I’m not sure I know the answer to the question I was asked last week by a student in Professor Samuel Wells’ “Introduction to Food Writing” course at Johnson & Wales University. “What are your thoughts on writing recipes? Because they’re always telling us to cut them down as much as possible. What do you think?”
Actually, I’m not sure the question was phrased exactly that way. But whatever the words were, they were smart, and they really got me thinking about recipe writing.
There is a technique to it, a craft. There are rules. Things have to be accurate and clear.
But there’s also, in great recipes, a soul.
I have two favorite recipe- writers. Both are dead, and each had a radically different style from the other.
Roy Andries de Groot wrote recipes that are wordy and flowery and ornate, such as the famous recipe for “The Timbale of King Neptune (The World’s Most Difficult Recipe),” from his 1967 masterpiece, “Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts.”
The recipe, for an extravagant, layered seafood meal, is nearly a dozen pages long, with glorious passages like this:
“Stretch out the lobster on its back and open up the underside of its head. Remove its stomach — the hard little sac where its chin would be, if it had a chin. Open up the underside of the tail and scrape out the black intestinal vein. If lobster is a female, she will have the red ‘coral’ inside her head. These are her eggs and a prized delicacy to be carefully removed and saved for later flavoring. Both sexes also have the green ‘tomalley’ in their heads (the liver), also a delicacy to be saved for later flavoring.”
Because the recipe takes four days to make, I suspect that de Groot knew perfectly well that no one would actually do it. (Well, almost no one.) But to read it is an adventure in itself. This is recipe-as-entertainment, and it is indeed entertaining.
My other favorite recipe- writer is Edouard de Pomiane, whose 1930 cookbook, “French Cooking in Ten Minutes,” is my favorite cookbook ever, and provides lasting proof that brevity and utility do not require humorlessness on the part of the recipe-writer. Take, for example, his recipe for Fried Mackerel:
“Have your fish seller clean a mackerel. Wash it and wipe it off when you get home. Make 2 or 3 slits in each side with a knife, and roll the fish in flour. Cook it for 10 minutes in a frying pan containing smoking hot oil or very hot butter. Sprinkle the mackerel with salt and chopped parsley before serving. I forgot to tell you to open the window. I bet you did, anyway.”
That’s it. That’s the whole recipe. Dinner in 75 words.
Both recipes are viable, both are valuable, both are useful, and both are, truly, great.
What makes a good recipe? I don’t know for sure. But I know it when I see it.
What makes a good recipe? You tell us.
