What's a recipe?
Producer Clea Wurster explores our attachments to recipes and cookbooks, and begs the question, should we leave them behind? Spoiler Alert: The answer is emphatically, NO!
Welcome to our new Friday column!
Each Friday, Salt + Spine producer Clea Wurster will stop by with a new Q&A, an essay on cookbooks, and other bonus content for our paid subscribers. Today, I’m sharing an interview with Daniel Licht, the author of a compact “cook”book that reads more like a journal and explores our modern obsession with recipes and how we use them in our own kitchens.
Plus, keep an eye out for next week’s piece featuring an interview with Cal Peternell, the author of four cookbooks and the long-time chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.
I hope you enjoy the essays and the holiday weekend!
PS. In case you missed it, we just announced our summer Cookbook Club author—Jessie Sheehan! So get baking from her book, Snackable Bakes, and join us for a Virtual Baking Party on July 26!
—Clea, Brian, and the Salt + Spine team
Samin Nosrat, in her introduction to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat promises to “liberate” us from recipes, to leave us confident at the market, in the kitchen, and with our ingredients. Alice Waters tells us in The Art of Simple Food that “Good cooking is no mystery.” And Cal Peternell’s Twelve Recipes opens with a section entitled “breakable rules.”
Cookbooks, at least those published by our infamous California culinary idols, are typically instructional and informational. Their ultimate goal is not that you will stoop from page to pot, anxiously stirring, timing your sauté with your phone, or frantically flipping through your cookbook library asking, “Just what am I to do with asparagus?” Rather, they seem to want to wean you off your recipe addiction, to embolden you as a cook and instill in you true confidence in yourself.
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