Art of the Recipe (Part II: Craft)

I’ve been out a few times this season and have been fairly successful. I usually come home, clean them, and prep them for dinner. They’re delicious–earthy, meaty, and a bit nutty. On my last outing it was cold, dry, and windy and I easily found about a dozen morels. A couple were perfect but the rest looked a bit dry — not bad, just not “fresh”. 

As I tend to do, I was thinking about what to drink later that evening and as it often does, my mind drifted to the martini. Of course you can’t just throw a wild mushroom as-is into a cocktail and be done with it so with the martini format in mind, I figured I’d try pickling the morels for a Gibson-like riff on the cocktail.

I had already been thinking about pickling some when the season started but it seemed a waste with such good, fresh mushrooms; however, these dry morels were ideal for that, so I cleaned the mushrooms, put them into a jar, and made a very basic quick pickling solution (1 cup water, 1 cup vinegar, 2 garlic cloves, a teaspoon each of peppercorns, dried dill, chili flakes, and kosher salt, all brought to a boil, dropped to a simmer, poured hot into a canning jar, and cooled.)

While I prepped the picked mushrooms, I was thinking about what kind of spin I could put on the martini to welcome this new ingredient into the drink. It didn’t take long before I thought to incorporate Manzanilla sherry, which is dry, briney and incredibly refreshing. And as I scanned the gin bottles I came across St. George Terroir Gin and knew it was a no-brainer–the earthy, green, resin notes coupled with the nuttiness and saltiness from the sherry would be great. Throw in some bitters and vermouth for good measure and a lemon twist and you can’t lose. The sherry martini isn’t new by any stretch but I hadn’t had one let alone made one and there several varieties with different ratios.

To make this sherry martini garnished with a pickled morel mushroom, you’ll need:

• 2 oz St. George Terroir Gin

• 1 oz Manzanilla Sherry

• .5 oz Dolin Blanc Vermouth

• 2 dashes homemade citrus & pepper bitters

Combine all these ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, stir until well chilled and diluted, then strain into a stemmed cocktail glass and garnish with an expressed lemon twist and a pickled morel.

Thanks to Pablo (@alchemyandatwist on Instagram) for this excellent recipe and the story of its creation – and thanks to all the members of the Modern Bar Cart community who continue to submit questions and recipes. You keep sending them in, and we’ll continue to feature them here on the podcast.

Part II: Craft

Narrated by Modern Bar Cart CEO, Eric Kozlik

For most historians, the ages of Enlightenment and Revolution in Europe and the Americas are, shall we say, problematic. When consulting history texts, it is both easy and important to focus on some of the negative forces that shaped today’s world: slavery, colonialism, the rise of nationalism, racial essentialism – basically, if it happened in Forrest Gump or in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” you can probably trace it back somehow to a rich dude in a wig wearing tights and pointy shoes with shiny buckles.

I say it’s both important and easy to focus on these things because we certainly can’t ignore the mistakes and atrocities of our ancestors…but unfortunately, they’re so numerous and widespread that they represent the broad side of the historical barn. But while a very small percentage of the world’s population was making decisions and allocating resources that would change borders on maps and alter the physical and cultural landscape of the world, a much larger group of people was busy making more humble (and less catastrophic) innovations that incrementally solved everyday problems and advanced our understanding of the world we live in.

This is not astonishing, for given the fact that there exists an indefinite series of simple tastes which can change according to the number and variety of their combinations, we should need a whole new language to describe all these effects, and mountains of […pages] to define them, and unknown numerical characters for their classification.

Two things jump out here. One is that the author’s description of the combination of tastes is eerily similar to the Epircurean physics we examined in part 1 of this series, where Lucretius described the way that atoms and void in different configurations resulted in different materials and experiences. The other is his advocacy for “a whole new language” to describe flavor. As a member of the emerging upper-middle class, the author was among the first to sample delectable dishes that had escaped the clutches of royal cooks, it was clear that there was much progress still to be made in the field of flavor, and that, in and of itself, was truly revolutionary, especially when paired with his lifetime of carefully recorded anecdotes and meditations.

