Comments on: THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD

By: PJ Hamel

PJ Hamel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:46:53 +0000

Thank you for bucking the recipe tide! I write recipes for King Arthur Flour, and continually try to squirm out of the computer software straitjacket in which I write – which REQUIRES prep times, times that are inevitably inaccurate, for the reasons you give. I refuse to write any sentence that isn’t something you’d actually speak; “In a bowl, place…” Indeed. I heard you speak at the Norwich Congregational Church last night, and quietly cheered your stand against the formulaic approach to food writing! And, since John Updike is my favorite writer of all time – there is NO ONE who could string words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, like Mr. Updike – I was delighted to hear that he was a pleasure to work with. Thanks for coming down to Norwich – and for continuing to fight the good fight. PJH

By: Denise

Denise — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:37:22 +0000

Judith, you are absolutely correct. And it is the lovely way you write your recipes that inspires me to cook every time I open your Cooking for One. No matter how tired I may be, I get out the pans and ingredients and enjoy my time in the kitchen as well as the meal.
Thank you.

By: Mona

Mona — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:36:32 +0000

I love reading your words. I have been married to a Chef for 14 years and I am working with him on writing a more evocative and sensual way of recipe writing……………

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:36:50 +0000

Many thanks Judith for voicing a similar frustration I experience when reading recipes. Imagine if Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote sculpting instructions in similar fashion! You’d think you were working up to a statue named “A Guy Standing, Holding a Rock in His Hand” instead of “David”.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:58:30 +0000

Judith,
Your comments about the time required to perform a culinary task reminds me of something my mother and I used to chuckle over in Gourmet: at the end of the recipes for baked goods they would note that ‘keeps for 5 days in covered container’, or 6 days wrapped in foil, and so on. Why 5 and not 4 or 6? We used to laugh over this years ago: I don’t know if they continued the practice or not, and now it is a moot point, at least with Gourmet…

By: Irena

Irena — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:35:02 +0000

If a recipe is written for a cook, all that is needed is an idea, for example, Pumpkin Soup: canned pumpkin, blood orange, fresh ginger, chicken broth,creme fraiche.Yummy.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:44:04 +0000

Judith,
I find that I use constructions such as, “In a bowl, combine the first mixture with the second mixture.” Most often when adapting a recipe from someone else and I’m trying to avoid plagiarism by directly copying the original phrasing. I find myself far more irritated by having to specify “in a bowl” at all – as though you might mix your cake batter in a skillet, or that there’s something wrong with doing s oif you don’t have a bowl handy. Unfortunately I’ve found in five years of writing recipes and teaching cooking classes much of what I consider redundant is not at all redundant to novice cooks. I would much prefer to write something like “after adding the spice the fond will become coffee brown, at this point deglaze the pan with white wine,” but instead I must write, “after adding the spice the ‘fond’ (browned bits stuck to the pan) will become coffee brown, at this point ‘deglaze’ the pan by adding the white wine over medium heat and scraping up the ‘fond’ with a spatula.”

I ceratinly keep my readers in mind assuming a certain degree of expertise in the readers of my blog and a much lower level of knowledge from readers of Cooking for Two.

By: Charlotte

Charlotte — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:24:44 +0000

Makes me also think of Robert Hass — one of my favorite lines from “Meditation at Lagunitas:”
“There are moments when the body is as numinous
as word, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”
Lines I’ve been known to mutter under my breath …