I bought some lamb shanks the other day, knowing there was a recipe for them in Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating, one of my favorite cookbooks. I’d made the dish once before and knew it was very good, but it had been some time ago, and I’d forgotten most of the detail. I got home, turned to the book and found these depressing words in the recipe, “marinate for at least two days.” I’d rather wanted to have them that evening.
And I began to think about other depressing or baffling, defeating or completely unreasonable instructions that appear in recipes. Of course there’s the apocryphal “first catch your hare” attributed to both Mrs. Beeton and Hannah Glasse although actually found in neither, and there’s the perfectly genuine “take a buttock of beefe” from The Queen’s Closet Opened, of 1655. But you don’t have to look nearly that far afield.
My overwhelming pet hate is any recipe that begins “Have your butcher ...” and then describes some process that no butcher I’ve ever met would in a million years be prepared to do: “& burn any additional hair from the pigs ears with a torch” for instance, and I just found this one at Foodista.com, “Have your butcher prepare the crown roast from two racks of loin lamb chops tied together in a circle. Have the bone ends Frenched.” Yeah, right.
This stuff often goes along with the command, “make friends with your butcher,” but it seems to me that butchers are wise to this befriending business. They don’t want to become the pal of some would-be hipster chef with ideas above his station who’ll suddenly expect them to do a lot of extra work. Butchers are understandably slow to embrace new, mercenary friendships. Who wouldn’t be? I think it’s probably best to start by making friends with the lady in the supermarket who slices the bread and work your way up.
The instruction “make in the usual way” is one of those deceptively difficult instructions. It sounds reasonable enough, and it’s fine if it’s referring to, say, potatoes, but what if you don’t have a usual way, as with—to take a random example—sauce Grand-Venour? OK, that isn’t really a random example. It’s one of the most inscrutable recipes in my copy of Modern French Cookery by H-P Pellaprat: it runs, “make a light sauce Poivrade and thicken with a few tablespoons of hare’s blood.” If only I knew how to make a sauce Poivrade, and had some hare’s blood on hand.
In truth, hare’s blood is only one of the ingredients I just never seem to have at hand. Demands for brewer’s yeast or ghee, chestnut flour or Sichuan pepper will also tend to throw me. The line “take a pig’s caul” used to throw me too, but then I found a place to buy cauls and now I keep one in the freezer, y’know, just in case.
But having the ingredients is only the start. There’s also the question of whether you’ve mastered the techniques for dealing with them. Being told to make a clear consommé is a problem if you can’t make and clarify a stock. Now, I reckon I can make a decent stock, and I have been known to successfully make clarified stocks using egg whites and egg shells, but it’s not something I’d want to take on lightly.
My kitchen skills show all the inevitable patchiness of the enthusiastic, untrained amateur. Marinating a piece of meat (a la Fergus Henderson) is fine, but larding it sounds a little excessive. I’ll happily take on a recipe that requires the bufferflying of a fish, but I balk at one that involves cooking en papillote. Baking fish inside parchment or foil sounds like an excellent idea and it certainly doesn’t sound very hard, but whenever I do it I finish up with a bag or wet gray, fishy mess. I generally stick to frying or broiling my fish, and occasionally to poaching, because it gives me a chance to use my fish kettle.
Now, recipes that demand the use of special equipment present a whole different set of challenges. I tend to avoid anything that requires a mandolin, potato ricer or piping bag (to name but a few), but I feel perfectly content using a bain-marie.
Every time I see a recipe that involves the chopping of herbs I think of using the rather elegant mezzalune that somebody gave me as a present, but when the moment comes I tend to chop with whatever knife I happen to have in my hand at the time. Much the same applies to the mortar and pestle. I do own one, and whenever I’m in a high-end cookware store I think of upgrading to one those rough, chunky granite types. But I don’t do it, because the fact is I rarely use the one I’ve got and, call me a philistine, I have yet to find a recipe where a whiz in a food processor can’t achieve much the same result as a mortar and pestle.
It would be even worse if I owned a duck press. They’re wonderful looking things and I do covet them, but even a modest one can cost a thousand bucks, and let’s face it, there are comparatively few recipes that say, “take a duck press.”
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There are some recipes that require infinitely more forethought and organization than I will ever be capable of. One of Norman Douglas’s recipes for snails, from Venus in the Kitchen, begins “feed your snails for a fortnight on milk,” which only makes me think that snail-rearing is best left to experts.
The early Martha Stewart was the queen of this kind of thing. Her book Hors d’Oeuvres is an absolute masterwork when it comes to making the aspiring cook feel like an inept trifler. Her instructions for a “Tea Party in the Library” include the words, “Prepare several types of home made mayonnaise the day before.” She might just as well say, “first build your library.”