Many would say that Brillat-Savarin was “ahead of his time,” but I would argue that another element that makes this book and this author so very compelling is that he was very much a man of and subject to his time. Even though he was of noble enough stock to work as a circuit judge, he wasn’t so high and mighty that the tides of revolution didn’t occasionally swing him out of favor with the ruling regime, which forced him to flee the country, first to Switzerland, and then to the newly founded United States by way of Holland. Throughout his fascinating life, he saw the rise of certain commodities like chocolate, coffee, tea, and sugar – which obviously had a massive impact on the shape of European food culture – as well as luxuries like truffled turkeys and well hung pheasants. But one of the most interesting advances he witnessed in real time was the birth of the restaurant. Brillat-Savarin writes: [quote]

Rich and powerful people were almost the only ones who enjoyed two great advantages: they could travel quickly, and they were always well fed.

The advent of the new public vehicles which can cover fifty leagues in twenty-four hours has eliminated the first privilege; the coming of restaurants has done away with the second, since through them good living is at the beck of any man.

Here, he ties the rise of the restaurant with the sudden access to public transportation that brought visitors flocking to cities like Paris, where, up to that point, you could only hope to get a good meal if you were well connected. Otherwise, you’d have to settle for whatever slop the innkeeper had on the fire. Restaurants, to Brillat-Savarin, were like little royal kitchens that would serve anyone who could pay, and that made them very popular indeed.

Would I love to tell you the story of the time that he witnessed a man eat more than 300 oysters before dinner? Totally. How about the best way to eat a small bird, feathers and all? Of course I would. Or perhaps his theory on the erotic properties of truffles? You bet. But alas, this author is heavy on talk and light on recipes, so I’ll wrap up this segment with Brillat-Savarin’s favorite recipe for fondue, which I think holds up pretty well to this day.

Weigh the number of eggs you wish to use, according to the presumed number of your guests.

Then take a piece of good Gruyere cheese weighing on-third of this amount, and a morsel of butter weighing one-sixth of it.

You must break and beat the eggs in a casserole [dish], after which you add the butter and the grated or minced cheese.

Put the casserole [dish] on a lively fire, and turn the contents with a spatula, until they have become properly thick and soft; add a little salt, or none at all according to whether the cheese is old or not, and a good amount of pepper, which is one of the important characteristics of this time-honored dish; serve it on a gently heated platter; call for the best wine, which will be copiously drunk, and you will see miracles.

That last instruction kinda sums up both the delight and the motivating factors behind Brillat-Savarin’s life’s work of analyzing and summarizing the world of food and drink. He did it because it brought pleasure, and that was something he could afford. But for those individuals who were less well off than he – unable to travel the world sampling its finest bounties – another important text was about to hit the scene and force open the door to the world of flavor even further.

Active Verbs in Recipes

From a linguistic standpoint, a few things jump out at me when I read Acton’s recipes, the first of which is her noteworthy departure from the normal format of the recipe by beginning her instructions with really dynamic action verbs like “pound,” “cut,” “brown,” “pare,” “strip,” “mince,” and others. These words differ from the traditional way of beginning a recipe, which almost always involved the word “take.” In fact, the word “recipe” itself is derived from the Latin imperative word for “take,” which is also the origin of the “Rx” you’ll see on doctors’ prescription pads. Right? Take 2 pills twice a day with food? So feel free to pull out that little factoid when you need a conversation starter.

Anyway, the important thing about Acton’s really specific action verbs is that they tell us she emphasizes “process” over materials. Anyone can acquire ingredients on a list, but what Acton demonstrates again and again in Modern Cookery is that it’s the way these ingredients are processed, and combined that has the largest impact on the end product. Again – this might not seem revolutionary to you and me, but I can assure you that it blew the minds of many an aspiring home cook in the 19th century.

Recipe Standardization Across Time

Now, the place where we take an unfortunate left turn is when we begin to analyze the importance of weights and measures in the formulation of modern recipes – and this becomes increasingly important as we transition from the culinary world to the domain of the cocktail and other creations that reside within the liquid medium.

