanding how these things work together, c) have their dishes are tasted, workshopped and tweaked by all of the other experienced professional cooks around, d) etc. etc. etc. It is truly the 'art' in culinary arts and the only way to get good at it is to do it a whole lot for a long time.

A really good example from my recent past is a parmesean peppercorn dressing I've made hundreds of times. One time, I was in a hurry and toasted the black peppercorns far more than most generally would, so the citrus notes totally subsided and it took on this deep toasty property. I was worried the dressing would taste burnt, but it was Fucking Magic. The people I was cooking for-- all competent and experienced cooks-- looked at me like I'd just spun gold. Black pepper in most circumstances doesn't benefit from being that heavily toasted, but it's just one of those things that you kind of have to be taught, specifically, or discover by yourself.

A good resource for reasoning about these things is The Flavor Bible.