I remember this from many years ago. Much as I appreciated the step-by-step instructions and their accompanying pictures, I always thought that the genius element - and perhaps one that might have real IP value - was the schematic representation combining recipes and the cooking process.
My favourite example of this is the schematic for the "meat lasagne" recipe, which is at the end of the instructions and before the comments:
As an Italian I am contractually bound to replying that there is no mozzarella nor ricotta nor cream in traditional meat lasagne. It's a bechamel sauce, made of milk. Booo!
As a third-generation Italian migrant, I'd remind you that food evolves. The grandmas and aunts always made both bolognese and chicken lasagna, with a heavy tomato sauce and a lot of cheese, in a pretty similar way (never any cream though). I'd take that any day over a "proper" one with bechamel!
Nobody said it didn't evolve, and you're the first one to use the word "proper" which has a much different connotation than "traditional." Think of it as a snapshot in an event-sourced system. You can take a bunch of snapshots over time, but #53 is going to be the same every time. A "traditional" lasagna has a bechamel sauce. You can make it without, and it can be as good or better. It just won't be traditional, which is totally fine.
I'm not Italian, but my impression from traveling in Italy is that every town\village\grandma has their own version of nearly every Italian dish and they all consider theirs to be the traditional version. I think I got told three or four times that I was in the village where focaccia was invented - different villages, that is. And they were all quite different focaccias so I guess they were all right.
Side note: bechamel lasagne is usually called lasagne al forno and I think it comes from Bologna. In many other parts of Italy they don't use bechamel in their traditional lasagnes, and they often do use ricotta and mozzarella.
What’s a third generation Italian migrant? Your family has been migrating for three generations? Or you’re just an American with an Italian great-grandparent?
I'd assume it means their primary language is Italian, and they basically only interact with other Americans who's great grand parents were Italian and primarily speak Italian.
So like a snapshot of Italian culture as it was a few generations back like how Quebec is a snapshot of historic France and Newfoundland is a snapshot of england
My great-grandparents migrated from Italy to Brazil. Is there a better way to phrase that?
It's not a really strong identity, we don't cultivate the ancestry like Americans do, so unfortunately I don't speak the language, neither do most of the ~30M italian descendants in the south. The deeper into the countryside you go though, you start hearing old dialects of italian (and german).
Can you recommend a cooking book with 100% authentic Italian dishes? All the recipes I find online (especially from US sources) always like to add their own spin on a recipe.
I make lasagna using bechamel sauce as well, but you'll also find videos with chefs that add mozarella (or other cheeses) to their bechamel sauce. So a traditional recipe can be sabotaged at every stage of the process!
can't say for a cookbook, but try https://www.giallozafferano.com/. Giallozafferano has essentially taken over all other italian websites for recipes, because it's clear, with pictures, and has EVERY recipe you can dream of. It also has an English language version as you can see. This said, Italians sometimes criticize it anyway, because it's not always perfectly proper, and because monopoly is never good. But Italians would criticize anything except their grandmothers when it comes to cooking, so I recommend you try it. It's generally a sufficiently good reference benchmark even for Italians and is complete.
Thank you so much! Finding good recipes online has become such a disaster because of all the blog recipe spam, especially when looking for international dishes in English where even the decent sites have very "americanized" versions of the dish.
Find dish on Wikipedia. It'll have the native name somewhere on the page, probably, or else you can switch to a version of the page in the correct language. Put dish name (and maybe the translated word for "recipe" or "food") in search engine. Find a page that looks like it has what you want. Hit it with Google Translate.
I highly recommend "Silver Spoon". Published in 1950s - about 2000 recipes - Indexed thoroughly - I use it both for its recipes and also for its heft as a doorstop.
Oh, I got the German version from my sister for Christmas once. I should really try to make some recipes from it, but it’s so much more work to look them up offline ;)
The authority in the English language is Marcella Hazan. Her "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" is probably the most comprehensive if you check out only one.
Just hit up the first amazon result to check out the book reviews, and seems like the recipes aren't traditional. Thanks for the suggestion however. Snippet of the review
> As an example, I made the carbonara in this book which calls for (among other ingredients) ... "4 cloves of garlic" & "1/4 cup dry white wine" & "2 Large Eggs".
