Bok choi or Chinese cabbage, Chinese broccoli, Carrots, Celery root, Escarole, Lemongrass, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Yellow Finn potatoes, Shallots, Acorn and Butternut winter squash
I recognize that my recipes often leave people feeling frustrated. They lack details. Amounts, times, even ingredients are frequently a little vague, as though cooking were an almost entirely ad hoc undertaking. Some people think I am just being coy, protecting my culinary secrets behind this irritating imprecision. Some people think I am just being irritating. Few people believe me when I say I don’t have recipes for most of what I cook and that I am not entirely sure I can remember everything I put in the dish, let alone exactly how much of any ingredient.
We tend far too often to think of recipes as authoritative texts, as the final word on how make a particular dish. We want to believe in their accuracy, believe that cooking can be made relatively simple and scientific, believe that there truly is one way to make each dish. If that is true then all we have to do to succeed in the kitchen is master reading comprehension and have a decent gourmet shop nearby. We will get predictable, praiseworthy results every time.
And a lot of recipes happily play along, adopting a tone of certainty. If you want to create, let’s say, Gratin Dauphinois or onion tart or celery root remoulade, then these, the recipe dictates, are the ingredients you must have on hand and the precise steps you must take in order to end up with that dish. You only have skim milk for the potatoes? No pastry flour on hand for the tart shell? A bit short of shallots? Oven imperfectly calibrated? Then don’t bother. You simply won’t end up with the dish you desire unless you strictly obey the recipe.
I see people come to a late fall farmer’s market with a list and walk away empty-handed because none of us had cucumbers or basil or lemons (yes, people ask if we have lemons) or whatever it was they needed to make some dish. And clearly they could not amend their plans when confronted by the seasons and a pavilion full of fresh produce. They had chosen what to make and given themselves over to the recipe, and the recipe most definitely did not tell them to go to the market and see what looks good and get that and figure something out from there. Nor did it suggest that in the absence of good fresh basil they might try using some other herb, cilantro perhaps or thyme.
I suppose modern recipes can afford to be dictatorial. They may well suggest you check the local farmer’s market for really fresh ingredients, but they know that you will always find cucumbers and tomatoes at the supermarket. Who needs spontaneity or ingenuity when the modern food distribution system can provide you with a full range of crops year-round.
But a recipe is not an unequivocal solution to a mathematical problem. It is just a set of directions, and like any directions it offers one of multiple possible routes to your destination. The person offering it probably considers it the best—the fastest or shortest or prettiest—way to go and so may present it as the only real choice. But you could take a different path and end up in the same place. Deciding which way to go might depend on all sorts of conditional factors: the time of year, your skills, your esthetic sensibilities, your schedule, other people’s schedules. Even if you trust the person offering the directions enough to choose his route—if you know he has tried all the routes, know him to be sensible, find his relevant opinions sympathetic— you have to be prepared to find an alternate way should you encounter some roadblock.
Produce varies even more than traffic and road conditions. An early October tomato won’t yield the same results as an early August one. If you insist on having a tomato salad in the fall you will be unhappy if you make it just the way you did with summer fruits. You need to use more salt and vinegar and perhaps a little sugar (how much more? Well, how salty and sour and sweet do you like your tomato salad?) to get anything like the flavor the tomatoes gave you two months earlier, and there’s nothing to do about the texture. You would be far better off forgetting about that salad until next summer and trying a celery root (the dense, pale greenish orb) remoulade instead. Obviously it is not the same as a tomato salad. But it is good in its own way, and far better right now than just about any tomato you can get your hands on.
If you don’t believe me, try making it. It is easy. Just peel your celery root and julienne or shred it (why can’t I just say to do one or the other? Because I don’t know if you have an implement that makes julienning vegetables easy and I don’t know which texture you prefer and either works), add a finely sliced shallot or a more or less equivalent amount of onion (or two shallots if you like shallots (or no shallot or onions of you don’t like them)), and mix it with a dressing made of a little oil (I always use olive oil), some heavy cream or sour cream, a dash or so of paprika, lemon juice (the lemoniness of lemons varies enormously, so see how strong your lemon is and add enough juice to give the remoulade a distinct but not overwhelming sourness), a big dollop of Dijon mustard (I think you have to use Dijon mustard to get the right flavor), salt, pepper and finely chopped parsley (or maybe a little marjoram or oregano or perhaps even lemon balm). Exactly how much of each component of the dressing? Enough to make enough dressing to coat your variably sized, variably cut up vegetables well. You can eat the remoulade right away, but the flavors and texture seem to improve if you let it sit for a couple of hours so the dressing can do its work on the celery root. You could use mayonnaise instead of the cream (or sour cream) and vinegar instead of the lemon, and come to think of it you could use kohlrabi or turnip instead of the celery root. Or of course you could make something else entirely with the celery root such as a pureed celery root and apple soup, or a celery root-stuffed baked apple (apple and celery root go together nicely). Or you could make potato and celery root pancakes. Or celery root sorbet (I have actually made it—and more than once).
Is that a recipe? Well, it is a reasonably accurate description of how I make remoulade, though I admit it is probably not the easiest set of directions to follow, especially since it ends up possibly backtracking and taking off in some entirely different direction. But then that is how I think one should go about making food. Open the box, see what you have got, try to figure out what the hell it is (the Chinese broccoli is the bunched green,and just needs to be lightly steamed). Sniff it, especially the lemongrass (the slender stalks), which has a wonderful scent and can be used to particularly good effect in spicy Thai soups and curries (just for flavoring purposes; it has exactly the texture you would expect from something that looks like that). Taste it. Think about what you feel like eating and start cooking, and keep tasting and amending until it tastes good. Now that is a recipe.
