Thinking and Feeling in the Kitchen

There’s an entire class of cookbooks that exist purely to serve as décor. The next time you’re looking at a cookbook, look at the glossiness of the pages, the size of the pictures (and the font), and flip through to see how many recipes there are, how detailed the instructions get. If it’s a big, heavy slab of a book with full-page glossy photos, chances are high (though not 100%) that you are looking at a coffee table book masquerading as a cookbook, and that it came from the clearance section of a Barnes & Noble. Beyond having some tantalizing food photography to put on display, there’s little you’ll get from those books that you couldn’t find with a quick Internet search.

My comprehensive thoughts on cookbooks will have to wait, but what’s relevant is that the chef, journalist, and author Michael Ruhlman introduced me to how much one could actually learn from a cookbook beyond the recipes inside. Ruhlman began his career as a journalist, before enrolling at the Culinary Institute of America, one the most prestigious culinary schools in the country, in order to write a book about the experience. Since then, he’s churned out a number books on food and cooking, including one called Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto (More on techniques later in this self-help guide!).

While most of the techniques are roughly what you’d expect (chapter titles include “Saute”, “Chill”, “Dough”, etc.), the first technique has stuck with me in particular: THINK. Here’s how Ruhlman describes thinking in the kitchen:

Thinking in the kitchen. It’s underrated. If you have a recipe, do you have to think? When you open a book that says “Combine A and B, add C, stir, and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F, do you simply follow the instructions? Cooking doesn’t work that way. Cooking is an infinitely nuanced series of actions, the outcome of which is dependent on countless variables.

Michael, Ruhlman, Ruhlman’s Twenty

As Ruhlman explains, even something as “simple” as buttered toast requires thought. What type of bread? What temperature is the butter? How toasted should the bread be? What’s the best tool for toasting the bread? Some might say the toaster, but I’ve had bread toasted in a skillet or under the broiler.

I don’t disagree with Ruhlman. But thinking, as anyone who suffers from anxiety like me knows, can be a trap. If I feel the pressure to consider every element of a recipe, the recipe will not get made. Simple as that.

So I would like to propose an additional kitchen technique (maybe I’ll write a book called Adam’s One?): Feeling. What motivates you to cook? What do you want? Do you want to learn how to make family recipes? Do you want to impress friends and loved ones? Is there a recipe from your favorite restaurant you want to recreate at home? When you think about certain foods you enjoy, how do they make you feel? What fond memories do you have cooking or eating, and what would it take to create more of those memories? You don’t need to be a brilliant master in the kitchen. As long as you’re cooking food that you enjoy, that makes you feel safe and at home, who cares if it’s fancy?

It’s true that to become a better cook, it’s important to stop being an automaton in the kitchen, following recipes by rote. But it’s also important to get in touch with all of emotions, positive and negative, that we bring into the kitchen with us. There are days when I want to make something big, elaborate, and new. But there are other days when I just want that janky version of beef stroganoff my dad makes with ground beef and dumps over egg noodles. They both make me happy — as long I know myself well enough to know which one I want to make when.