I defy thee, cookbook!
(This story wants to be written, and it doesn’t care that I have the worst flu ever and I’d rather be left alone. So enjoy, and pardon my errors.)
What’s the first thing you see when you look at a recipe? A list of ingredients, right?
What’s the first thing you see when you look at a recipe and you have dyscalculia?
Numbers.
Translation: Anxiety. Fear of failure. Fear of wasting perfectly good food. And lurking in the background, fear of food poisoning.
It began somewhat harmlessly.
When I started teaching myself to cook using recipes, I’d confuse teaspoons for tablespoons and vice versa all the time. Oversalt your food a few times and you’ll pay attention soon enough. Add too much baking powder to your cake and it’s a chemistry lesson you won’t forget.
Then it got worse.
“Preheat the oven to…”
I hated this part. Still do. Because if a recipe is in Fahrenheit I must convert it to Celsius. Then I must hope to get the setting right on the oven itself, otherwise I’ll overcook and ruin it or undercook my food and wait for longer to eat.
It got worse still.
My recipes would fail because of altitude. F*cking altitude adjustments. “Add 1.5 teaspoons of liquid and God-knows-what-fraction of sugar for every X-thousand feet (convert to bloody meters please) above sea level.” As if I needed further complications.
The only chefs I ever understood
I searched for so long to find recipes that I could actually follow. No, YouTube videos didn’t help much. It’s all the same numbered recipes but with pretty moving pictures.
Only two chefs got through to me. One called Michael Ruhrman and another called Todd Mohr.
Mr. Ruhrman basically said, “Stop it with all the cups and spoons and stuff. Use parts instead. Doesn’t matter if the parts are handfuls or buckets. Bread: 5:3 flour to water. Pound cake: one part of everything. Chill.”
And Mr. Mohr said, “You know what, throw out those cookbooks. Burn them actually. Because what you need to know isn’t the measurements, it’s the method. Can you fry? Sautee? Roast? Can you make edible food with just a good fire and a pot? That’s all you need. Chill.”
May blessings be upon both their houses.
I became the Queen of the Eyeball
Over the years I’ve turned into a much less anxious, much more sensual cook. I don’t much care for those numbers a.k.a recipes anymore, thanks to those two chefs and years of experimenting.
Now, I cook with all my senses. I can tell when to stir a pot of rice just from the sound it makes. I can tell the order of how ingredients cook just from how they smell. I don’t use timers, which are just more numbers. I’m more in tune with what the heat is doing to the ingredients. It can take however long it wants. And my way works: I’m yet to suffer food poisoning at my own hands, I never throw food out, and I often go for seconds.
The only thing I do measure is internal temperatures. I hardly eat meat, but when I do, I look at my internal temp note on my phone and reach for my trusty Thermowand. I can’t hope to memorize the temperatures but I don’t need to.
I still suck at baking.
There’s no escaping it. If I want muffins or cake or cookies, I can’t eyeball them. I have to take out my measuring cups and spoons and read my recipes twice or thrice and still hope they turn out alright.
Mind you, the only recipes that work for me are for lemon cake and berry muffins (any berries will do). I only found them this year, and preparing them takes forever, but they work and I still can’t believe they work.
Taking forever = double/triple checking that yes, I’m using the 1-cup and half-cup for the flour, and I’ll need the 1-cup again for the milk. Yes, it does say 1 tablespoon of baking powder, and yes, this spoon does say 1-tbsp on it, yes, I’ve checked twice.
Baking brings all the anxiety home. I cannot rush it. I cannot be spontaneous with it. I must plan to bake at least a week in advance. Usually it’s two weeks, spent calming myself down before facing the numbers again.
Dys-cooking sucks
What if there are Michelin-star chefs stopped in their tracks by the numbers? Or piles of unwritten cookbooks because their recipes doesn’t translate into numbers? Or people who just gave up on cooking without knowing it was dyscalculia at play? What if, gasp, we’re not bad cooks?
I’ve chosen defiance. No, I will not read cookbooks anymore. No, I won’t look at recipes online anymore. I will use all my senses to figure it out. And maybe I’ll tattoo the cake and muffin recipes on myself because holy **** I can’t believe I can finally, finally make my own desserts. I can’t hope to memorize them, but I can’t bear to lose them.