Brillat-Savarin’s fondue recipe from the late 1700s or early 1800s uses only relational measurements (he says: weigh the number of eggs you need according to the number of guests you expect, and then every other ingredient is proportionally based on that weight). In Modern Cookery, on the other hand, we see the use of Imperial measures like pounds, ounces, quarts, and gallons. This again seems like a serious upgrade and looks a lot like today’s recipes – but I’ve got some bad news to break to ya: even these systems of measurement are a really, REALLY new thing. Let me spit some facts at ya to put in all in perspective.

Weights & Measures

Regarding weights and measures, England had a bunch of legislation on the books, but no unified and consistent system until the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824 – about 20 years before Acton’s book was published. America, on the other hand, decided it would go ahead and figure out its own system of weights and measures, despite recommendations from Francophile Thomas Jefferson, who liked the metric system. That, by the way, was rolled out in France in 1799. If you look at cocktail recipes to this day, there’s almost always one set of instructions for US measurements, and another developed for the metric system – which means that you’re never making a completely faithful version of a drink if you swap between the two. So, although we take it for granted today when we see consistent volume or weight measurements on a recipe, there were very few consistent standards even a century or two ago, which actually lends a bit of curb appeal to all those relational recipes that just threw measurements out the window.

Time

Now let’s talk about time – right – Acton famously included “cooking time” on all her recipes. Well, it might surprise you to learn that until the middle of the 1800s – and for poor families quite a bit later – nobody besides the uber rich could afford a clock in their home – let alone one that was portable enough to be moved to the kitchen. To me, this doesn’t so much invalidate Acton’s recipes as it emphasizes the importance of making informed estimates about things like the passage of time. Even if it’s aspirational, Acton gives her readers a target to shoot for, which in itself was revolutionary.

Temperature

Finally, we have the issue of heat (or temperature). I won’t dwell on this too long, but suffice it to say that Acton’s cooking was all done on wood or coal stoves, so there was no such thing as setting the oven to 350 for one hour. That wouldn’t come along until much later, and since I just promised you that we’d be moving along to cocktails, which don’t require cooking, let’s fast forward to the last decade or two, where one popular drinks historian makes an important contribution to beverage recipes and our ability to re-create them.

Wondrich, Mr. Boston, And Beyond

Enter David Wondrich, good ol’ Davey-boy. Cocktail historian, noteworthy for his work at Esquire and just about every other respectable print and digital publication that has a regular drinks column. He is, of course, the author of two very important books, Imbibe! – which is a great entry point to spirits and cocktails – and Punch, which gets real deep and historical and has, in my opinion, even better writing than his first book.

Now, Wondrich faced a question that pretty much anyone interested in cocktails has raised at some point, which is: what did these classic drinks taste like when they were first invented? The first step, of course, is to dig up some sort of documentation that reveals a cocktail’s ingredients and measurements, and hopefully even its origins. But if you’re a true, primary source historian like Wondrich (and not like all these lazy bloggers and journalists I complain about during our featured cocktail segment), you might rightly be faced with a recipe that involves measures like “flagons” or “gills” or “wine glasses.” In both his books, he provides easy conversions for all sorts of arcane weights and measures, which is what makes them useful both as historical texts and as recipe manuals.

Wondrich’s books – as texts that bridge history and craft – are quite different from many others that were popular earlier in the century. Here, I think of the Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide which takes the form of a reference book like a dictionary or encyclopedia with short entries about each drink. Hold up Mr. Boston next to Imbibe!, and it looks like apples and oranges…kinda because it is. While Wondrich leans heavily on historical context, Mr. Boston and similar texts care more about the materials (and maybe a few sketchy notes on the process) needed to produce a given drink.

This reminds me quite a bit of the difference between Apicius, which we discussed in Part I, and Modern Cookery. Apicius, like Mr. Boston, is targeted at professionals – people who might consult it as a part of their day-to-day occupation (and perhaps even under a deadline). Books like Imbibe! and Modern Cookery are much more concerned with giving tools to people who are operating in their own homes – and if you’ve made it this far, I think it’s kind of cool to appreciate some of the heritages from which we can trace today’s popular cocktail books.

