The Recipe Rebel

There are two types of people in the world: those who read the directions, and those who should have.

I am usually a rule follower. I don’t drink milk beyond its sell-by date. I launder my whites and darks separately. I always fasten my seatbelt. But when I flip open a cookbook to create a culinary masterpiece, I am a recipe rebel. Call it a personality flaw or just a streak of stubbornness, I simply do not – ever – follow a recipe exactly.

The reasons we rebel

Sometimes I am a recipe rebel for quite legitimate reasons, like a family-wide bias. If I expect my clan to try a new dish, I know better than to put Brussels sprouts in it, despite what the recipe calls for. Likewise, you’ll not find walnuts in any cake, cookie or brownie I bake. Ditto for raisins – those desiccated grapes hold no appeal whatsoever. The most delectable-looking dessert will garner a polite “No, thank you” if even a single raisin is visible.

Occasionally inventory shortages govern my compliance to the recipe. In a perfect world I would plan my menus and have all the necessary items on hand. But life isn’t perfect, and sometimes I have to improvise. I’m not going to halt my dinner prep to run to the store for a missing ingredient. Nobody will sue if I use rotini instead of ziti, or black beans instead of navy.

The most common rebellion I stage is usually in terms of quantity. I am forever halving, doubling or quartering a recipe to make just the right amount. The difficulty lies in defining what the right amount is. I have to leverage the Quotient of Leftover Appeal against the Potential for Ingredient Repurposing. For example, my household will consume leftover rice without complaint, in side dishes, stir frys and soups, for up to a week after the initial meal. In contrast, after its first appearance, leftover broccoli will be left to rot in the refrigerator until trash day.

Rebel without a recipe

Cooking without a recipe also makes me a rebel. I make a lot of soups, omelets and skillet suppers with ingredients on hand. I start with a little sautéed onion, and then make it up as I go along. A friend once asked me to teach her how to make soup. She wanted me to give her a shopping list so she knew what to buy. It wasn’t that easy. I had to go to her house and look in her refrigerator to see what we already had to work with.

My mom taught me to make spaghetti sauce the same way. She’d start her sauce on Saturday morning with onion and home-canned tomatoes, and then add in all of the leftover meat from the week. Chicken, pork, ribs, sausage – it all went into the pot. Make a few meatballs with fresh ground beef; boil up some pasta, add a crusty loaf of Italian bread, and meals were done for the whole weekend.

It’s genetic

My Grandma Lena was a recipe rebel too. She cooked from scratch, and her kitchen boasted not one cookbook. Once in a while I’d press her for a recipe, but she inevitably left out an ingredient or ignored a critical measurement. For example, when she made my favorite pasta e piselli, she added “a few tomatoes for color.” How do I interpret that? I spent years trying to recreate her Italian fig cookie, a Christmas staple from my childhood. I finally found a recipe that was close, and made it for my own mom. It wasn’t quite the same – come to find out Grandma soaked her filling in brandy for three days before making the cookies. No wonder Grandpa kept sneaking tastes from the container.

That is the downside to freestyling in the kitchen. If a dish turns out particularly tasty, I don’t always remember how I altered it. Or, if I share a recipe, I have to include additional explanations of how I deviated from the instructions.

Full disclosure

Finally, in the interest of culinary transparency, I admit I’ll alter a recipe because I’m just plain lazy. My mom always said, “If you can read, you can cook.” I’m a voracious reader, and I enjoy a good book as much as the next person. But pretentious recipes don’t win any Pulitzers in my kitchen. Rachael Ray’s crudités will always be just a veggie tray on my table. And I will swap out julienned water chestnuts with a chiffonade of basil for plain old peas and carrots any day of the week.

And if it takes longer to read the instructions than to eat the finished dish, I’m closing the cookbook and ordering a pizza.

How about you? Do you follow the rules or are you a recipe rebel in your kitchen? Share your thoughts in the comments below.