> Upon further research, an authentic Italian carbonara has no garlic, no white wine and only the yolks of eggs.
> I have found several recipes in this book already which are not true to the original recipes. Granted, this may not worry some people, but please bare in mind that if you are looking for true authentic Italian recipes ... look elsewhere. This book will not give it to you.
Searching foreign recipes in their native language then using Google Translate on the recipe (assuming you don't speak the language) has served me well in the past. Some not-that-uncommon dishes are wildly different (and, sometimes, far better) from what you find searching in English. Often much fattier :-)
Wikipedia can be helpful for translating the dish name. They'll either list the name directly, or you can switch to the version of the article in the dish's home language.
Difficulty: this is less useful for Indian dishes because they'll almost always include ingredients an American won't have in even a stocked-for-Indian-dishes kitchen. Usually a great strategy for European dishes, at least, though.
The Italia Squisita YouTube channel has an excellent series of videos of Italian chefs preparing their signature dishes (lasagna: https://youtu.be/H-Ll19h9FFo).
They are 100% authentic Italian by definition, but if you are looking for THE singular authentic Lasagna recipe you aren’t going to find it. Even within Italy there are huge regional variations, and the practice is continually evolving to this day.
I really like this chef’s outro (another lasagna video: https://youtu.be/zXZq6crD6WI)
Basically he says “This is how I make it and honour my region and my ancestors, but you should make it however you like, and experiment, because it means the food is alive”.
I believe Pellegrino Artusi’s
La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene ("The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well") is the classic reference and has been in print since the late 19th century. It is available in many translations.
I'd be willing to try a version with bechamel but the ricotta provides a signature distinctive taste. I suppose without it, it would taste pretty different. So, yeah, like the sibling comment says - this dish has evolved while retaining its old name. Much like some loanwords which take on new connotations.
I would not use the word "evolve", because in Italy it has not "evolved". There has been made an American version, which would have been best if it were called with a different name, but I guess I can't have everything...
I would rather replace "evolved" with "degraded", or better butchered or destroyed.
you can generally put all British, German or US cooking "evolvements" put into this category. thankfully the recent "fusion" cooking doesn't involve anything related to these evolvements, only the good asian and central american kitchens.
You can't really go wrong with Marcella Hazan's books. She was an evangelist for traditional Italian recipes and methods in the US starting in the 1970s much the same way Julia Child was with French cuisine. Her marvelously simple tomato/onion/butter sauce is revelatory.
I do something similar with any recipe I get. I go through the list of ingredients and draw brackets around things that go together, then indicate which order the "buckets" join together.
That way, I can prepare things directly into bowls (or directly into pans) together.
I also call out which one needs to go first if there is one. For example, softening butter in the microwave needs to happen first, because it's a combi microwave and oven and I'll need it as an oven later.
that kind of schematic is exactly what i've wanted ever since I started trying to learn how to cook recipes (as opposed to just knowing some basic techniques and mixing things I like). I've always wondered why cooking, which is a very procedural and quantitative thing, doesn't have more standardization and conventions. If you're just trying to replicate an existing recipe to the T, it makes so much more sense to use numbers and diagrams than prose (let alone the irrelevant blogs that so many cooking websites attach to their recipe pages).
> Recipes are usually not protected by copyright due to the idea-expression dichotomy. The idea-expression dichotomy creates a dividing line between ideas, which are not protected by copyright law, and the expression of those ideas, which can be protected by copyright law.
> ...
> Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients.
So basically you can copyright your blog which I skipped entirely, but not the actual materials and process, which is all the information of value anyway lol.
i love that diagram! I enjoy cooking just enough to do it but not enough to want to do it. In the consulting world what we call "solution architects", i know it's very weird jargon, would make very good cooks IMO. It's all about scheduling, resource allocation, and following procedure.
