The Dish and its Recipe

COVID-induced travel restrictions meant that my daughter and I spent 6 months continuously in Pennsylvania with my husband and son – the four of us have never been together for so long a stretch in over 9 years. An additional happy side-effect of this stay has been my son’s attempting to cook some items from scratch (desserts – what else?) himself now that I am back in Chennai. Prior to that, he had been content with chopping vegetables, spreading dosas and rolling out an occasional chappati. Today, he informed me he made a vegan chocolate pudding. 

I always tell my son he should go as a tester – be it for recipes or for products – he will interpret instructions in all (im)possible, unintended ways, and find every fault or loophole there is – anyone who acts on his interpretations will have a guaranteed, fool proof, recipe or product. I write my recipes keeping him in mind, along with others who are new to cooking and for whom nothing is obvious. Therefore, he prefers these recipes. However, since I have not, as yet, written out the recipe for this pudding and he wanted to make it pronto, I sent him the New York Times version written by a favourite of mine, the renowned Mark Bittman. An uber simple recipe. With minimal ingredients and basic steps. Impossible to make a mistake in. Ahem.

Son informed me that he put in the chocolate into the blender without melting it. “That it should be melted is stated in the ingredients. Not in the instructions. I got all the ingredients together first and then read only the instructions.” He made a quick recovery though and heated everything up on the stovetop until the chocolate melted. He says that the pudding tastes excellent though a tad harder than it normally is. 

How did he miss that crucial instruction? “Amma, I think like a computer scientist – you have inputs and THEN you manipulate those inputs – you do not begin with a manipulated input.” I laughed out loud. 

I have guided many newbies over the phone through mysore paak, aloo paratha, badam halwa and more and the experiences are very revealing. When one has done anything consistently for a reasonable duration, many aspects seem so obvious that they are assumed and seem not worth elucidating. But it is those unexplained details that make ALL the difference between success and failure. This applies to any field at all – not just cooking. 

Something I try to keep in mind – but this one by my son was new even to me – even if you describe something, WHEN and WHERE one describes it makes a difference. I too often list ingredients as “two onions, chopped”, for example. To me, it makes sense. For it is those chopped onions that will then be manipulated through various cooking techniques.  Mark Bittman too must have thought the same way.

My daughter, who watches MasterChef sporadically, tells me that in an event where contestants are told to just recreate a given recipe, they mess up so often for exactly reasons like this – they do not read (or, at any rate, assimilate) all the instructions.  So, I am thinking, even as I write this, that it might be prudent for me to add a line in the instructions section saying ‘Begin by preparing individual ingredients as stated in the list of ingredients.’ But would even that be enough?

Son’s concluding statement was indeed a silver lining – “I thoroughly enjoyed making it, screwing up AND fixing it. It is so nice that a mistake can still taste so good!”  

So many learning points – for son as an aspiring cook and for me as someone who strives to write recipes such that the first timer gets even complicated ones right. Never a dull moment. No wonder The Gita says one should go through life as a householder – the constant lessons in humility keep us simultaneously learning and grounded!