A brief, semi-autobiographical, history of recipes.

By Molly Watson - Photos by Naomi Fiss

These four San Francisco walls are full of recipes. Scads of cookbooks, more than I’m willing to count—each of which is crammed with scores, if not hundreds of recipes—fill a towering bookcase in my kitchen. Recent acquisitions and unsolicited review copies sent by publishers pile up in my study. Still more sit in double rows on shelves in the basement. This bounty exists even after a huge cull last fall, after which my husband took box after box of cookbooks (including such gems as The Comfort Table by Katie Lee Joel and Gluten-Free Cooking for Dummies) to a used book dealer. There is an archive of Saveur magazine, each issue with several dozen recipes in it, lining the top of a bookcase. Equally ridiculous archives of Gourmet and Fine Cooking use up yet more shelves. There are three ring binders in with the cookbooks—six in all—recipes I carefully pulled from magazines or print-outs of emails friends have sent. In a fit of organizational mania I once went through them and made a master list of “Things to Cook.” Eight years later, it sits untouched at the back of the Appetizers binder. There is a file on my desk called “To Cook” with more torn out pages in it. Two giant binders on the shelf in my study are filled to bursting with tear sheets of the 300-plus recipes I created while on staff at Sunset magazine. Another six inches in a filing cabinet contain print-outs of some but not all of the hundreds of recipes I’ve posted on The Dinner Files or other websites in the last two years.

Vintage cookbooks in the author’s collection include Cutting Up in the Kitchen (1975, Chronicle Books) by the 1970’s celebrity butcher from Tiburon, Merle Ellis.

I am, in no small measure, surrounded by recipes. This may seem appropriate. I am a food writer. I am often called upon to write recipes. Having some recipes around on which to call, could prove useful, one would think. I have been known to consult the archive, as I’ve come to think of it, for reference or inspiration. My husband just made this point, in fact, as I decried the sheer physical mass of recipes and started piling them into the dining room for immediate disposal.

The insanity of all these recipes is that, unlike my legions of fellow Americans who don’t cook because they are too busy to follow recipes; I don’t follow recipes because I am too busy cooking.

Cooking? Without recipes? To many people I know this sounds nuts. I can assure you, however, that it is possible. And not just by professionals, not just by that rare breed of individual who makes their living by developing recipes for other people to follow. Cooking is an act; recipes are things, printed text. You no more need a recipe to cook than you need Runner’s World to take a jog around the block.

However, if you don’t actually know how to place one foot in front of the other, you might want to watch someone do it once or twice before you give it a whirl.

That, of course, is how people used to learn to cook. They watched other people and did what they did. They made a lot of mistakes; they tasted a lot along the way. Eventually they baked cakes and cured hams and did all manner of things to vegetables without being able to read, much less follow a recipe.

Recipes existed, of course. If we think of them as description of food preparation, they’ve been around forever. Methods for cooking can be found in ancient texts, and Apicius famously chronicled the eating habits of 3rd-century Rome in De Re Culinaria. Once the printing press was developed and literacy spread, recipe books found small audiences, with the publishing of such texts increasing slowly through the late 18th and 19th centuries.

The first truly successful mass market cookbook, however, wasn’t until Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book. Just under 600 pages, it covered everything from filtering coffee to larding a beef roast. When Farmer died in 1915 the book had sold 360,000 copies. It has remained continually in print, with regular revisions and sales in the millions, ever since.

Writer Mary Ann Mason gives us a solid clue as to why the cookbook as we know it—a collection of recipes aimed at home cooks—didn’t really take off until almost the 20th century. In her 1875 book, The Young Housewife’s Counsellor and Friend: Containing Directions in Every Department of Housekeeping, Including the Duties of Wife and Mother, she gives dozens of recipes and food preparation tips and encourages her readers to “accustom your daughters, while growing up, to aid you in culinary matters.” What it means to her to aid in culinary matters, however, is stated in the introduction: “A young and inexperienced housekeeper is always more or less in the power of her servants, especially of her cook.”

Before the 20th century, in other words, women with the literacy, time, and money to buy books usually had servants who cooked for them. Cookbooks were designed to give them the knowledge they needed to plan menus and to direct their staff—not to prepare dinner.

The Boys and Girls Cook Book was much read by the author as a child. The pears-as-mice salad seemed like a bad idea even then.

The instructional, scientific bent of what would become Fanny Farmer’s Cook Book (the first chapter covers the 13 elements that “enter into the composition of the body” and the foods they come from in detail that would challenge many culinary-school graduates) became de rigeur in American cookbooks straight through the middle of the 20th century. Recipes are organized by course and primary ingredient. Variations on the theme of a recipe are given in groups. Household tips for the middle-class housewife are included, as on the dog-eared page 431 of my grandmother’s 1950 copy of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book advising the busy housewife to take a moment for herself while the children nap or, if overcome with fatigue during the day, to lie down on the floor with her hands over her eyes for five minutes.

What these books all have in common is that, for all their educational tone, they were written for people who knew how to cook. Their goal was to regularize that cooking, to bring it in line with scientific understandings of food and diet. The ingredient amounts are precise, but the instructions assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the cook. Phrases like “cook in a hot oven until done” are common.

I often wish that I could simply write “cook until done.”

But I can’t. Not most of the time. And I blame Julia Child. She is celebrated for bringing real French food to American kitchens, for breathing life into the dry text that recipes were. She was a woman of her age and believed fervently that, if properly worked out and thoroughly explained, the basic scientific principles of cooking would win out, as long as the cook followed the recipe.

