Against recipes
The other day, someone spoke to me of their family roast chicken recipe. ‘It’s to die for’ probably soon followed, but I’d stopped forming memories. Basically, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a recipe for roast chicken.
Well, there is, but there’s only one of them: you put it in the oven, 100 minutes later, you take it out. It’s steak in 3D. You can vary the temperature, you can salt it, rosemarize it, you can embowel it with an onion (or, Christ, a beercan if you’ve literally landed in DSM-V for porn or have otherwise never seen an ocean). But fundamentally, roasting a chicken remains the kitchen equivalent of downhill skiing. There are a couple style points up for grabs but in the end it’s impossible not to get where you’re going.
(That’s also why it’s a bad idea to order the half chicken in a restaurant: they’re all the same. Good, but, the same. Because there is only one recipe.)
Other things there are not different recipes for: apple pie, a Negroni, milk.
A thing there are multiple recipes for: grilled cheese sandwich. Christ alive, it turns out that people will willingly file cheese between breadslices and fry all three of them. Why they would want to do that I don’t know, but we are logical people, so let us agree that a cheese sandwich that you put in a frying pan, to fry, is a fried cheese sandwich. And that is at least a recipe, distinct from the usual grilled cheese sandwich recipe, of melting the cheese open-face underneath (what is called on these shores) a broiler — or a grill, in the UK, so named for the grill that separates the food from the fire. Sandwich construction is finalized when the cheese is still bubbling: A life lesson taught to me by my parents.
Let us eliminate the things that make no difference. When the unwary driver was pushed over 0.08 BAC by the sherry content in the hostess’s sherry trifle, his lawyer got him off by reminding the judge, de minimis non curat lex—the law does not concern itself with trifles. My own father makes incisions in the chicken to insert cloves of garlic before roasting. Given that a head is sometimes cleft into, what, like, 16 cloves (and is it my imagination, or is pesticide garlic more cloven than organic)? That’s a lot of knifework, none of which makes any difference to the flavor of the meat. But why make a fuss about it? Everyone needs a hobby.
In my lifetime I have met Englishwomen who pronounce ‘recipe’ as ‘receipt’. I was always too awestruck to ask, in God’s name, why. But I like the idea that it’s something received. You don’t keep everything you receive—Christ, can you imagine—but let’s try to hold onto the ones that mean something.
