New York Times has an article on Eula Mae Doré, a renowned Cajun chef who never had formal training and didn’t use recipes. She worked for McIlhenny Company, makers of Tabasco, for 57 years.
Speaking of cookbooks, like Heston Blumenthal’s excellent Big Fat Duck Cookbook, it seems that lately a wash of books has hit our bookshelf labeled under “Cooking” that have very few, if any, recipes. Instead they concentrate on other aspects of preparing food, like food chemistry, or specific ingredients, like cheese (in which case they might come with a brief, glued-on recipe section at the end that concentrates on the ingredient in question).
My own cooking rarely centers around recipes. Even when I’m using one I get the irresistible urge to change the amounts of ingredients, swap them with my own alternatives or completely break them apart and just make up my own unrecognisable versions of them. What mostly happens is that I eat something memorable at a restaurant and then try to replicate it at home without knowing how it was done and what ingredients were used, as was the case with Consommé from Baked Rice & a Poached Egg that we tasted at Postres (Helsinki).
Sometimes the first impression of what a dish is about is completely different – and far more interesting – from the picture than the recipe that accompanies it turns out to be. This often leads to experimenting that sometimes leads to great, but far more often not so great, results. Sometimes in case of failure I tend to get a bit angry and force my initial idea to work through a lot of research and experimenting, if I have the time and see enough potential in the combination of ingredients I’ve imagined.
I’m far from being a great all-round cook, but what skills I have I’ve learned through experimenting. A recipe in itself holds no logic for me, whereas preparing a dish in two slightly different ways and comparing them starts to make a lot sense.
