I have a feeling that lots of people would cook a lot more if they just learned to cook food, and didn’t pay so much attention to recipes. Cooking isn’t about recipes.
I repeat: Cooking isn’t about recipes.
Don’t get me wrong: recipes can be good things. They are often treasured, passed down through the generations, and religiously adhered to. They have to taste, and smell, just right, have to trigger subliminal childhood memories of sitting in the kitchen while Grandma put a pie in the oven. You’re not just making food when you cook a recipe like that, you’re not even making a specific type of food – you’re aiming to make the exact same pie that Grandma made. That’s as it should be.
Other times, though, recipes are something you clip out of a magazine, bookmark in a cookbook, or find on the web, because they look pretty good or because you just need something for dinner… and that kind of recipe can become a prop. You can follow a recipe to the letter without necessarily learning anything about how to cook.
Cooking, in contrast, is all about making food. You’re making something to eat, and you hope it will be delicious, but it doesn’t particularly matter what it is. You can cook from a recipe, but you don’t need a recipe to cook. Even if you start from a recipe, you can deviate from it however you want – who will care, as long as the result is good?
The truth is that most recipes (when they’re not Recipes that you treasure, but just instructions for making food) aren’t that different from each other. If you googled for tomato soup recipes, picked the top ten, and arbitrarily chose a bit from this one, a bit from that one until you’d combined them into a whole new recipe, you’d probably get something pretty decent.
And most foods are like that. For any given type of food, there are hundreds of variations on how to make it, and while they won’t all come out the same, they’ll all come out good. You can stray from the instructions, make substitutions, adjust cooking times, and most things will still come out good. There are certain steps, certain themes and commonalities, that make the dish what it is. These commonalities are the bones of the recipe, and all you really need to know. The rest is frills, subject to your whims.
So, when you think about cooking (in the what-the-heck-is-for-dinner kind of way), you shouldn’t have to think about finding the right recipe, or fret over missing an ingredient or two. If you know the bones of the recipe – the basic steps of the dish you’re trying to make – you’ll be free to get cooking, even be creative.
In this section, you’ll find the Recipe Bones for many foods: how to make any kind of pasta. How to make any kind of soup. Very few recipes for particular pastas or soups (at least in the form you’re used to seeing them). Instead, you’ll find guidelines for making whole categories of food, using your own creativity to fill in the blanks. Learn the recipe bones, rather than the recipe, and you can improvise a good meal in any situation. You can experiment, and be safe in the knowledge that it’ll probably come out okay.
And if it doesn’t? That’s what learning is for. But instead of spending your time in the kitchen worrying, you’ll spend it cooking… and cooking is way more fun.