#24 | No-Recipes for Disaster
And why "just getting to them" is the meme that will never die
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Credit to Tammie Teclemariam for inspiring the title this week.
And here, we, go:
“I place the groceries in a silver wheeled basket that belonged to my mother, stuff down my apology to the environment, and roll them inside the house to the kitchen. I think of my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather every time we do this. I stand in our kitchen straddled between past and present.” A beautiful, meditative diary unmoored from time from Crystal Wilkinson in the Oxford American.
“I see it happen with ingredients like chicken feet. They are heralded in Eurocentric kitchens, but when I talk about cooking and eating them, people say they are country and backward, or that I’m eating “slave food.”” Amethyst Ganaway pushes back against tropes of acceptability and racial stereotyping in putatively progressive food movements for Plate. Put it into conversation with Nia-Raquelle Smith’s essential piece on the sociology both at play in and left out of the Popeyes fried chicken sandwich mania, from 2019, and then read Sourced’s interview with Smith from earlier this month.
Imagine driving a boat into the busiest trading routes in the world, getting it stuck, creating total chaos, and just … Leaving it there. Okay, now imagine the boat is the New York Times Cooking Community Group, the trading route is Facebook, and the boat captain is, well, the New York Times. Three contrasting stories tell one larger of their own: Erin Biba’s thread putting the decision to abandon the group out there; Laura Hazard Owen’s report at Nieman Lab, and the NYT’s own Ben Smith having “reported this out.”
Oh, and, the comments are a lot.
An interesting review from Laura Shapiro in The Atlantic of another NYT effort: the new “no-recipe” … Recipe book. I have quite a few thoughts on this codification and ownership of a cooking methodology that underpins myriad traditions and genealogies, but a line from Shapiro’s review stuck with me in a different way, where she refers to the “happy housewife” vibes the book projects:
“Not last century’s version, of course—the one I’m detecting in this book is a distinctly contemporary icon of unspecified gender, a casual figure in sweatpants and bedroom slipper.”
One of the premises of the book is to offer guidelines from which cooks can riff and improvise, but the foundations of those guidelines are, by comparison, tectonic plates of cuisines: pasta dishes, sushi dishes. Shapiro seems right to identify the imagined user as casual and kind of urbane; and it’s a bit much to expect a cookbook to invent the basslines as well as the improvisations. But something snags at the endlessly iterative handfuls of herbs and glugs of olive oil that might go into pots in the kitchens of casual figures in sweatpants and bedroom slippers, independent cooks making independent decisions which, taken together, don’t look quite so independent. It snags in the way Kyle Chayka’s coinage of “airspace” so aptly describes the deadly sameness of many specialty coffee shops — a promise of difference that got broken somewhere along the way. This book probably won’t spread like that (and if it does the NYT will be delighted) but the circumscribed “no-recipe recipe” feels less like liberation, and more like emptiness.
Perhaps a more guiding practice might look like Ruby Tandoh’s audio baking guide. As she says in its introduction, “within even the simplest recipe there are hundreds of paths you can take, most of which will work out fine, and some of which will be disastrous. I have to preempt all that.” It sounds better in her voice than these words.
And, whisper it, but it’s been like, a week and there haven’t been any “just get to the recipe” tweets? Bless. “Just get to the recipe” is the meme that refuses to become a meme: it never quite falls into the pit of benign reproducibility. It is almost certainly not a sincerely held belief that scrolling for 0.1 second of your life to get to a recipe is annoying, but a small minority of people actually believe that it is annoying, or pretend to believe it is annoying for … fun?
When clout-thirsty celebrities want likes, they can plop out “just get to the recipe,” knowing that there are just enough people ready to say “yes, I hate bloggers, their unpaid creativity is the worst thing on earth.” If no-one genuinely believed it, it would just be meme, but up to now it can still hit people's sincerely felt beliefs about food in the most extremely insincere way. It’s cultural commentary for people who have already made their mind up; it will never convert anyone who thinks differently. It’s one for the haters. It’s probably being tweeted right now.
At Dirt, Daisy Alioto gets into this dynamic with a review of a documentary — Made You Look, which recounts a forgery scandal — that is not about food, but is very reminiscent of one about wine: Sour Grapes, which recollects Rudy Kurniawan’s wine fraud and reveals that there may still be 10,000 bottles of fake wine in private collections. Both are ostensibly about fraud! scandal! truth! and! lies! but really, per Alioto, are about how people’s sense of themselves, of their taste, and of their trust, can be shattered — and how we can watch them get shattered and think, “silly rich people.”
“The De Soles, collectors who bought the $8.3 million forged Rothko, express their own anguish in far more emotional terms. One infers that what they feel is not so much wronged as humiliated. They picked the Rothko themselves; it was not handpicked for them. They were at the gallery to look at another artist.
It’s the humiliation of being an easy mark. Like a tourist in a foreign country paying twice the local rate for a taxi they can still easily afford. And yet… and yet… to be so easily parted from their money? Intolerable.”
Rudy Kurniawan’s marks have their own quirks. For the dry wit of its title, Sour Grapes never quite broaches the subject of wine people being duped by wine. It broaches the subject of billionaires being duped by labels; of Hollywood supremos being duped by prestige. All of these are cons; all of these are crimes. But they are not the biggest con of all: the con of drinking the wine not just in the belief that it is telling the truth, but in the belief that the drinker would know if it were telling a lie. When Hollywood producer Jefery Levy opens one of Kurniawan’s bottles with pride —“very real!” — there is finally a fall. He takes the same bottle to a wine store and ask for the taster’s verdict.
“It tastes like skunk juice.”
“And yet… to be so easily parted from their money? Intolerable.”