I absolutely hate cooking, the effort vs reward is just not worth it in my opinion. This led to me living off Huel[0] for a long time (at home anyway). I stopped buying groceries and only ordered Huel. The amount of time it saves and the cognitive load it frees up is insane. No longer have to wash dishes, you have a single shaker cup that you wash before you prepare your next drink. No longer have to cook anything, food is ready within 2-3 minutes (wash cup, pour water + huel, shake for a minute). No more writing shopping lists to make sure you buy all the ingredients you need for what you want to cook. No more thinking about when you bought something and determining if it's going to poison you or not, 0 food waste as well :).
I still ate 'real food' when going out and at the work canteen. But having to never think about food at home is great. I also felt great, having those 3-5 portions of huel a day gave me significantly more energy and I felt like a brain fog was lifted (that I wasn't even aware of before).
I've been traveling around for the past ~6 months and I really miss it. I know this kind of reads like an ad, but I have no association with Huel at all. Just a very happy customer.
This is the great thing about life, everyone is different and we care about different things and we all get along.
Im the complete opposite but I totally get your point and respect everything you said.
Everything you listed as a positive is a negative for me. Cooking isn’t a waste of time, it’s an opportunity to be creative. I get a lot of pleasure from making a good meal, both a sense of accomplishment but also the pleasure of eating good food. It’s also a time to spend with family. Eating the same food every day, and a texture-less shakes at that, sounds awful. So many of my family memories are around the table.
I get that people see shopping as a waste of time but I enjoy exploring grocery stores and specialty markets, trying out new products and flavors. The other day my wife and I went shopping with our daughter, we got some beer to enjoy while walking around, my daughter got a slice of pizza. The staff in the bakery section was decorating a cake, she thought my daughter was cute and gave her a little cup of frosting and some Easter cake toppings. As a 3 year old it was the greatest experience of her life.
I'm going to agree with you on the effort vs reward on cooking, especially when cooking for one.
The time investment for a balanced meal for 4 is only slightly more than the time investment for a balanced meal for 1. This results in a high time cost per person when cooking for one.
However, I've gone a slightly different way than powdered meal replacement. I've signed up for two different prepared meals (one gives me lunch, the other dinner) that cuts the lunch to "microwave some fairly good food for 2m" and the dinner is "put this raw food in these aluminum trays, scan the barcode, come back in 13 to 20 minutes.
It competes fairly well with going out to eat and while more expensive than other instant dinners, tastes better and has more variety.
Food (& drink) is one of the only reasons I continue to live. If I couldn't practice the meditative process of creation that is cooking, or eat delicious foods, or drink delicious drinks, I would seriously consider ending it all.
.....I wouldn't end it all, of course. But life would feel so empty. What do you do with your life that's worth avoiding one of the simplest pleasures?
Well, first of all, I still eat delicious food prepared by restaurants and still drink :).
> practice the meditative process of creation that is cooking
I do not find it meditative at all, the actual cooking process is tolerable, but all the pre-work(shopping/managing ingredients) and post work(cleanup) is not worth it. The reward of delicious food does not outweigh the annoyance I get from those things.
I did something similar for a while with Soylent. It was fine. Good for a time even. I eventually got sick of it. I'm not sure if it's just me but eventually if I'm eating the same thing over and over I tend to get disgusted by it.
If I ate my favorite meal 150 days in a row I would start to almost feel ill looking at it. I just need more variety.
I love food but what you’re saying really resonates with me. I hate all the effort around food.
This is definitely something I’d be interested in, but I’m worried about the lack of variety and it’s probably not ideal for people who lift weights regularly (even when supplementing with whey etc).
> Have you done any blood tests after going with this diet for a few months?
Nope, I kind of regret not doing something like that to compare before/after. I'm from the UK, you can't just go to your doctor and ask them to do random blood tests if there's nothing wrong with you. They'll politely tell you to go away. Getting them done privately didn't feel worth it, I had little faith in the DIY ones being accurate and getting it done at a clinic was too expensive last time I looked.
> Did you take any vitamin/mineral supplements?
I took vitamin D supplements, before and after. But that's because we get no sun in Scotland :(.
