The Enemy of Recipes
Cutting chunks of Black Cherokee heirloom tomatoes, I had no idea what would happen next. Maybe I’d fall back on a familiar pattern, roast them long and slow with capers, lemon zest, garlic and a few wild bay leaves? Maybe I’d turn them into a cold gazpacho with a dash of fresh ground Ancho chili powder?
I leave as many potential ingredients, lemons, limes and oranges, various salts and peppers, spices, in line of sight around the kitchen; smoked Alderwood salt, lemon salt, kosher salt, Maldon salt, Indonesian long pepper, Sichuan, black telicherry or pink peppercorns.
If you listen, the ingredients will speak to you.
An idea suggests itself for the tomatoes and not long after we enjoyed a wild riff on a Caprese salad. Turns out a great Italian olive oil can hold up to some red Korean chili flake, a typical kimchi ingredient. Mint or even hyssop can be a fun alternative to fresh basil. The syrupy oak-aged balsamic was perfect on the creamy buratta. In the back of my mind, there was some sheet music that inspired me, but I never actually pulled it up or tried to follow it. I didn’t make use of a recipe.
This morning, the organic Maple butter on the counter asked for some cream cheese on a toasted everything bagel. A little sweet and a little creamy fat. But my Camel’s Breath Pu-erh was about to brew and I thought, “Yeah, I’ll take my tea sweet today.” This dark, aged, fermented tea from Yunnan province has probably never been poured, hot and unwashed, with maple. Pu-erh is expensive and if you’re a tea worshipper, you take it pure and according to ritual. Does experimenting with fancy tea make you cringe a little? Aren’t you also a little curious? Doesn’t sound bad in your mind’s palette, does it?
Fostering more collisions, food can be an “exquisite corpse,” like the Surrealist game, an associative adventure.
Keeping things out in the open allows you to maximize new combinations. Balance salt, fat, acid and heat, as Chez Panisse alumni chef Samin Nosrat suggests, from whichever corner of earth the ingredients originated. Play with them instead of executing someone else’s vision. Have fresh, local, seasonal produce on hand all the time without any clue what you’ll eventually do with it; these are the strategies if you’re an enemy of recipes, which is not the same as being an “expert.”
We obsess over the formulaic, over the reproducible, over the ways to make things that can be scaled for mass production, with efficiencies of scale, every component ordered just in time and in vast quantities to drive down cost. This industrial age mindset has crept into our everyday lives and it now requires concerted effort to resist it, to push back, to add spontaneity, to create things that are unique, once only, ephemeral, not reproducible, unrecorded. Often you can’t remember what you put in that food or in what order or what exact heat you used or for how long.
A life of spontaneous joyful surprises will of course be mixed in with some obvious failures. It’s a novelty seeker’s paradise punctuated by flavor collisions that aren’t always pleasant. Still, I’m guessing many of us would be happier for rejecting recipes more often.
Turns out that if you want to infuse culinary lavender into a good filet of salmon, you better create a mild reduction first; actually roasting the fish with the flowers turned out…gross (we ate it anyway). But with practice, the failure rates of food or furniture or art or music or even software code, become less numerous. The misfires fade in number and the experiments reveal refreshing combinations and unique uses never imagined ahead of time.
Quantity is creativity’s friend.
Past the top of the hill of shame and perfectionism, the boulder rolls itself down and Sysiphus gets to enjoy a flow state, at least for a little while. The lesson here is from creativity theory; you make the thing with no idea what will happen and the use cases appear in time.
Or it’s useless.
That’s okay too. The process was fun and you learned something. You’ve got some new rules of thumb and your jazz is improving. All of this, of course, pre-supposes being resourced. Imagine if we raised the floor on need. We might unleash a tsunami of human creativity, currently unmanifested because of poverty.
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The formulaic approach to hospitality, as Priya Parker suggests in her book “The Art of Gathering,” has lead to wooden, stressful and formulaic hosting. We often just don’t bother to invite folks over and when we do, we feel it all needs to follow the old commandments of Martha Stewart. If it’s not perfect, it’s a failure.
Have we considered that the emotional tone expressed by a host matters ten times more than the place settings or furnishings, the failure to stick to a cake recipe or whether or not our silverware matches? If our hosts are relaxed, grounded and at ease, with generosity of spirit and genuine warmth, we could be eating undercooked Tater Tots and enjoy the best possible evening of laughter, meaningful discussion and connection.
Do we want a consistently reliable and safe car? Want a rocket to achieve near earth orbit, repeatedly and with near zero incident of catastrophic failure?
Here we are likely best served by Six Sigma and Toyota’s Five Whys. I am so grateful for all of the brilliant people in our world who find this sort of drive towards perfection fulfilling.
But for most of us, the relentless pursuit of perfection in all things is exhausting. Even the space engineers, fault testing a telemetry system that will go on a probe heading to Jupiter’s moons, even they would like to “turn off” and be messy, fallible, imperfect and spontaneous when they get home; perhaps especially them.
The creative constraints, the guardrails that can set the tone for a dish in the kitchen, a new musical composition or a fresh way of seeing the world; these are best set neither too narrow nor too wide. Calibrate your limitations thoughtfully.
Imagine you invite dozens of people over some time between noon and midnight and say simply to bring food and have no organizing principles once they arrive, no “container” or rituals, this is a surefire path towards fizzle (too wide).
But getting too narrow, requiring very specific dress, behaviors, moderators or proctors, every formula obeyed to a tee, this is pretty common actually and lands with a lot of folks as stifling. These are the pretentious circuses, the pomp and circumstance, a weighted sequence of formalities. We are forbidden to speak out of turn. We eagerly glance towards the door. Netflix calls us home.
And in my experience, when we jettison recipes, even as beginners, and err towards the simple, not doing too much, learning the basics, we discover our own creative joy. We build confidence. We set free the burden of doing things “just so,” molded to fit expectations, and this is not only a relief for ourselves, it also unburdens our friends, our guests, our collaborators.
The optimal constraints for creativity, also bring out human warmth, social chemistry and the ideal contexts for learning.
“I” doing a thing can become “we” doing that thing.
Then we unlock a human superpower, true collective intelligence, actual collaborative creativity, a continuous hurling of ourselves into the unknown, with the confidence that our combined creative faculties can buoy us above unpredictable waters, whatever the ingredients we have on hand.
Together, truly together, we create magic.
