In one of the classes in my graduate program, we’re required to do creative writing exercises every week. The general theme is that they all have to be connected to teaching in some way. I ended up kind of liking this one, although it’s not my usual genre. Readers averse to personal essays are advised to wait until my next post (“The Replacement-Level Novel: Notes Towards an Investigation,” coming out sometime in December).
“You’re a good cook.”
“Eh, it was just a recipe.”
It wasn’t, and isn’t, an uncommon exchange to hear at the Coulsons’ dining room table when I cook for my family. Someone compliments my cooking; I explain it away as mere recipe-following, cooking by algorithm. They might as well give a robotic arm on an assembly line all of the credit for building a Toyota.
Whether following a recipe makes you a good cook is a perennial debate among people who like to cook, or at least people who like to talk about cooking online. (Whether the latter group is a representative sample of the world’s home cooks is a question for another time.) If it’s true that l’habit ne fait pas le moine, the robe doesn’t make the monk, is it also true that la recette ne fait pas le chef?
I don’t claim to have an answer. I do, however, feel confident saying that people who make food for a living almost never have this conversation. Maybe the executive chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants do. But in the various front-of-house and back-of-house food service jobs I’ve worked for the last five years, I have never heard anyone argue over whether you count as a good cook if all you did was follow a recipe.
Indeed, in most food service jobs, there’s not much room for originality. “Focus on accuracy, not speed,” my manager told me when I first started working at the Green Spring Deli.1 His focus was on making sure I didn’t end up leaving the sauerkraut off of a Reuben or the alfalfa sprouts off of a Health Sandwich because I was acting like I was auditioning for a primetime spot on the Food Network. But informing his advice was an even more basic principle: follow the recipe to the letter. If someone orders a Health Sandwich, they expect that there will be alfalfa sprouts on it. Even if you think a Health Sandwich is immeasurably better off without sprouts—they do, after all, taste like dirt and are riddled with bacteria—you will put the sprouts on the sandwich, no ifs, ands, or buts.
After about a month of regular hours on the line, I became competent enough to require little micromanagement by my supervisor or the more experienced sandwich makers. Though I never considered myself God’s gift to the deli business, people generally liked the sandwiches I made; if they were disappointed, they were almost never disappointed enough to call and complain to a manager about it. When the unexpected happened—when, for example, the sub rolls kept crumbling and splitting open because the bakers thought they could get one over on us by selling us yesterday’s rolls instead of fresh ones—I generally knew what to do. If I didn’t know what to do, I could identify the problem well enough to get the help I needed.
Until the following summer, if you had suggested that these abilities were anything but the bare minimum needed to keep my job, I would have called you a shameless flatterer. If you had said that any of this made me a good cook, I would have called you a shameless, degenerate flatterer. I was, after all, merely following recipes. Then I met Steve.
When Steve started working at the deli, I was spending most of my time working the cash register and did not see much of him in action. What I did see did not give me much faith. He would freeze as soon as things started going poorly, such as the first time a sub roll split open when he was trying to fold it closed. I’m tempted to compare him to a deer in the headlights, but that doesn’t quite capture the narcissistic injury that these events seemed to provoke. Imagine, if you will, an older deer telling a younger deer, “Okay, when you’re crossing a road at night and you see two bright lights, you’re going to want to freeze, but don’t do it!” and the younger deer saying “Yeah, yeah, for sure” the whole time, like he ought to be the trainer in this scenario, then freezing up anyway the first ten times. That should give an idea of what it was like to overhear people trying to teach Steve how to make sandwiches:
Deli Veteran: So you cut the roll open—
Steve: Yeah, uh-huh—
Deli Veteran: —and put Cajun mayo on both sides—
Steve: Yeah. For sure.
Deli Veteran: —and then put down two slices of pepper jack—
Steve: Cool, cool. Yeah. For sure. Gotcha.
Deli Veteran: Steve, shut up for a minute and let me talk.
(I didn’t make up that last part. Allegedly it was what my coworker Mike, one of the most patient, decent people in the entire foodservice business, said to him during one evening shift.)
Steve did not last long on the line. He had, I am sure, many positive qualities, but they were not on display behind the deli counter. Since my supervisor was unwilling to micromanage Steve for an entire eight-hour shift—there were deliveries to sign for, phone calls to make, cigarettes to smoke while making other phone calls—Steve was soon relegated to dishwashing and simple prep tasks. After freezing in the headlights for the eleventh time, he got run over. No one was surprised when he quit a few weeks before he left for college in August, never to be heard from again.
Though Steve might not have had much patience or humility, if there was one thing he did have, without a doubt, it was the recipes. He had full access to solid, time-tested recipes, written by experienced food service professionals, recipes people raved about in our Google reviews. Most of them, I believe, were written before he was born. But even with all the recipes, he wasn’t much of a sandwich-maker.
I suppose, then, that I wasn’t telling the whole truth earlier when I said that I didn’t know if following a recipe makes you a good cook. In truth, the use or non-use of recipes is immaterial. What is more important is your ability to know what to look for, to adjust on the fly when things aren’t going quite as expected, to respond quickly and effectively to unwelcome surprises. In the year since he left the deli, Steve may have acquired these abilities. Everyone can, so long as they are willing to set aside egotism and laugh at themselves once in a while. But those abilities certainly weren’t on display behind the deli counter. He had a full list of the recipes right in front of his face, but no recipe would or could teach him not to take it as a personal insult if a poorly-made sub roll split open.
A sub roll splitting open, by the way, is not even the tenth-worst thing that’s happened to me in any kitchen, whether at home or at a job. Indeed, what you do when things go completely wrong is perhaps the most important test of your abilities as a cook. (And it will happen, by the way. If things have never gone aggressively and embarrassingly wrong for you, you haven’t done enough cooking.) If the chili is too salty, the creme brûlée too watery, the pasta too mushy; if the steak turns to shoeleather or the chicken turns to sawdust, the good cook might want to swear or throw things. But the good cook never gives up altogether. Now they know what to do differently the next time. One could say the same thing about teaching.
Legal disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
Names of some persons, places, and things have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.