All those products are typically just oats, some protein powder, vitamineral powder and a bunch of flavorings, all blended into dust. You don’t chew because it’s just baby food, so I wonder what your teeth and jaw will be like in a few decades, but nutritionally it’s infinitely better than fast food.
But keep in mind it’s all marketing for oats and vitamins.
Along the same lines, there is absolutely a middle ground between not cooking and needing to buy prepackaged food.
The first step should be birdfood. Eat like a bird. Trail mix basically. It is super easy to concoct your own nut mixes buying things in bulk.
The next step would be to eat fermented food like yogurt and kimchee.
The next would be overnight oats, possibly combined with the yogurt and or trail mix from above.
And finally would be raw greens and canned fish/bivalves and hard boiled eggs and hard cheese.
Any sort of outdoor hiking, camping, wilderness preparedness diet can be adapted to indoor living.
No cooking involved, minimal fridge space, some variety in texture, and anytime you need a snack or feel hunger you can pretty much eat till your hearts content. You can also combine greens, trail mix, eggs, canned meat and cheese to arrive at salad.
I wanted to make something similar for years, just with more focus on timing and multi-threading :) I really cringe when I read recipe for normal people and it says something like "Chop ingredients A and B and put them into bowl. Now add previously prepared mixture of C and D.". I mean, just tell me first to mix C and D, not in the middle of the process. Lazy initialization is not always good :) The same thing when the recipe tells "and now put all of that into preheated oven". Great, now I have to wait for 15 minutes until oven heats. That should be done on the first thread which waits on a barrier until I finish with the dough in the second thread.
Wardons in Syrup. Take wardons, and cast in a pot, and boil them till they are tender; then take them up and pare them, and cut them in two pieces; take enough of powder of cinnamon, a good quantity, and cast it in red wine, and draw it through a strainer; cast sugar thereto, and put it [in] an earthenware pot, and let it boil: and then cast the pears thereto, and let boil together, and when they have boiled a while, take powder of ginger and cast thereto, and a little vinegar, and a little saffron; and look that it is poignant and sweet.
-- from Harleian MS. 279 - Potage Dyvers, circa 1430
It helps a little to know that Wardens are a variety of pear.
The recipe has been recast in modern terms in the book Take A Thousand Eggs and is a nice poached pears in reduced wine syrup.
One thing that needs to be said about recipes is that they take practice. Not just for skills like reading it before diving in like a computer interpreter, but also adapting to your own ingredients, taste preferences and constraints.
Give yourself a few tries with any new recipe. You'll find they always need tweaks, especially for anything that's complex.
Recipe writing (and recipe following) varies a lot. For some people a recipe is a formula, very precise. For others it’s a rough guide of an idea that should be adjusted.
Totally agree, but if you're a pro and there's extra detail in the recipe, you can ignore it or tailor it to your needs. If you're just getting started or it's an unfamiliar recipe and you don't have any details, you're left hanging. It costs nothing to add in the details to help people along, so why not?
I know what you’re staying but a philosophical point I’d argue that there is a cost for adding that information. It implies that if the recipe deviates from the one listed it won’t be as good, as if there is some platonic ideal and the the only way to get there is this recipe.
When I started cooking I had a very scientific approach, as if it were like chemistry class in high school. It felt like if the recipe wasn’t exact then it would be garbage, which is far from the truth.
Also, there’s a trap where some things are hard to define and are better left to the senses and judgement.
When a recipe says “cook for 30-40 minutes” some people feel trapped — which is it, 30 or 40? “Oh no, I cooked it for 45, it’s going to be awful.” Or “I cooked it the time that the recipe stated and the skin came out soggy.”
The worst is when there is a "total time" and it is way off. I have run into instance where the total is 20 minutes, but they expect you to leave for several hours, and then cook for 20 monutes
This book is also worth a read for basic cooking that can be built upon but also explains the underlying scientific principles https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/
Exact quantities at the bottom! LOVE IT. None of those "spoons", "cups", ... nonsense, how are newcomers supposed to understand those. What I want in cooking is reproducable builds!
Watching a European cook American recipes is a delight. "What the fuck is a cup?" Umm... Google says 240 milliliters. "Ok. How much butter is that in grams??"
