Art of the Recipe (Part I: Origins)

Put this mix in an electric blender with 6 ounces (3/4 cup) crushed ice, then blend at high speed for no more than 5 seconds. Pour it into your tiki mug or other tall glass of choice, add ice cubes to fill, and garnish with a mint sprig.

Now all of these ingredients are things – even the falernum – exist at any good liquor store near you. All of them, I should say, except one. We’ll return to that one fateful ingredient later on in this episode, because it has a very important thing to teach us about how recipes are created and shared.

I’m really excited about this little mini-series we’re putting together because it’s nerdy and esoteric, but you also have to keep in mind that recipes are one of those little invisible threads that run through each and every one of our lives, and I’m personally stoked to give this subject matter some serious time and attention to see what we might learn. So with that, I’m pleased to present to you this first installment of our “Art of the Recipe” series. Enjoy.

Part I: Origins

Narrated by Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik

If we really want to get to the heart of what a recipe is and what it does, then we need to trace our way back to the very origins of food and drink preparation – back in time so far that we find ourselves face-to-face with an ape-like creature who has descended from the trees somewhere in Africa. But although it was a major risk for these proto-humans to abandon their arboreal sanctuary in favor of a dangerous life on the ground, it was a risk with a very specific reward attached to it.

Here’s boozy historian Mark Forsyth who explains what is commonly known as the “drunken monkey hypothesis.”

When you consider this in light of the fact that cooking food makes calories and certain nutrients more available to the human body, it’s easy to draw a correlation between fire, food preparation and brain growth, which, in turn, paves the way for language.

I bring this up because I think it’s absolutely fascinating that language, food, and drink are so interrelated. In fact, I imagine that many of the first proto-conversations centered around the correct way to harvest and prepare food. Back then, it was a matter of life and death, and language was a great tool to keep our ancestors on the right side of that dichotomy.

Now, here’s Mark Forsyth again talking about the role of food and drink on the way isolated groups of hunter-gatherers put down roots and formed complex societies.

Atoms And Void: An Epicuren Science

Let’s move forward in history a bit to the time of the Roman Republic around the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE. Now when we think about this time period, a lot of what comes to mind is a society that basically renamed the Greek gods and claimed them for their own. We think of Rome’s military and bureaucratic prowess. We think of Elephants crossing Alps. But one thing we don’t tend to think of is the humble atom.

To be fair, Romans borrowed the idea that the world is comprised of atoms – just like they borrowed their gods – from the Greeks. Philosophers like Democritus and Parmenides paved the way for the notion that the universe is composed of particles that are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. In fact, Democritus went so far as to explain that the size and shape of atoms had a direct impact of taste perception, claiming that: Bitterness is caused by small, angular, jagged atoms passing across the tongue; whereas sweetness is caused by larger, smoother, more rounded atoms passing across the tongue.

But it was the Greek philosopher Epicurus who advanced the theory and really honed it to create an atomistic worldview that explained all objects and phenomena in terms of either atoms or void. Unfortunately, no primary sources of Epicurus’ writing exist, but historians widely regard the Roman poet Lucretius and his epic poem De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) to be an accurate mouthpiece for Epicureanism. We’ll return to that term in a moment and discuss its relation to food and drink in particular.

If that epic poem, De Rerum Natura, sounds familiar, you may be recalling it from our “Cocktails in a Tim`e of Plague” episode where I reference its detailed account of the plague of Athens. But aside from that bizarre final chapter, the rest of the poem is much more concerned with unpacking the atomistic nature of the universe. The basic premises of Epicurus’ atomic physics are as follows:

• The Universe is comprised entirely of atoms and void

• Atoms are unlimited in quantity, but have a limited number of types (like letters in an alphabet)

• Different arrangements of atoms create different materials and experiences (like the same letters can be used to make different words)

• And finally, all that exists was set in motion by an event he called “the swerve,” which is when one atom changed course and bumped into other atoms, causing a chain reaction of movement and recombination. (Today’s scholars obviously draw very close parallels between this and the Big Bang Theory, but many earlier Christian scholars viewed this as a validation of the idea of Free Will).

