Food52 launched into beta with a little bit of advance fanfare and a dollop of general hype-a-site from Daily Candy and others. So far, so tasty. I’m all for more general food bloggery and cookout throwdowns, anything to get families back onto a table together, fresh and healthy food onto said tables, and a swift kick in the faces of McKing and TacoBox.
Sadly, the site’s handlers had to start the whole shebang with a virtual challenge, a throwdown of their own, of sorts, and a claim I can neither leave unanswered nor unchallenged. Here’s what we read when coming to food52′s homepage:
We created food52 to celebrate the best cooks in the world: home cooks.
Ouch. Ok, ok, just who the best cook is, that’s debatable. Matter of style and taste, I’d suppose. One man’s super-cook is another woman’s fryolator fool. And, sure, a little home-town teasing is never a bad idea. So we’ll let this one stand. From this non-home cook to all my brothers and sisters in arms – if home-cooks were the better cooks, they’d be making OUR food and charging a pretty nickel for it, not the other way round. But, alas, as I said – it’s a matter of perception. And, yeah, my mother is a home cook and she is, without a doubt, the best cook in the world. Then there’s nothing, for, like, a gazillionbillion lightyears, and then there’s others. Most of which aren’t home cooks.
Today's home cook, however, prefers "Food Network" themed Barefoot Comtessa looks over blue tile.
So, sure, let the homies think they’re the best cooks in the world. As long as they keep coming to my place for dinner when it counts, I can live with that. But…
Every week we’ll hold recipe contests. After a year – 52 weeks – Harper Studio will publish the winning recipes in a beautiful cookbook.
Recipes? The “best cooks in the world” use recipes? Dang. Recipes are to cooking prowess what paint-by-numbers is to Picasso. It’s to “best in the world” as training wheels are to the Tour de France. It’s the paper plane to getting buzzed by an F-16, the watching Bobby Flay to being Hubert Keller. In short, recipes are small dictators, mustached little men marching in lockstep between TV shows and magazine racks, proclaiming loudly the need to keep the plebes down. Teach a cook to read recipes and they’ll keep buying your magazines. Teach them to cook, and they’ll never need a recipe in their lives again. Nine out of ten mustached recipe dictators agree with that. Number ten just wants to take you out back and have you flogged.
We don’t need more recipe collections. The web is full of cut-and-paste jobs, glossy food porn action shots of a lacquered pork loin sitting on top of a spray painted salad of something. Food isn’t supposed to look that way. Blame Gourmet Magazine and the insidious food photographer’s guild whose idea of good looking edibles means to make them look inedible. We need more talk about the basics. Do away with lists of ingredients and instead teach taste, ratios, and the science behind the things that happen in a bowl, mixer, or pan. Do away with times and, instead, talk about the telltale signs that a steak is done, a cake baked, or an egg runny.
We need more I’m just here for the food, more On Food and Cooking, more Cook’s Illustrated, and less of the same-old-same-old recipe collections which, give or take one ingredient, have been published over and over for the past forty years (case in point: this year’s “Healthy American Cooking 2009″ featured 85 recipes, 83 of which “Healthy American Cooking 2008″ featured, as well. Food doesn’t change that much).
So, if you want to be the “best cook in the world”, take off those training wheels. Every possible recipe has already been published, Mme. Child and Mssr. Escoffier took care of that. Learn how to cook rather than following orders, and there might be, just might, a “best cook in the world” in your future.
Due to a recent avalanche of rather … unprofessional … comments by fans of things I supposedly “derided”, comments are temporarily closed for this post. Please email me at jluster AT chezgeek DOT org for comments for publication.
I'd never consider myself even a "good cook", but the only thing I use recipe books for is to get the general concept of a dish. Once I know that, I don't need a recipe (unless I'm baking).
Take off those recipe training wheels cooks! RT @wildhunt: [blog] My food52 rant: http://bit.ly/18p9mq
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT: @wildhunt [blog] My food52 rant: http://bit.ly/18p9mq
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Recipe for Disaster — chez Geek: We need more I’m just here for the food, more On Food and Cooking, more Co.. http://bit.ly/1fjSQP
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Recipe for Disaster — chez Geek: … and less of the same-old-same-old recipe collections which, give or take o.. http://bit.ly/mAceJ
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Recipe for Disaster — chez Geek http://bit.ly/4dmScE
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@mcogdill Take a look at @wildhunt’s blog “Recipe for Disaster”: http://bit.ly/HQyY6
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
This is why I frequent your blog and send people to your site Chef Luster. You are open minded and insightful.
If I may add…
I recently tweeted to Chris Kimball via @foodista, who accepted the challenge, that Kimball is completely missing the point. In it, I added, “IMO learning how to cook is a question of tinkering and breaking free of recipes. ”
It’s not the recipes that I keep going back to Cook’s Illustrated for. It’s the stuff around the recipes I find so much more valuable: the diagrams about how to truss a bird or roast, the explanations about what attempts with which ingredients produced different flavours, the tips about why adjusting temperature during baking produced better textures etc. It’s the same reason I am an avid fan of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” and his books.
However, I also turned to Gourmet, but for vastly different reasons. Like Kimball’s somewhat self servicing op-ed piece, I believe the demise of Gourmet has to do with poor management at Conde Nast and it misjudging the state of its audience.
I enjoyed Gourmet because Ruth Reichl and her crew published innovative dishes and photographed how they could be plated. Many complaints about Gourmet, post mortem, involve its former recipes and/or pieces employing ingredients that are difficult to find or prohibitively expensive. And, the recipes were equally difficult to attempt and often prone to failure.
I think people simply lost the ability to appreciate Gourmet because they’ve forgotten how to cook. Quite frankly, I’m no better. There are a little over a hundred posts involving recipes on my own blog.
Cooking is a dying art whose death is hastened by “paint by number” recipes. With people having too little time to devote to developing techniques or finding out why a recipe works, because we simply don’t have time to fail at making a dish anymore, everyone looks to recipes. Recipes in turn have become very granular and reflect this increasing loss of skill and understanding. Hence, why Kimball believes and perhaps rightly that his recipes are of higher quality than his contemporaries. His come from a professional test kitchen, staffed with trained cooks/chefs. His are somewhat fool proof.
When Kimball replied to me, he tweeted “Are recipes that much of a burden? I cook from recipes!!!” I replied ” u r not just cooking from recipes, u r cooking w/decades of experience, both yours and those of ur test kitchen.” He responded “That would be, I think, the whole point!”
Damn right! Yes Kimball’s recipes reflect the expertise he and his staff have developed over decades, but the recipes themselves do not pass on this expertise. Kimball cooks with experience that was gathered from a lifetime in a kitchen. We don’t. While we may use his recipes and produce great results, we gain nothing if we don’t read the “stuff” he publishes around his recipes.
There is a reason that cooking by taste isn’t heard of much anymore. There is a reason that Michael Ruhlman, author of Ratio, thinks foodies are masturbating deviants who “get off” on FoodTV. We barely cook anymore.
Is there a solution? What is written in the blog above. Crowd source and share expertise from learning how to cook again. Post insightful recipes that are more than just instructions. And most importantly, go play in the kitchen.
This comment was originally posted on chez Geek