Concept Cuisine for Confident Cooks

While living in Moscow I managed to keep a daily blog going and it usually ended with something about the dinner we had had the night before.  My job as a supportive spouse was to take care of the household affairs, which included - but was not limited to - shopping and cooking.   I enjoyed doing both and obviously many of the readers of the blog enjoyed the food photos and descriptions.  Some thought I should pull them together and do a cookbook. 

Not knowing much about the process I wrote to one of our readers, Andi Bidwell, who has worked Betty Crocker/General Mills for more than thirty years.  Cindy met her in the mid-seventies when they were both in the same Swedish language course. They became friends and have stayed in touch over the years.  Since Andi had had lots of experience with editing cookbooks and such, I asked her what she thought of the idea of putting my stuff together.  Andi is diplomatic, and her response - while not coming out and saying DON’T - certainly made me rethink my venture.  She said that while my descriptions were fun to read and made sense to those already familiar with the cooking process, they were far short of being recipes. She reminded me that recipes are meant to be precise steps that can be replicated with the same result 99% of the time.  She suggested that a handful of this and a pinch of that were rather imprecise measurements. 

I hadn’t thought about any of that and of course she was correct. Now there is no way in hell that I’m going to ever do precise recipes. I find them boring and repetitive and unimaginative. That is not to say I haven’t used a recipe to create something the first time, but after that it is just the concept I remember and then let the juices flow to create something similar but different.  I remember when I first started to cook in the late sixties.  I did not come from a rich tradition of culinary arts being displayed daily in our home as a child.  My mother would have rather been a showgirl or a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall than a cook.  That is not to say we ate badly - she did the very best she could with whatever we could afford - but when your heart isn’t in it, you just can’t excel.  So when I got interested in cooking I needed other role models.

My first was the marvelously entertaining and talented Graham Kerr.  He had a TV show in 1969 called the Galloping Gourmet and his personality made cooking look like so much fun.  I would watch his show as often as possible and I purchased his three cookbooks and worked my way through them.  If you have the time, here is an episode that captures his style. It took me another several years before I would prepare this but it has since become a standard in my ‘really fancy’ category of dessert making. 

I did almost end up in jail in 1970 as a direct result of my wanting to create one of his other desserts, Chinese Gooseberry Rice Pudding.  This was a rice pudding mold that was decorated with Chinese Gooseberries, which are now called kiwis.  The recipe called for injecting the kiwis with Cointreau and letting them sit in the fridge overnight.  At the time Colin was only one year old and needed some stuff from the pharmacy, so I was getting that when I asked for a hypodermic needle.  You must remember that I had a full beard, long hair and beads – yes, beads.  I had to wait a very long time for the stuff for Colin when all of a sudden in came two of Amherst’s finest police officers who approached me and asked why I wanted a hypodermic needle. As I was trying to explain the recipe, I realized that they thought I was using drugs, and I became rather tongue-tied.  Finally I think they realized that a young father getting stuff for his son was not a big risk and they let me go, but without the hypodermic needle.  (PS they are now available in all cooking stores but the needles are quite large.  You can get better ones at pet stores.)

I digress.  Every night I would go to bed and read a chapter or two in the New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne, which had whole chapters on different aspects of cooking.  There were whole sections on pasta, beef, bread, etc. and they got me thinking about the concept of cooking as opposed to the specifics of recipes.  I would then try to create a dish from what I had read about the concept. Then I would try to find a recipe for something similar and see what others did which again got me to experiment with the dish once again.

Therefore, since a cookbook is beyond my desire to conform, I shall endeavor to create something that is strong on concepts for confident cooks and we’ll see where it goes.  We shall be entertaining family for the next week or so and my time will be devoted to shopping and cooking for them, so CCCC will be on hold for a wee bit.  Let me leave you with this cartoon.  Always feel free to ask me to remove your name from the Blog List if this get too much for you.   

Happy Bastille Day and Happy Anniversary to Cindy Emmans who has been married to the same adorable man for twenty-nine years today!