There I was in the kitchen the other day, trying to invent yet another recipe on the fly.
Not because I particularly wanted to but because the recipe I’d started out with, a blueprint for an end-of-summer tomato sauce, just wasn’t working.
The tomatoes had more liquid than I’d expected, and I didn’t have the time to set the pot to a super-slow simmer and spend hours sniffing the air while the concoction reduced into the supple, velvety red sauce I was looking for.
So, as I’ve been known to do, I resorted to improvisation.
The result? The sauce wasn’t perfect. But it wasn’t bad, either.
It made me think about recipes, and what, exactly, they’re supposed to be.
It’s tempting to imagine your recipe as a strict, inflexible road map. You just follow the directions exactly, and you’ll achieve precisely the result you intended.
Yeah, right.
Like that ever happens, with recipes or road maps. (Duncan Hines cake-box recipes aside, of course, which are the only known perfect recipes.)
No, after following my share of recipes, and writing a few, I’ll say this: Recipes are, inevitably, imperfect.
Cooking is an inexact craft, rife with unpredictables, from the quality of ingredients to the peculiarities of equipment to the humidity in the air to the skill level of the cook. It’s impossible for an honest recipe to anticipate and provide for every possible condition.
But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s freeing.
I’d rather look at a recipe as an idea. A fluid set of guidelines, perhaps, and advice on how best to approach the goal you seek.
Helpful, yes. But never flawless.
Cooking is not dictation. Cooking is a conversation. A nimble, unpredictable kitchen conversation between you and your ingredients. The recipe is merely context. Talking points.
To be a successful cook, you have to do more than manipulate your groceries according to a solid set of skills and rules. You have to get to know your ingredients in the context of your own abilities and your own kitchen.
To make a good sauce, you have to understand your tomato’s characteristics, forgive its imperfections and imagine its potential. You have to anticipate which buttons to push and which to leave alone. You have to believe in its capabilities but respect its limitations. You have to be demanding but forgiving. You have to be flexible, to be able (and willing) to stray from the path you’ve started down, should your ingredients require (or inspire) you to take a detour.
And you have to have plenty of blind faith.
Perfect is no synonym for delicious. So even if my sauce didn’t have the sultry silken texture I imagined when I first approached the stove, it was its own sauce in its own right, and it wasn’t half-bad.
Tucker Shaw: 303-954-1958 or dining@denverpost.com
