Where are the recipes?

Many of you have asked me about recipes on this site, and it’s a subject I have wanted to address for a while now – in fact, I think the question has been asked enough that my reply deserves its own little home on this site. That there are so many of you out there who are not only reading this site but who want to try to duplicate what you see here… well, it’s incredibly flattering and humbling. But the fact of the matter is that there is no good or convenient way for me to include recipes for every dish you see here at this point in time. Let me explain a little further.

My belief is that cooking is not a science – it’s a craft. And while there are standard ways of executing this technique or that, I simply don’t believe that there is a “right” or “wrong” way of preparing a particular dish. I certainly don’t think that my way is some sort of standard, and the few recipes that I do turn to for guidance – Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese, for example – work well for me, but aren’t necessarily any better or more correct than any number of time-tested recipes from any number of nonnas out there.

There are many variables to consider when you cook. What tastes balanced to my palate may taste too spicy or acidic to yours. The stock you use in a dish may have an entirely different level of seasoning than the stock I use, which will have an outcome on how much other stuff needs to go in. I can’t provide exact measurements for many things because I add seasoning as I go, tasting and adjusting until it tastes right to me.

My day job and commute don’t leave me much time for the precision and repetition involved in creating a recipe – when I get home in the evening, my main concern is getting dinner on the table, and as much as I love puttering in the kitchen, the last thing I want to do is spend an entire evening or weekend tied to the stove testing version after version of a dish. Cooking is my chance to get creative, to relax and get loose after a day spent at a job that requires meticulous attention to detail.

I love experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients, or rethinking standard ways of preparing familiar ones, and even the dishes I repeat often are constantly evolving – things I’ve made over and over again, like mac and cheese or enchiladas or chili or chicken stew are never exactly the same twice. And in our house that’s okay – I like playing with a favorite dish to see if I can improve it. That means that sometimes, I end up with a less-than-satisfactory result, but those results are rarely inedible, and they provide good lessons for the next go-around. I am constantly learning.

One of my biggest influences in recent years has been Chef Caroline Fidanza. I’ve mentioned her often in these pages, as I have always come away from a meal at Diner or Marlow and Sons feeling not just happily sated, but incredibly inspired. Though we are far away from those favorite Brooklyn eateries now, I am still inspired by their food and philosophy: I keep an eye on the restaurants’ respective websites and their posted specials, and every new season finds me waiting impatiently for the next Diner Journal to land in our mailbox. When the latest edition arrived earlier this week, I was not entirely surprised to learn that the chef who inspires me so much has feelings similar to mine on the subject of recipes. She writes:

“It is always my tendency to write recipes with very little in the way of instruction. This is not meant to be difficult, I just find it pointless to measure out the amount of oil, wine, lemon or salt in a recipe when it usually comes down to the question of how much does it need? How can I ever answer that question for you? Worse, when will something be done? The answer is, when it’s done. The truth is cooking defies instruction (this is not true for baking). So why do we insist upon having exact measurements and procedures? Mostly all I can attribute this to is fear. Fear of cooking in the first place and fear of screwing it up if we do. If we have measurements there is a paper trail and someone to blame. We have lost our culinary instincts and now must rely on books and pictures to tell us what to do.”

–Caroline Fidanza, from “Ribollita: The Meticulous Recipe and the Ghost of Elizabeth David,” as published in the Winter 2008 issue of Diner Journal (No. 10)

Last Night’s Dinner was never intended to be a recipe site – there are many, many good ones out there, and you’ll find many of my favorites listed on the links page. Rather, what you see here is a peek into our lives by way of our kitchen, a culinary record of sorts. And I hope that the lack of recipes won’t drive you away; I’d love nothing more than to inspire you to be fearless in the kitchen, to taste, to trust your instincts and your palate, and to find your own unique way of creating beautiful meals.