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Recipe Reflections: In Defense of Not Following Directions
by
Nicki Leone
Last week I offered, sort of on the spur of the moment, to cook dinner for my girlfriend’s band. They had been hard at it for hours, practicing cover tunes and jamming on originals and because the only place in the house where the drum kit can be set up is in my library I had been banished for several days from my beloved room full of books to the kitchen—where the only books I could get my hands on were cookbooks.
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 was to ferret out new recipes from the 500+ cookbooks I already own (although I still reserve the right to add to the collection). So while my girl and her friends banged away in the other room doing a rather startling rendition of L.A. Woman, I pulled out a battered and dusty copy of The Mediterranean Kitchen by Joyce Goldstein and paged through it. I decided I would make the Seafood Risotto with Tomatoes and Gremolata.
The thing you need to know is that (1) I had never made Risotto in my life, and (2) I didn’t know what Gremolata was. (It turned out to be a combination of lemon, garlic and parsley.) I picked it partly because my girlfriend likes scallops, partly because it looked like I already had most of the ingredients on hand and partly because the list of ingredients simply appealed to me.
This is pretty typical of how I approach cooking; an innate assumption that I can cook anything if I have a book to tell me how to do it, coupled with a kind of general faith that if I like all the individual ingredients, I’m sure to like the whole dish. Add to this a certain casualness (some might call it laziness) when it comes to actually following the directions in recipes, and you will understand that when I cook it is very much a hit-or-miss proposition. Whatever I’m making will probably be edible, even good, but there is no guarantee that it will be great. And no guarantee that if it does turn out exceptionally well, I’d ever be able to make it again. People who accept my dinner invitations do so at their own peril.
I didn’t pick up these cooking habits from either my mother, who is a meticulous cook, or my grandmother who was happy to simply make the same eight to ten recipes she knew by heart over and over again. In fact, both my mother and grandmother have been known to shake their heads at my apparent lack of discipline in the kitchen. But I did find justification for my eccentric approach in the writings of a man named John Thorne.
In an age when “cooking” seems to be the sole domain of dieticians or celebrity chefs, when food is all about either the calorie counts or the rarefied tastes of expensive and obscure dishes, John Thorne is an oddity—a man who rejects food fads but revels in unusual tastes, who finds Martha Stewart too bland, Paula Wolfert too snobby and Rachel Ray rather silly. He produces a hard-to-find newsletter called “Simple Cooking” and every five years or so Farrar Straus Giroux collects his essays into a book. My first exposure to Thorne’s idea of food writing was in his book, The Outlaw Cook, which opens with a rather lengthy quote from The Tin Drum about making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan:
Klepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured movements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery. When the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water into a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his body, reached under the bed and produced a plate encrusted with grease and tomato paste. After what seemed like a moment’s hesitation, he reached again under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under the bed . . . After providing me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense portion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of his noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato paste to which, by deft movements of the tube, he succeeded in lending an ornamental line; finally, he poured on a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate out of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste, sprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share, and motioned to me to do likewise . . . Strange to say, I enjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp's spaghetti became for me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have measured every menu that is set before me.
I was instantly both captivated and horrified by the passage, but “captivated” won out when later on in the essay that Thorne calls “The Outlaw Cook” he says how Gunter Grass made him “aware, against the force of all my upbringing, of a denied appetite, of a repressed and forbidden hunger.” Thorne, in turn, brought home to me in the most vivid way that you can’t write about food without writing about EATING—and next to sex, eating is one of the moments when we are at our most primal, most basic, operating on sheer instinct. I am suspicious of food served as if these instincts do not exist, and tend to revel in the kinds of foods that tempt us to indulge in them. The risotto, it seemed to me, was the kind of dish that called for indulging those instincts.
Joyce Goldstein’s instructions for Seafood Risotto were specific and explicit. She does not trust her readers to have “instincts.” You can see a copy of the recipe below. But once I returned from a quick trip to the supermarket with a pound and a half of bay scallops, a bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley, some rice and a lemon, I only paused to look at the book once. The recipe itself condensed in my head into a few salient points: That you should heat up the stock and keep it hot, and add any liquid from the can of tomatoes. That the scallops were cooked separately, and added at the last minute, and that the rice needed to be sautéed in butter before you started adding any liquid, which you then did in stages.
Everything else—the amount of each ingredient, the time you allowed for cooking, the order in which things were to be added, I glossed over, supremely confident that it would all be obvious and that, while my instincts weren’t always right, I could hardly go wrong with a dish that just had tomatoes, onion, lemon garlic and parsley in it. So the “3/4 cup chopped fresh parsley” became simply “one bunch of chopped parsley.” The “2 tablespoons freshly minced garlic” became several large cloves. And the “1 1/2 cups diced onion” was simply one medium-sized onion while “2 Tablespoons of lemon zest” was simply the zest from one smallish lemon. I didn’t measure out the olive oil to cook the scallops, didn’t measure out the butter to sauté the onions. I’ve cooked enough things in pans over the years to know about how much oil and butter would be needed. The only thing I bothered to measure was the rice, and really, the only reason I did that was because someone gave me a collection of measuring cups in odd sizes for Christmas, and one of the sizes was the required two cups. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have just eyeballed it, and probably rather badly.