Like Acton, Wondrich begins Imbibe! with a list of tools and techniques that anyone who plans to read the ensuing pages will need to know or reference, and this explicit definition of terms is important because the assumption is that the reader hasn’t attended culinary school (or in Wondrich’s case, arcane cocktail school).

Going back to Brillat-Savarin, and even further to the Epicurean atomistic physics we covered in Part I, I think one way to distinguish these two different types of recipe books from one another (and to value them each for their own sake) is to think of texts like Apicius and Mr. Boston as being concerned with the quantity and type of ingredients, and texts like Imbibe! and Modern Cookery as being concerned with how those ingredients are manipulated and configured (and why). So the next time you purchase a book of recipes, or come across a sexy recipe blog on the internet, I’d encourage you to try and pass what you read through that filter. It could tell you what the recipe and its author are best-suited to communicate, and it could also offer insights on what might be missing in order for you to truly grasp the process.

The Role Of Narrative In Recipes

Before I wrap up this episode with a list of my best practices for writing a well-crafted recipe drawing on all the stuff we’ve learned in the first two installments of this series, I’d like to take a quick pit-stop in our current time to consider a recipe trend I find charming – but only to a point.

Here’s when this trend first really occurred to me – and let me preface this by saying I do not own a television and I do not watch network TV on the reg, so I’m often oblivious to certain popular trends until they smack me in the face. That’s exactly what happened here.

Siba’s Table

It was New Year’s 2018, and my wife and I were in Lisbon for a trip she was taking as a business school requirement. And, wouldn’t you know it – I happened to contract just about the worst case of Norovirus that anyone has ever had the pleasure to meet. So there I was, lying feverishly in a hotel room in a foreign country, and the station I told my wife to leave on while she left for the day happened to be the Food Network – but not the good ol’ American Food Network – remember, we’re in Europe, so I was watching some UK version of the Food Network and they happened to be airing an all-day marathon of a show called Siba’s Table.

Now, I grew up watching chefs like Emeril Legassi and others who did cooking demonstrations – often in front of live studio audiences – but where the show was centered wholly around the food. But Siba had a style all her own. All I can remember about that day is lapsing in and out of fever dreams, listening helplessly (for I could not reach the remote) about how we were making this dish because Siba’s in-laws were visiting, and we needed to make this dessert because she was being visited by a childhood friend who had a mango tree in her backyard, and all the while we got to watch her husband entertain their two kids while Siba shopped for ingredients and prepped the dishes.

I don’t know if it was the cramps and cold sweats or the deluge of unnecessary plot lines that had me more bent out of shape that day, but I continue to be fascinated by the use of narrative (or story arcs) in recipes, and very quick to point out when someone goes overboard.

The Pioneer Woman

The U.S. has its own version of Siba’s Table in the form of The Pioneer Woman, who not only has a show with a similar format on The Food Network, but she also has a line of cheaply made cookware and serving ware that will break if you look at it the wrong way – I can tell you that from personal experience. In essence, the host, Ree Drummond is out there on her Oklahoma ranch living the American dream. Did the kids just get done wrastlin’ in the hay field? Let’s whip up grandma’s famous lemonade! Is the husband tired from a day milking horses out in the south pasture? Time for some deep fried shepherd’s pie! And for dessert? Well, you’ll get a heapin’ helpin’ of staged, scripted banter that somehow makes you feel like you’re just another member of the family.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. At a certain point, a recipe is no longer a recipe when you spoon feed it to people in the form of “info-tainment.” It may have been a recipe at one point, but when the delivery is somehow contingent on filling a 20 minute time slot to feed you ads…well, I’m gonna go ahead and unsubscribe.

