Cooking like jazz - motivation

One of my earliest memories about recipes and cooking was hearing people in my parent’s generation making fun of their parents for not measuring things while cooking. A typical example - use a little salt, a lot of pepper, fry till it’s cooked, garnish with a handful of cilantro. How frustrating! How are these doting children to replicate mom’s cooking with this level of ambiguity?

It’s scary cooking something for the first time, and it seems like precise instructions would reduce risk of failure. Use a quarter tsp of salt, a half tsp of pepper, fry for 10 minutes, chop finely 1 tbsp of cilantro to garnish. Much better. But… what if you have Morton’s salt and mom was using kosher? Too salty. What if your pepper is more or less spicy? What if you are cooking for someone with a genetically negative predisposition towards cilantro?

A precise recipe is like playing classical (western) music from manuscripts. The instructions are all there, and you’ve just got to do the things. The goal is to replicate exactly. You do get a reasonably facsimile of the original, but there’s relatively little scope to make it your piece. The instructions don’t take advantage of your particular skills or likes and dislikes. And it’s frustrating to be creating something doomed to be a not-quite-as good version of something you could easily buy. A quick search on spotify yields many, many versions of the Pathetique. Are you really going to be doing anything more than a pale imitation of one of them? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a joy to be had in demonstrating skill, but the output is ultimately a bit unsatisfying.

Which gets to the deeper question - why do you cook? There’s a whole Maslow’s hierarchy of reasons between “got to eat” and self-actualization. There are some reasons in there where one would want to try to exactly reproduce a thing - to learn or show off skills, or for sentimental reasons, to remember a person or place. That pizza we had on vacation…

But what is the alternative? I call it cooking like jazz. Instead of having all the notes written out, you have the key chords, and possibly a melody - then it’s up to you to use your skills and imagination to fill in the rest. Now - most recipes don’t come like this - it takes a bit of work to undo the detail of the recipe. In this series I’ll show you how to take apart a recipe and then put it together as your own. It’s exciting and fun. With this approach, you’ll be able to complicate and simplify recipes to fit the time and effort you want to put into a meal. You’ll understand recipies you’ve never tried before and feel more confident cooking them for the first time. And - best of all, it will be your cooking. No one will do that better than you.

Photo by Lan Pham on Unsplash