I didn’t even measure out the stock, which I really should have done, since there is only so much liquid that two cups of rice can absorb. As it was, I had already started the onions sautéing when I discovered that although the recipe called for six cups of chicken stock, I only had a box with one quart on hand. I peered into my pantry and found I also had a quart of seafood stock so I blithely poured both into the saucepan together. For those of you aren’t counting, that’s eight cups of liquid, not six, and that is before I added the leftover juice from the tomatoes. I compromised by leaving the top off the pan and letting the liquid boil down some. But there is no telling how much liquid I ended up with for the rice—something more than six cups, maybe a little over seven.
This is the sort of thing that keeps me from being able to reproduce dishes in the kitchen perfectly. But at the same time, my inclinations to substitute, estimate, guess and adapt aren’t habits I ever want to break. Thorne writes in his latest book, Mouth Wide Open, that instruction is the least important part of any recipe. One recipe can function “as a sort of fulcrum to shift my thinking about another one,” Thorne writes in a flight of philosophical fancy. He had been trying to make a recipe off the back of a box of pasta called “Fusilli with tomato and green olive sauce” and was being rather cavalier with the directions. “The result,” he said, “was a dish that retained some connections with both but fell more directly in line with our taste.” What he ended up with was more accurately described as “Gemelli with onion, bell pepper, black olives and tuna” Like me, he had shamelessly substituted, estimated and approximated to suit his own tastes and make use of what was already in his own pantry. “Surely,” he concluded, “an important aspect of any recipe is its use as a tool for understanding other recipes.”
Recipes are actually about relationships—about the relationship between rice and stock, lemon and parsley; about how onions liked to be cooked slowly in butter, but scallops quickly in a simmering broth. How the former taste best when used as the foundation of a dish, but the delicate and flavorful seafood, or the bright, fresh taste of tomatoes, work best when added at the last minute. In other words, recipes don’t just tell you how to make risotto; they teach you how to cook.
As the rice sautéed, become opaque and pearly white, I poured the stock bit by bit into the pan, once again disregarding Goldstein’s careful instructions to add it a precise half a cup at a time and relying on my sense of taste and smell to tell me when I had added enough. When I thought the rice looked like it couldn’t take any more liquid, I added the tomatoes, then the lemon and parsley, and—taking a chance—a clove of very finely minced garlic. Lastly, right before serving, I stirred in the scallops that had been keeping warm in their juices in another pan.
The end result was amazing. As I served out plates and forks and let the band dig in, silence briefly descended. “My god,” said the drummer, “this is incredible.” My girlfriend’s comment was a little more succinct. “Shit” she said, with reverence. I had, it turned out, made the perfect risotto on my first attempt, cooking mostly by instinct. John Thorne, I think, would have been proud.
Seafood Risotto with Tomatoes and Gremolata
Adapted from The Mediterranean Kitchen by Joyce Goldstein.
[Note: Ingredients in parentheses are what I used]
Serves 6
5–6 cups chicken stock or fish stock combines with juice from the tomatoes (I used half chicken and half seafood stock)
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/4 pounds crabmeat, picked over or bay or sea scallops, or medium shrimp, deveined
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3/4 cup unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups diced onion (one medium onion)
2 cups Arborio rice
3 cups diced canned Italian plum tomatoes, juices added to the stock (one large can)
2 tablespoons freshly minced garlic (two large cloves)
3 tablespoons lemon zest, covered in 2 tablespoons lemon juice (zest from one small lemon, covered in the juice from half of the same lemon)
3/4 cup chopped fresh parsley (one bunch)
Heat the chicken stock to boiling in a saucepan, then reduce the heat and hold it at a simmer.
Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan or skillet over medium heat. Sprinkle the shellfish with salt and pepper, add it to the pan, and sauté it quickly. If you are using crabmeat, just warm it in a little butter for a minute.
Eat the butter in a wide heavy saucepan over law heat. Add the onions and cook until translucent, about five minutes. Add the rice and cook, stirring to coat with butter, until opaque, 3 to 5 minutes.
Add 1/2 cup hot stock and cook, stirring constantly, until the stock is absorbed. Continue adding the stock, 1/2 cup at a time, and stirring until the rice is almost completely cooked. Add the tomatoes, garlic, lemon zest and parsley and continue to cook. A minute or two before the rice is perfectly cooked, add the shellfish. Season with salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle with a little more parsley. No cheese please (says Joyce).
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program “Let's Read” on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at
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