When and How Narrative Can Work

That’s why I began this episode with Pablo’s wonderfully thoughtful and beautifully articulated story about his Sherry Martini with Pickled Morels. Let’s walk through it so I can show you what I mean in light of Siba’s Table and The Pioneer Woman:

• Was there a story or an initiating incident? Yep. The story was, it’s Spring, and spring means morel mushrooms. Pablo likes to forage them – it’s a good excuse to get some exercise outdoors.

• Was there a problem to solve or a reason why he made this recipe? Absolutely. He foraged some morels that were dry, and he was able to re-purpose them by pickling them and using them as a cocktail garnish.

• Was useful information conveyed? Yes. Not only did Pablo give us the cocktail recipe, which he customized using carefully chosen ingredients from his bar and explaining why he selected each one, but he also gives us a bonus recipe in the form of his pickling liquid. He also told us about Morels and how to identify them.

I love a good story – but all good stories are real, just like Pablo’s, not constructed in order to prevent you from changing the channel. Remember that last detail of Brillat-Savarin’s favorite fondue recipe?

Call for the best wine, which will be copiously drunk, and you will see miracles.

TIPS FOR WRITING GREAT RECIPES

 Now it’s time to see if we can synthesize what we’ve learned over the past two installments of this “Art of the Recipe” series and turn them into a few helpful tips that will help you to be a better recipe writer the next time someone asks you for the secrets behind your favorite dish or drink.

Tip #1 – Be Careful What You Assume

Jerry Thomas might have assumed that the ingredients in his “Gin & Pine” cocktail were pretty obvious, but here we are, a century and a half later, scratching our heads. This is the “think about your audience” instruction that all writers need to consider before publishing something because your end product is going to be vastly different based on the assumptions you make about what your audience knows and has access to regarding tools and ingredients. So, if you make an assumption – make it a good one, based on reflection and evidence.

In cooking, a large onion is different than a medium or small one. In mixology, is bar spoon of absinthe is different from an Absinthe rinse, is different from an absinthe mist. Thus, it is crucial to specify, whenever possible how the raw materials you use will be configured. If we’re using the absinthe example I just gave and combining it with our running Epicurean Alphabet metaphor, Absinthe might be analogous to a letter of the alphabet (let’s call it “A”). But a bar spoon might be an “A” with a particular accent on it, and those other two absinthe applications might also have slightly different inflections depending on how they’re used. If you’re able, make sure you specify not just the type of ingredient, but also any other specifics related to its application. This can be the difference, when going to a French restaurant between requesting “poisson” (fish) or “poison” (poison).

Tip #3 – A Recipe is Not Just a List of Ingredients

Remember how Eliza Acton used all those really beautiful action verbs to begin her recipes in Modern Cookery? To me – those really helped me to visualize the process of creating her recipes. Like all good verbs, they brought the process to life. One way of thinking of a sentence is by designating something as an “Agent” (that would be you, or the person making the recipe), something as an “Act” (the process of executing said recipe), and something as an “Object” (the ingredients you manipulate on the way to creating your end product). But in between, there is a lot of description that can occur using words like adjectives and adverbs to really bring some color to the picture. There’s a difference between slicing and “thinly slicing,” just as there’s a difference between shaking and “vigorously shaking.” So before you send off a recipe, go through it looking specifically at your verbs, adverbs, and adjectives to make sure you’re painting a full picture of the process you aim to describe.

Tip #4 – Know When to Elaborate and When Not To

The best place to elaborate in a recipe is the place where it’s either most complicated or it’s easiest to mess up. This is when you want to hold the hand of your reader. Otherwise, you might want to take a page out of Apicius and assume when convenient that your reader can glean some basic information from context (like the fact that you need to peel an onion before using it).

Tip #5 – Narrative Should Be Used Like Sauce

As you can see from my final rant, when the story overshadows the recipe, it’s like having a comically tiny piece of meat swimming in a bowl full of gravy. So if you wouldn’t do that, why would you bog down a perfectly good recipe with unnecessary backstory that your reader might not relate to? If you want to write a culinary essay – do that. If you want to produce a substance-less TV show or a narcissistic food blog, do that. But if you want to write a good recipe, make sure that everything you write is somehow in service of the dish or drink you’re trying to describe.