Cooking With and Without

Posted January 27, 2004

I once had a friend who considered herself a poor cook. Then one day she realized she was rebelling against her recipe book. Why should she put in a quarter cup of sherry just because some stupid book told her to? Why not a whole cup, or a tablespoon? She resolved to consider recipes not as arbitrary commands but as friendly suggestions, and had a great deal more sucess in the kitchen thereafter.

I've always been of the "suggestion" persuasion, myself. This causes unending pain for my friend Patrick, who has a great respect - nay, a reverence - for authority. When he set up houskeeping during the period of separation before his divorce, he asked me to teach him to make bread. He was appalled by my demonstration and stopped me when the printed instructions said to cut the roll the dough in half and roll each half into a rectangle so many by so many inches. I was just going to use my fist to beat each half into the breadpan in some semblance of eveness.

I was equally appalled when Patrick whipped out his tape rule. I have to admit that Patrick's bread has an edge on mine. But I attribute it to the ardor with which he attacks the kneading, and not to the tape measure!

However, I'm glad he was't present at the dinner party in which I built up to the dessert, a mint vinegar pie. (If mint vinegar pie sounds unpleasant to you, it's like a lemon merengue that nods toward apple cider and mint julips.) I had not only sucessfully beaten egg whites into a tasty merengue (a new skill for me) but had made the supreme effort of making pie crust from scratch.

Unfortunately, I'd been distracted in the making of the pie filling and put the vinegar in twice. The crust and the merengue were great sucesses, and even I scraped the filling off of them before I ate them.

That was a mistake, not a conscious decision to disregard the recipe, but Patrick would have never let me live it down!

The funniest thing that ever happened to me in the kitchen (not that it was funny at the time) was the result of not having a recipe to disregard.

It was around the time of the rye-bread fiasco. I had my heart set on chicken livers and rice, but it wasn't in my Women's Magazine pull-out cookbook.

How hard could it be? I asked myself. I asked Jim if I had to cook the rice first. Jim's mom was a good cook so I figured he'd know these things. (What can I say? I was young and foolish.)

"I don't think so," Jim muttered, not looking up from the book he was reading.

So I blithely sauteed an onion and browned the chicken livers, then added the rice to the pan,. and continued sauteeing. If I added water, I didn't add enough, because the rice didn't get soft. As if I could render the contents of the pan delicious by sheer force of will, I continued stirring, testing the rice now and then. It just got harder, and the chicken livers were getting overcooked. I fished them out, added some water, and stirred more. My determination not to be defeated by a pan of cereal blinded me to the fact that the rice was becoming unapetizingly dark, but I continued my grim endeavor until the rice got the best of me.

It blew up, spattering the kitchen walls near the stove and leaving marks that reproached every time I entered the kitchen.

Jim's mom sympathised with me more than Jim did. She'd first cooked rice when she was a newlywed, with only the kitchen utensils she'd received as wedding presents. She put as much water and rice in one of her pots as the box called for. But it didn't look like enough rice, so she poured in more. Quite a bit more.

Soon the burgeoning rice was lifting the lid off the pan. She had to scoop some out into another pot, and by the end of the cooking, she'd used every pot she had to her name.

After Patrick had been on his own a few years, I once asked him if he'd ever cooked rice.

"Yes," he replied.

"What's your story?" I asked him.

"Story? What do you mean?"

So I told him mine and Jim's mom's.

Patrick shook his head in bewilderment. "I followed the directions on the box to the letter," he told me. "It came out just fine."

More about Patrick  §  Adventures in Breadmaking

By Ruby Jung, even the background. All rights reserved to the story. If you care for the background, you're welcome copy and use it.