Since her 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, recipes have gone from being written for people who knew how to cook to being written for people who don’t.

While her recipes largely deliver on that promise—I wouldn’t braise endive as perfectly as I do without that initial guidance from page 299 in The Way to Cook—it’s a big promise on which to deliver. In an attempt to live up to that expectation, modern recipes tend to make cooking sound more difficult than it is. In their pursuit of precision, they often obfuscate the simplicity of preparing food. There is something to be said for a salad recipe, like one from The Queen Mary Cook Book that reads: “Cut avocado lengthwise. Fill with diced lobster and flaked crab meat, mixed with mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce with slices of tomato.” How much lobster and how much crab, the reader assumes, doesn’t matter much. The salad will be tasty with a whole range of proportions.

The author’s post-it note pizza recipe is conveniently stuck to her fridge.

The fixation on recipes was most visible in my family at the death of my paternal grandmother, who appreciated good food like nobody I’ve ever met but wasn’t much up for fussing in the kitchen. There was a sudden flurry: Had anyone written down her pot roast recipe?

Everyone thought they needed a list of ingredients and written instructions. Yet the secret to Gram’s pot roast was to leave it the hell alone while it roasted, including a few hours in a turned-off but- shut oven. Everyone knew this already because everyone had, at one time or another, seen that oven door taped shut. Everyone had been yelled at to leave the pot roast alone. We had been given, if indirectly, all the expertise we needed.

It may sound like I hate recipes. I don’t. I do think too many people equate cooking with recipe following, and in doing so deprive themselves of the opportunity to learn how to cook. I hate the pedestal we’ve put recipes on. I hate that when someone asks how I made something, no matter how simple, they don’t want to listen or to watch, they want a recipe. I hate that people think there is an unbridgeable divide between what I can cook and what they can cook.

As Peg Bracken so perfectly put the common view in her 1960 classic The I Hate to Cook Book, “experts in their sunny spotless test kitchens can make anything taste good.”

Well, yes and no. Several years of hard time around the Sunset test kitchen showed me first hand that the foolproof recipe is a mirage. The same recipe, cooked with and on the same equipment, using the same ingredients, under the same instructions to follow the recipe to a T, will, in the hands of different cooks, yield wildly different results. Put that same, tested recipe, in the hands of readers, and the accounts of what resulted never ceased to amaze me. In an attempt to correct for that variety of results, a recipe style evolved to explain in painful detail the minute steps of a dish’s preparation. The mania for detail was toned down a bit while I worked there, but when I started, we went so far as to instruct people to “discard” potato peels.

Yet I see how these details seemed necessary. People had become estranged not just from their kitchens and from cooking, but from their own good common sense. A colleague once fielded a call from a panicked reader wondering how to freeze blueberries. If you have a home freezer, your options are pretty much limited to putting them in the freezer, perhaps in some sort of container to keep them from rolling around. All these cookbooks and all these recipes and all these experts seem to have convinced people that they need expertise when in fact they rarely do.

The less we cook, the more we cry out for the false god of recipes to help. Like a snake eating its own tail, the dependence on recipes leads to more detail in recipes, which leads people to think that cooking is tricky, which leads them to avoid cooking, which leads to more dependence on recipes.

Yet that promise of a scientific formula is a lie. Experience in the kitchen matters. A well-written, well-tested recipe can take someone a long way towards making a dish. It will signpost things to watch out for—how the batter should look at a certain point, what noise the mixture in the pan should make, how the roast should feel when you poke it before you add the vegetables. It will tell the reluctant or inexperienced cook those things that used to be handed down through direct observation that aren’t formulaic, that don’t result from simply adding the sugar to the milk. But it can’t substitute for experience and, to be honest, most recipes don’t even try.

If a recipe is deemed foolproof but you find it taxing or confusing to follow, or the dish doesn’t turn out great, you are left to assume a) you don’t know how to cook, b) you’re not a good cook, and/or c) you don’t like cooking in the first place.

Would you think you’d be able to run a marathon—or even a 5K—with any success or enjoyment straight out of the gate after reading a description of the course?

From my earliest cooking days I preferred to go off-road. To riff on things I’d seen or eaten. I made up soups using bouillon cubes and added extra vanilla to cookies. I played around and in the process I learned the hard, bitterly disappointing way that more of something delicious—chocolate or cheese, for example—does not always improve a dish.

I also learned that you learn to cook by cooking. You can cook from recipes or alongside someone or simply muck about. Nothing substitutes for time at the stove. Not the best recipe ever, not the best cooking show ever (although watching anything with Jacques Pépin in it will actually teach you something), not talent. Nothing.

I know. I have the recipes around me to prove it. Cooking is muscle memory and knowing your kitchen and tasting. You have to start somewhere, and recipes will help. But no precision of words on paper can substitute for having cooked a dozen or twenty or a hundred chickens when it comes time to determine if the poultry is done.

As the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, learning to cook the perfect bird begins by throwing a chicken in the oven.

See the recipes Molly Watson is too busy developing to have time to follow recipes at TheDinnerFiles.com and LocalFoods.about.com.

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More content from the Edible SF Summer 2010 issue:

Wayne Garcia's tackles the sometimes controversial natural wine movement > To Nature or to Nurture? What “natural” means when it comes to wine—sometimes a little interference is just what the grape needs.

Sarah Rich's new column on the SF Urban Ag scene > Urban Agtivist: Entrepreneurs are seeking sustainability and equitability in San Francisco’s urban ag movement.

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