"There is nothing like a good old recipe.
If it has lasted, then it is good."
-- Yotam Ottolenghi
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| My grandma's cookbook 11-18-14 |
"I hate the notion of a secret recipe.
Recipes are by nature derivative and meant to be shared --
that is how they improve, are changed, how new ideas are formed.
To stop a recipe in its tracks, to label it 'secret'
just seems mean."
-- Molly Wizenberg
I don't use recipes a lot.
Recipes are rules, and, well.
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| Recipes 11-18-14 |
Anyway. When I cook, mostly I just wing it. I follow principles as a general guide, but after that I like to wander off the trail and explore the landscape on my own.
Unless I'm baking.
Baking is an exact science. It involves chemical reactions and precise measurements and combinations of ingredients and heat and cold and time.
So when I bake, I definitely stick to the recipe.
I have a shelf loaded with cookbooks full of recipes and a shoe box stuffed with hundreds more. Some of them are hand-written from friends and family, others are printed from the Internet or taken from television chefs or ripped from magazines.
You can tell easily which recipes are my favorites -- the trusty old reliable ones that I return to again and again -- because that's where the pages in the books stick together. They're the ones on the food-stained and spattered recipe cards. They're the ones copied onto sheets of notebook paper that's been handled and folded in half so many times that the paper is soft and delicate as tissue.
One of my favorites is a recipe for Madeleine cookies that a French chef jotted down on an order ticket and sent to me via our waiter.
Anyway, all of this is by way of saying I popped my pecan pie cherry yesterday.
I baked an absolutely perfect pecan pie using a recipe from a Food Network cook after watching her bake it on TV.
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| Pecan pie 11-18-14 |
Pie crust has always been a bugaboo for me. Because if the pastry isn't good, then the pie isn't good. I make fine, serviceable pie crust. But I've always wanted to be able to make a crust so tender and flaky and buttery that it makes your eyes roll back.
It finally happened. I made a perfect crust.
That fucker was as tender, golden, flaky and buttery as shit.
And it wouldn't have happened if someone else wasn't generous enough to share her time-tested recipe.
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| A tender flaky crust! |
True confessions, though.
I didn't follow the recipe exactly.
It called for a cup and a half of cold shortening, and I'd only chilled a cup. So I added a stick of cold butter instead, and it worked beautifully. And I'd venture to say my tweak made the recipe even better, because it made it buttery.
Thanksgiving is around the corner. And Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, sure, but it's also a good time to do some plain old giving.
Good recipes will be trotted out and prepared on dinner tables across the country. If someone asks you for your recipe, don't be a Selfish McStingy Pants. Cough it up. Share it. Write it down for whoever it is. Let them know where you got it from.
Good recipes have history. And that's part of the appeal -- knowing the path a recipe has traveled, whose hands and kitchens it has passed through. I love using a recipe that someone else gave me, especially if it's in their own handwriting. It's like looking at an old photograph. It's nostalgic and special. It makes me think of that person and evokes memories of a time and a place and the food we shared, and that feels good.
It tastes good too.
**(For the pecan pie recipe I used, click here.)**