And you know things aren’t going to get any easier when it comes to Martha’s “Grand and Elegant Dinner Party.” Here you’re told to begin by cutting a pound of tuna into precise, uniform strips, and then to cut pieces of seaweed to a precisely different size that’s big enough to wrap around them. Now, I might just about be tempted to take this on as an interesting challenge, if only the same dinner party menu didn’t require me to deal with 70 littleneck clams and 100 oysters that have to be opened “no sooner than half an hour before serving.” This is beyond my wildest dreams. It may also be a way of telling me that I don’t have enough staff.
The lady has clearly softened over the years. Her website now features a section of “quick dinner in front of the TV” recipes. The one for bean burritos starts, “Cook rice according to package instructions.”
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Since I collect old and quirky cook books, I often get glimpses into alien or lost worlds. A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes of 1861, written by Charles Elmé Francatelli, tells us that “a sheep’s pluck, properly cooked, will furnish a meat dinner for twelve persons.” I can’t absolutely swear that’s true, but I’m happy to take the author’s word for it.
I’m also fond of The Cook’s Oracle by William Kitchner (various editions from 1829 onwards) which is a wealth of useful instruction about the cooking of swan, calf’s head, mock turtle and “Suet Pudding, Wiggie’s Way.” The recipe for lark seems straightforward enough to begin with: “When they are picked, gutted, and cleaned, truss them; brush them with the yelk (sic) of an egg, and then roll them in bread-crumbs” all of which seems doable, but then suddenly, “spit them on a lark-spit, and tie that on to a larger spit.” My local Williams-Sonoma seems to be right out of lark spits.
The North American Hunting Association’s Wild Game Cookbook of 1992 (yes 1992) has several beaver recipes that require the cook to “first remove all fat, being careful not to cut into the musk glands.” Now that’s quite a deterrent if you’re like me and aren’t completely sure what a beaver’s musk gland looks like. I’d feel safer cooking porcupine which, the book tells me, simply has to be soaked overnight in salted water, then next day brought to the boil, and the process repeated with fresh water. “Your porcupine is then ready for any preparation,” says the Association.
But if you want to be truly challenged and perhaps baffled by a cookery book you really need to refer to the text generally known as Apicius a collection of recipes from classical Rome. It’s not that the book tries to be difficult, in fact it tries to be enormously helpful, telling you “how to make one ounce of silphium last indefinitely,” and why, when you’re boiling a crane, the bird’s head must never touch the water; it’s just that the modern cook mightn’t find much use for such help.
Sometimes it’s not so much what Apicius says as the way it says it. The instruction to “disembowel the pig from the gullet” could have been put a little more gently, I think. And even though I’m among the least squeamish of eaters, the recipe for udder stuffed with sea urchin does leave me feeling just a little queasy.
On the other hand, if you’re in search of a recipe for flamingo or parrot where else are you going to look? And Apicius does contain a famous recipe for dormice—ground pork and pine nuts are involved. In fact it’s the only dormouse recipe most of us know.
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OK, so if we’re aware of many of the difficult, dangerous, troubling words and concepts that can appear in recipes, then what are the positive, encouraging, confidence-building ones?
It’s always nice to see the words “simple’ and “basic.” “Foolproof” is another good one, and foolproof recipes are obviously very welcome, but you have to know who’s calling it foolproof. I’m less persuaded by Guy Fieri’s “Foolproof Turkey Breast” than I am by Julia Child’s foolproof mayonnaise, which she wrote about in My Life In France. I’m also much taken with her description, in The Art of French Cooking, of mayo made in a food processor about which she says, “no culinary skill whatsoever enters into its preparation,” which sounds massively reassuring.
Other encouragements: “season to taste” or “cook until tender”—I know the seasonings I like and I know what tender is. “Great hot or cold” is good, though in my experience really very few things are equally great both ways. Absolutely best of all is “combine all the ingredients in a pan.”
And finally a totally reassuring, simple, basic, foolproof recipe: It’s Frank Zappa’s recipe for Burnt Weenie Sandwich, which was the title of one of my favorite Zappa albums, though the recipe itself appears in The Rock and Roll Cookbook. The instructions in full read as follows, “Take weenie, put it on a fork and burn it on the stove. Wrap bread around burnt weenie. Squirt some mustard on it and bite.” Now there’s a set of instructions I think all of us can follow. Whether we really want to is another matter.
Geoff Nicholson is a writer in Los Angeles. His books include the novel The Food Chain and the nonfiction Lost Art of Walking. His other articles for Gourmet Live include “Funny Food,” and “The Art of Eating, the Eating of Art.”