Now, one through-line we’ll see with recipes during this origins episode is that they weren’t so concerned with units of measurement until much later in history. And there could be a number of reasons for this. Early on, it was probably because there was very little value in re-creating a very specific dish in a precise manner because you couldn’t just drive to the supermarket and pick up whatever your heart desired. You were subject to the seasons, the weather, random droughts, famines, and a whole bunch of stuff beyond human control. So if you could throw something together with whatever you had on-hand and it filled you up or got you drunk and tasted good at the same time, it was a success. Weights and measures be damned.

But today we really value the ability to faithfully re-create dishes and cocktails as close as possible to the way they were originally made. This process connects us with our heritage, it prevents us from making silly mistakes and ruining the dish, and it allows us not to have to carry all recipes around in our head, freeing up our memory for other things. But this dedication to accuracy and precision in recipes is a much newer concern than you might expect.

Here’s recent podcast guest Aaron Knoll, who brings to light some burning questions about certain cocktail ingredients that were in wide-spread use less than 150 years ago, but that we may still never be able to re-create.

As you can see, it takes a lot of work (and a certain amount of concern for people who will come after you) to develop a recipe that will be as useful 100 years into the future as it is on the day when you first set it down. What if their systems of measurement are different? What if an ingredient is no longer available? What if a terrible tragedy takes place and your language goes extinct? If you were a person in the ancient world, these just wouldn’t be things that kept you up at night in the same way that bandits, or plagues of locusts, or pleasing the goddess of the harvest would. No, unfortunately, the inclusion of precise weights and measures in recipes would come much later in history, so we can’t talk about that just yet. But we can talk about a really crucial stepping stone that would eventually allow us to get there, and that stepping stone is the atomic worldview.

Let’s check out Lucretius’ explanation of Epircuean flavor theory. He writes [quote]:

And it is so straightforward to explain the sense of taste

On tongue and palate, that any extra effort is a waste.

First of all, in our mouth we taste the flavors when we chew,

Squeezing out the savor from our victuals as we do,

Just as you might squeeze in your fist a sponge that’s sopping wet

Until it’s almost dry. The flavors we press out then get

Dispersed through pores all over the palate, distributing among

The tortuous passageways of the more loosely textured tongue.

Then, if the particles of flavor that ooze out are smooth,

They sweetly brush against the tongue, and sweetly touch and soothe

All watery and moist places about the tongue. The more they tend

To be prickly, on the other hand, the more the bodies rend

And sting the senses as they are released.

Here’s a recipe for Roman Vermouth:

ROMAN VERMOUTH [or Absinth] IS MADE THUS: ACCORDING TO THE RECIPE OF CAMERINUM YOU NEED WORMWOOD FROM SANTO FOR ROMAN VERMOUTH OR, AS A SUBSTITUTE, WORMWOOD FROM THE PONTUS CLEANED AND CRUSHED, 1 THEBAN OUNCE OF IT, 6 SCRUPLES OF MASTICH, 3 EACH OF [nard] LEAVES, COSTMARY AND SAFFRON AND 18 QUARTS OF ANY KIND OF MILD WINE. [Filter cold] CHARCOAL IS NOT REQUIRED BECAUSE OF THE BITTERNESS.

Here, we begin to see something that resembles today’s recipes, something we might have a snowball’s chance at re-creating if only we could figure out how much a “Theban Ounce” weighs. But unfortunately, the specificity of this recipe is one of very few exceptions in the book – rather than the rule. Check out this recipe for milk fed snails and you’ll see what I mean:

TAKE SNAILS AND SPONGE THEM; PULL THEM OUT OF THE SHELLS BY THE MEMBRANE AND PLACE THEM FOR A DAY IN A VESSEL WITH MILK AND SALT. RENEW THE MILK DAILY. HOURLY CLEAN THE SNAILS OF ALL REFUSE, AND WHEN THEY ARE SO FAT THAT THEY CAN NO LONGER RETIRE [to their shells] FRY THEM IN OIL AND SERVE THEM WITH WINE SAUCE. IN A SIMILAR WAY THEY MAY BE FED ON A MILK PORRIDGE.

