'Your grandmother did it, everyone did it ...' Going off-piste in the kitchen can give confidence to 'cave man' cooks and also suit ingredient-conscious fitness gurus.
Everyone's grandma did it, and now chefs are encouraging a new generation to do it. They want you to cook without a recipe. The decade-long rise of celebrity chef-dom, cult restaurants and kale has sparked a proliferation of technicians' guides for the home cook - a selection that oscillates between the wildly narrow and those that claim to be foundational.
Now, cookbooks are as much food porn as instruction, leading to Amazon reviewers calling such manuals good "coffee table" books. Nearly all modern cookbooks have lusty illustrations of sheening roasts and desserts. Few push technique alone. That, some chefs say, is a mistake.
"How many people do you know that really have a cookbook, and pull out the whole recipe [to cook]?" asked chef Frank Prisinzano, owner of several restaurants in New York City's East Village neighborhood.
"You got to break through that barrier people have, where they're just afraid to cook, and they're afraid they're going to fuck it up and be embarrassed," he said. One example of "method" cooking he's pushed is "how to make a crispy fried egg - because I feel like once you teach someone that one method, it's going to give them confidence in the kitchen".
Prisinzano isn't alone in his advocacy. No-recipe cooking events have been happening in New York City since at least 2009, chronicled by Marc Matsumoto's No Recipes cooking blog ("The first course was a watermelon radish and micro-chard salad," writes Matsumoto about a 2009 event in Brooklyn). Prisinzano drops bits of method cooking knowledge on his social media accounts, and influential home-cooking magazines such as Bon Appétit have begun publishing recipe-less articles.
How to Cook a Pot Roast Without a Recipe and No-Recipe Fall Soup Ideas are a sampling of Bon Appétit reading that hopes to push home cooks away from the tedious step-by-step of recipes.
"It's not just the home cooking culture but it's just the culture in general. Some of it is people being more conscious about what they're putting in their bodies," said Matsumoto.
Matsumoto started his blog No Recipes as a "half-joke", but it grew into a successful, technique-centric blog that attracts an unusually large male audience.
Matsumoto also starred in what is probably the most mainstream iteration of recipe-less cooking: Food Network's Chopped, where insidious judges attempt to undo chefs by providing them bizarre and seemingly mismatched ingredients. (Matsumoto was on the Thyme Flies episode.)
Matsumoto characterizes much of his audience as the "cave man" who might have just become interested in cooking, or the fitness guru who doesn't want to follow a recipe as much as be ingredient-conscious. Prisinzano believes it might be the moment in American food culture that's pushing recipe-less cooking forward.
"As kids are coming into the business, they love meatballs, they love hotdogs, they love hamburgers," said Prisinzano. "They don't want to spend a lot of money any more, so this is the perfect time to go back to method."
"I mean, it's just like, get into this now - this is the salt-of-the-earth type stuff. Your grandmother did it, everyone did it. They had to cook, they had to make things ... So everyone has it in them to be able to cook."
