Recipes and Learning

There's a new trend in cookbooks -- books that instruct you on how to cook without a recipe.

First of all, there is a category error going on here. Instructions ARE recipes. So this is not so much cooking without a recipe as it is cooking with a vague, incomplete, annoying recipe.

I learned during my time as a cognitive scientist that almost all human reasoning is what Darwin called "descent with modification." We reason by analogy with prior knowledge and experience, taking something from the past that sort of fits and adjusting it. And it isn't necessarily always personal experience. It just has to be relevant to the context of your current situation. The person I worked for at the time had even, as a graduate student, created an AI cooking program called JULIA that could create new recipes subject to current constraints. She taught computers to cook. So recipes are the starting point for learning. They are codified prior experience, waiting to be modified. They are not impediments to learning.

Cookbooks do have a lot of problems but recipes are not one of them. They suffer from a lot of tropes, just like TV and movies, that have accreted like barnacles over time. Here are two.

1. "Cook onion over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes, until fully caramelized." Everyone knows, even the cookbook writer, that caramelizing onions takes no less than 45 minutes unless you want them burnt. The first time I ran across this trope, it completely wrecked my dinner.

2. "Salt and pepper to taste." You even see this statement as instructions for salting and peppering raw chicken. What the fuck is that supposed to even mean? I mostly don't like recipes from America's Test Kitchen, but at least they give you actual measurements as a starting point. You get something that is at least tolerable the first time, and you can adjust up or down in the future. Descent with modification.

And that's leaving aside the recipes that the author clearly never even made him/herself, like the porchetta I once made with a spice mixture suitable for 10 porchettas. It was inedible.

Can you tell I'm between semesters?

THEATLANTIC.COM

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