Let’s just assume that milk soaked snails is a normal thing to eat. Aside from the foreignness of this recipe, you’ll notice that there aren’t any weights and measures to speak of. How much milk? How much salt? How many snails makes a decent portion, and what do you serve them with?

Just like Epicurean physics was more concerned with the real-world implications of atoms than today’s physicists are, you can see a distinct difference between the recipes in Apicius and those that Julia Child wrote. The good thing about Apicius is most definitely its incredible breadth and depth. By studying it closely, you can learn a lot about food and eating in Roman society. But the unfortunate part is that a lot of details fell by the wayside – perhaps intentionally.

In the edition of Apicius available on Project Gutenberg, the introduction is written by a fella named Dr. Frederick Starr, who offers a lot of historical context about the work. Regarding the dearth of certain specific recipe information he observes:

There may have been two chief reasons for concealing necessary information. Apicius, or more likely the professional collectors of the recipes, may have considered technical elaboration of the formulæ quite superfluous on the assumption that the formulæ were for professional use only. Every good practitioner knows, with ingredients or components given, what manipulations are required, what effects are desired. Even in the absence of detailed specifications, the experienced practitioner will be able to divine correct proportions, by intuition. As a matter of fact, in cookery the mention in the right place of a single ingredient, like in poetry the right word, often suffices to conjure up before the gourmet’s mental eye vistas of delight. Call it inspiration, association of ideas or what you please, a single word may often prove a guide, a savior.

This kinda makes sense. If you’re a carpenter, then architectural plans are easier to read than if you’re not. If you have a lot of experience sailing, you can learn to read the wind and the waves better than a landlubber, so it makes sense to me that chefs can look at an ingredient in context and infer how it should be prepared.

There are two other potential reasons Starr cites for the lack of detail in these recipes. One is simple: during Roman times, paper or parchment was expensive and hard to come by, so one might be motivated to keep things concise from a cost perspective. The other reason is a bit more insidious. It’s possible, says Starr, that among wealthy Romans, there was competition to throw the best parties and to have the best cooks, and so the omission of key instructions or secret ingredients may have been a way of maintaining status by guarding the recipes that made other folks jealous.

Of course, recalling back to our Roman example, power and status were primary motivators for the secret formulation because Donn Beach was famously competing with another chain of Tiki Bars – Trader Vic’s – for market share. As one last little marketing trick, Donn would only serve two Zombies to any patron on a given day, claiming that they were so strong he needed to limit their consumption. By making his signature cocktail a sort of forbidden fruit and by keeping a tight lid on the true formulation, Donn Beach was able to rake in some serious cash and make a name for himself.

If there’s anything to learn from this parable, it’s that there can be both risks and rewards when it comes to keeping a recipe overly simple. The risks of course, are that some elements will become lost to time, but there is some serious status to be gained by having a complete monopoly on a certain type of food or drink.

Recipes For The People

Apicius set the tone for recipes that lasted straight through the middle ages and Renaissance. They were written by and for cooks employed in the houses of the nobility, and because weights and measures varied greatly in many places during these times, you could expect much of the same when it comes to details. The recipes are sketchy and their effective translation effectively relied on specialized training handed down from cook to cook.

But following the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment – following advances like the printing press and the Columbian Exchange, which sent new ingredients and knowledge across the Atlantic both to and from the new world – the recipe began to evolve. It descended from its mystical, almost alchemical role in the closed off kitchens of Kings and Dukes and found its way into the hands of middle- and working-class people and into the kitchens of a new type of establishment – called a Restaurant.