Cooking Without Measuring
Several years ago I was following a James Beard recipe for cornbread that called for two tablespoons of salt, which, even to me, a salt fiend, seemed like too much. But this was James Beard on cornbread, practically the master and his muse, and so I did what the recipe told me to, despite my qualms.
Guess what? It was too salty, way too salty, even for me. I assume it was a typo. The inedible cornbread, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise: It gave me the confidence to question and modify recipes. In time, this led to eyeballing measurements and relying more on common sense, instinct, and tasting than on slavish direction following. Last Thanksgiving I went so far as to cook the entire meal, appetizer to dessert, without measuring or closely following any recipes. It was the most relaxing holiday meal I have ever made.
Cooking without measuring (or even using a recipe) is as old as cooking itself. Grandmothers did it for centuries, but somehow we of recent generations have lacked the kitchen confidence or culinary know-how to pull it off. Of course, this kind of learning happened more naturally when kids grew up watching their mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen improvising. The last decade or two of celebrity chefs as gods and cookbooks as their bibles have, in some ways, made home cooks more dependent on recipes and measuring rather than less.
"A lot of people measure and expect it to be perfect at the end. They're afraid to taste and trust what they're tasting. But it's all up to your taste buds, so you have to taste as you go and trust your own taste," says Diane Forley, the former chef-owner of the two-star Manhattan restaurant Verbena, and now the chef/baker/co-owner (along with her chef husband Michael Otsuka) of Flourish Baking Company. "If you like it, then it's good."
Forley says she almost never measures when she cooks for her family (but then she is a trained chef). What she does, however, any of us can do, which is to eyeball her ingredients and the cooking vessel they're going into and visualize amounts and ratios of one ingredient to another according to flavor. "So if I'm making a vegetable soup in a big pot I'll lay out my ingredients and know that I need two or three carrots, onions, zucchini, maybe rutabagas, Jerusalem artichokes, but only one or two parsnips because they're a much stronger flavor."
With seasoning, of course, a tablespoon versus a teaspoon makes a big difference (as I learned), so adding less and tasting to see if it needs more is the way to go. "For something like a chili or stew, you have to trust that the dish will evolve and flavors will develop, so tasting at the end to add whatever seasoning it needs is important." How do you know what it needs? By believing in your taste buds and cultivating your taste memory-in other words, remembering flavors you've liked. Forley feels she owes a lot of her taste memory to her mother, a natural and inventive cook.
"All I need are the ingredients," says 80-year-old Ruth Forley. "Sometimes I start off doing one dish and I end up doing another because I am spontaneous and I am able to taste it in my mind." The elder Forley's cooking draws as much on her international, multi-cultural background as it does on sheer time spent in the kitchen. Her mother was born at the turn of the (last) century in India and then lived in Israel and Egypt, where she met Ruth's father. Ruth was born in Guatemala and was raised there in a Sephardic Jewish community, doing the rest of her growing up in Ecuador. "Each place has contributed to what I am. I am not a person of one place, I'm a mixture of everything."
And therefore so is her cooking. Like her chef daughter, Ruth eyeballs her ingredients in bunches and pinches, instead of in cupfuls or teaspoonfuls. "It's more creative this way, no? You're able to make something that is your own concoction."
Samantha
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