A guest rant by Bonnie S. Benwick
Cookbook recipes are undergoing yet another a rethink of sorts. I’m fine with some innovations, like Ali Slagle’s cookbook, I Dream of Dinner. Her recipes feature specific amounts in the method, rather than in the ingredients list.
But a development that really burns my toast has surged in restaurant cookbooks of late. Anyone who has tried to edit restaurant recipes understands the hitch: How to capture the essence of a chef’s dish that had the benefit of many hands, processes, and without presenting its creation as a treatise?
The answer can involve oversimplifying to the point of deception. Editors and collaborators feel pressure to simplify restaurant recipes because otherwise they look too long and involved. When sub-recipe after sub-recipe stacks up on the page, the pages will keep getting turned.
I recently tested restaurant recipes from a few chef cookbooks. A croquette recipe had 14 ingredients. (That’s only one more than the max total of a Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That? carrot cake.) The steps to make the croquettes looked like a couple hours of work.
But two of the 14 ingredients took more than six hours to complete, and that’s if they were cooked simultaneously. Here’s how the author stated them:
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- 6 bottles dark beer, reduced to a syrup consistency (about 2.5 ounces)
- 3 ounces caramelized onions, deglazed with beer
That’s a lot of prep, a lot of time without so much as a heads up in the headnote.
Another recipe required only a few tablespoons of a separate sauce recipe that made a bucket’s worth. A pasta recipe left me with 26 egg whites—but no suggestions for using them—after harvesting the necessary 24 egg yolks.
By making these complex recipes appear to be accessible, this kind of writing does a disservice. Such culinary land mines could kill the good works of cookbooks that are transparent about the work. Editors and recipe collaborators ought to flag non-accessible recipes upfront, in a headnote or tip.
Another way to defuse the land mines would take some rethinking. How about presenting cookbook recipes in order of the expertise or the time it takes to prepare them? It could be a game-changer for home cooks. This could be at the expense of organizing by season or meal course. Using this method would mean readers could know when they are approaching a challenge, or making an aspirational treat.
I’ve seen it work, most notably in Greg Wade’s upcoming cookbook Bread Head. Building-block recipes of buckwheat brownies and dinner rolls come way before his laminated maple rye kouign amann and multigrain sourdough loaves.
So, for the moment, watch out for the mines, dear readers. And think before you plant them, cookbook creators.
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Bonnie S. Benwick is a cookbook editor, reviewer, and recipe tester. She retired as deputy editor/recipes editor of The Washington Post Food section in 2019. Find her on Instagram @bbenwick, and mostly lurking on Twitter @BSBenwick.
You might also like these posts that include Bonnie:
- Are You Guilty of Recipespeak? Why the Washington Post’s Recipe Editor Hates It
- A Revolutionary Way to Handle Subrecipes
(Photo by Lasse Bergqvist on Unsplash.)
I’ve written articles in which I collected recipes from Chefs. The readers love to hear that these recipes come from local celebrities, and their favorite restaurants. Unfortunately, the recipes were often just as described, with sub-recipes for stocks and sauces, and usually written in chef shorthand. I’ve also seen the same phenomenon in cooking classes-a chef from a hot restaurant can fill the class, but may not even teach anything.
Maybe we need to tell people the truth about the levels of prep and pantry in restaurants at the beginning.
Amen to that!
I have another suggestion: Price these books as if they were multi-multicourse tasting menus at, say, $400 a pop. The die-hards who fancy themselves “chefs” and do actually try to cook those recipes at home will happily pay for the, um, privilege. So will those who dream of being pals with the chef-author. And the rest of the cooking public will spare themselves the agony, along with the expense.
I know you’ve had to deal with this, Suzanne!
Oh yes! There was one chef whose book I was “translating” from British English into American in the process of copy editing. It was actually quite well done for home cooks, assuming they could find the somewhat unusual ingredients such as sheep’s pluck. And then I hit a pastry recipe that had not been scaled down–it made enough for something like17(!) full-size tarts. IIRC, I was told to just scale it down myself. So I did, but didn’t test it. That’s still on my conscience. 😉
And then there was the chef whose native language was not English, and who had refused to have a co-author/writer who worked in both their language and English . . .
I had a weekly radio show in which I often shared recipes from chefs. I would diligently test them and try to simplify them before posting them for my listeners. It was definitely a real chore sometimes! When later collecting recipes from a book that ending up getting canceled, I would tell the chefs over and over again I wanted something simple that could be easily recreated in a home kitchen. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t! There are also a lot of pay-to-play cookbooks out there now. The publisher charges each chef or restaurant for the privilege of being in the book and they get a certain number of copies in return. Of course the poor collector and editor of these recipes has to pretty much humbly accept what they get given and go from there…good luck to them!
yikes, that kind of recipe gathering seems fraught w peril.
thanks for sharing, Don!
As I cookbook author, cookbook editor, and former culinary magazine editor, I’ve had to deal with many chef’s recipes in my time. Most took an inordinate amount of work to craft into usable recipes for the home cook. The instructions for a chef’s recipe in a German cookbook that I edited began, “Pickle a pig’s head,” when a pig’s head (pickled or not) was not even listed in the ingredients. When celebrity chefs’ recipes are published, editors are seldom given credit for turning them into dishes that cooks can make at home. However, I was gratified when the German chef–to whom I had sent pages and pages of changes that needed to be made in his recipes–finally met me in person and said that he wanted me to edit all of his cookbooks in the future!