Steal Like a Chef

Long ago, after my mother and her sisters had moved out of theirs parents’ home, my Gram, their mother, gifted them small boxes, each with dozens of handwritten note cards. These were the family’s crown jewels: her recipes for all of their favorites, each of them carefully inscribed in her distinctive hand, with clever asides and illustrations of angels and candles along the sides.

One Christmas when I was in my 20s, my Mom kept the tradition going. She bought a little black photo album. She slipped a photo of me in apron and toque circa age 6 in the front, and titled it “Adam Can Cook!!”. Where photos would go, she slipped jumbo-sized note cards with every recipe I had grown up loving, from my Aunt Olga’s chocolate cake to the traditional Christmas corn pudding (recipe: drive to the Yorktown Inn in York, PA and pick it up there).

This made me wonder: where had all these recipes come from? Who had invented them? Was Aunt Olga’s chocolate cake the product of a distant aunt who was a baker? Was my dad’s macaroni and cheese a product of punishing trial and error in the kitchen, testing recipe after recipe to come up with the perfect gooey consistency and cheesy goodness?

No, of course not. When we cleaned out my Gram’s house, my mom showed me her secret: battered three-ring binders, all of them troves of scraps and fragments from newspapers and magazines, a 1950s housewife’s Dead Sea Scrolls. Surely, many of these recipes were never made, and others were made once and then discarded. But the lucky few remained in her rotation, and then became tradition, and then were passed down to the next generation, their origin long forgotten.

Chances are, all your favorite childhood dishes were stolen. And want to build your confidence in the kitchen, you should steal too. Unless you’re a star chef cooking for paying customers, there’s no such thing as plagiarism in cuisine. Your macaroni and cheese doesn’t require citation. There’s no such thing as a chocolate cake with footnotes. In fact, in the United States, you can’t claim a copyright on a recipe, as long as it remains a “mere listings of ingredients” without substantial creative expression involved.

My comfort in the kitchen is the derived from a lifetime of being a sponge and a thief. I’m constantly flipping through cookbooks in used book stores, watching food shows on TV and more recently on the Internet, and taking pictures of menus with novel combinations of flavors or preparations that I want to try for myself at home. And when I go to cook in the kitchen, all of that attention paid as I go about my day finds its expression. I’ve reached the point where I subconsciously mix and match techniques I’ve learned from all over.

So join me, for a journey through all of the most important lessons I’ve learned to overcome my anxiety in the kitchen and make food for myself, my family, and my friends to enjoy.