apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I'm a big recipe follower, but when cooking Korean cuisine I rarely use a recipe. These are the dishes I learned to make from my mom, who has built up her recipe collection by memory and experience. I'm trying to get her to teach me how to make more of these dishes - Sujaebi, Hobak Jeon and Mandu guk are some of the ones we've gone through so far!

Most of the Lebanese recipes I make that I learned from my Sito and Jido I don't use a recipe for. I have their instructions like "put in enough rice until it looks like more rice than meat" etc. To me, it's the first steps in learning how to cook with the senses rather than strictly following a recipe and it's a skill that translates over even when I follow a recipe.

The only thing that worries me about that quote is the "if we choose to cook another way"... part. Not that they can't but I have a Greek friend whose mother refused to tell her children everything that was in her recipes so she could ensure that no one made X like mama. Too bad she didn't realize no one would make it like her even if she gave them most explicit instructions possible. A whole way of cooking has now been lost to her children as a result.

I don't find it amazing but rather sad. I am one of those that wasn't taught to cook..my Mother hated it and my Grandparents were already deceased when I was born. As someone who loves to cook I long to have my Grandmother's cookie recipe or spaghetti or whatever.

Everyone has a different style in the kitchen. I was fortunate enough to be immersed in the oral tradition of my grandmother’s kitchen and the cookbook modeled meals of my mother’s dinner table. You can read the whole story here….

http://gabrielaskitchen.wordpress.com/about-gabriela/

Whenever I ask my (Japanese) mother for recipes, I basically only learn the ingredients when she says things like "just use a little bit of this and some of this and that." And I ask, "how much?" and she replies, "you have to taste it".

I generally only use recipes the first couple times I am cooking a new recipe with unfamiliar spices or seasonings. Some spices that are strongly flavored definitely need that initial measured recipe.. star anise comes to mind.. =D

But after you've cooked something a couple times.. guesstimation works pretty good!

My father taught me to cook when I was home one summer from college. We never used recipes, but he covered lots of techniques, like making a roux, or how to tell when a piece of meat is done. And he taught me some basic spices, which spices capture the essence of different cuisines, and how much to use, and how to taste what's missing.

His lessons on techniques and flavors (with a little supplemental education from Alton Brown) have made me a very intuitive cook. Even when I use a recipe, I seldom follow it perfectly, using it more for basic guidelines on time or temperature. I hope I can pass this cooking oral tradition down to my children (when I have some) as well.

Now I'm working on becoming a more intuitive baker, but sadly don't have a good teacher. Cookbooks help, especially those that take to the time to explain a bit of the why of baking, rather than just reciting recipes (again Alton Brown is a great inspiration). Still, I wish I had a bit of oral tradition to help me out there too.

I asked my mom how long to cook something the other day and she said "oh you'll know when it's done." That's generally how all of the Indian recipes that I get from my parents or parent-types come to me. Often, it's just a laundry list of ingredients with no specific measurements.

The funny thing is, I did just know when it was done.

My mother always made me stand and watch her as she cooked. I didn't help and we didn't talk about what she was making, I was just supposed to watch. I am in my early twenties now and I've turned into a pretty decent cook, but I didn't realize just how influenced by my mother I was until recently. I was home on a visit when she called form the grocery store and asked me to get dinner started by chopping the onions she left out "her way". I told her I had no idea what she meant by that and just chopped the onions how I would normally, but when she got home she looked at them and chided me for giving her a hard time. I had chopped the onions exactly as she would have.

I'm mostly a private cook - in the sense that I learn by myself (mostly online). While I long for the recipes my elders made, I look them up online - they never really taught me as such. I did work for a few years at my father's shop so learned some of the dishes he cooked there.

I cook a lot by feel, and although I use recipes a lot of times I just "wing it" based on what I've seen my grandma do, or what I've seen various cooking teachers do that I've learned with. once you watch someone do it, and cooked alongside them, you don't really need a recipe. I'm a firm believer in the "add rice until it looks like more than the meat" school of cooking.

All too often parents either don't know how to cook or don't teach. My family was more in the latter group--although my mom did teach me a number of useful basic techniques. I also learned just by eating and tasting and seeing the food; my taste and style of cooking is somewhat similar to my mom's as a result. I use recipes to expand my repertoire, since I'm not satisfied with just what I know now. My mother did something similar.