And so on, while the rest of the food is burning/sticking/melting.
Plus, a "stick" of butter is not sold in Germany. What they have is more than two sticks joined side-by-side.
Well, problem number one is that you're trying to do volume of butter instead of weight. All the sticks are by weight, so even though they're marked with tbsp on the side (8), the stick is a quarter lb (4oz). So the notional volume is 4 fl oz, and the weight is 4 oz, but the density is not equal to water.
The other problem is that density of things can vary wildly. Flour can be 30% different in density depending on how you scoop it ( scoop it into the measuring cup vs scooping with the measuring cup).
And of course problem number three is not converting your measurements before you start cooking, just like it's a problem not to mise-en-place your ingredients first. (If you mise-en-place, you've probably got the correct measures of ingredients already).
I prefer to measure powders by mass, liquids by volume. Butter is weird, since it's a solid but has a pretty consistent density, so it's easy to just cut off the amount needed. It's very rare that a precise amount of butter is necessary, so it's faster to use volume for it than it is to shave off slices onto a scale.
Most recipes have some slack in them. If you're dialing in a single shot of espresso, you want to make sure you have an exact weight for inputs and outputs. If you're baking a cake, 7 grams difference in how much flour you use doesn't matter.
Notably, for a lot of ingredients, recipes don't even try. "4 eggs" is always approximate since eggs aren't the same size. Recipes with peppers always mention you need to play around and use judgement because both size and capsaicin amounts vary quite a bit from batch to batch.
Yup. I see a lot of "cooking for engineers" engage in this sort of false precision. In truth, for a huge number of recipes, you can dramatically vary ingredient amounts with no major consequences. And even in baking people overstate the needed precision. Even if you weigh flour in grams, your eggs are imprecise and your mixing technique is imprecise and your oven temperature is imprecise and the times listed are imprecise (have you ever seen a recipe say "bake for 22 minutes and 15 seconds").
Love the part where he just puts the metric values but without the crazy conversions.
I see many websites do the conversion as 1/2 lb -> 226,79 grams but guess what, I am not going to the butcher and ask for 226,79 grams of meat. Just like I won't do 14,79 ml of oil (1 tbsp) (well, I just use a teaspoon in this case but you get the idea).
Labels are clearly converted from F but with some non-perfect formula, 700F is actually 371C not 374C for example. Still trying to figure out the formula used.
the difference between 38℃ and 94℃ is 100.8Δ℉ rather than the 100Δ℉ that was probably there in the original markings. It's the closest you can come to the correct values though, 93℃ is off by 1Δ℉
They then assumed 100Δ℉ = 56Δ℃, and applied that to the rest of the dial.
That means the values on the dial are off a bit, and should be: 38, 93, 149, 204, 260, 316, 371, 427
True, though this is still one of the most annoying things in online recipes:
"Add one small onion"
Oookay...how big is that? How much of a difference in flavor will it be if I add more or less? What if I barely like onion? If I add more, will it cook enough to not change the outcome significantly?
It does take experience to guess whether it will matter or not, so if you're getting started it's nice to be given a clue (like weights).
Also, adaptation assumes that you're going to be trying the recipe again to get it right for the next time. Some people may do that, but there are so many great recipes out there that a lot of people (myself among them) will just go find some other recipe if one doesn't turn out well.
Go to the store and look at the onions. Categorize them as large/medium/small. Now you know what a small onion looks like.
Additional precision doesn't help here because onions aren't all the same. Two onions of identical size will contribute varying amounts of sweetness and pungency based on their freshness. The effect of your knifework and cooking temperature will make the outcome vary as well. "Add 200g of diced onion" is false precision. It looks more precise but it actually doesn't change the reproducibility of the dish at all.
> How much of a difference in flavor will it be if I add more or less?
Is onion a main ingredient like in onion soup? Probably a meaningful amount. Is onion just part of the overall mix? Probably not much of a difference. This isn't something that a recipe can tell you. This is something that learning to cook tells you. There is an entire genre of books that teach this "what makes recipes taste the way they do" concept but they aren't recipe books.
> It does take experience to guess whether it will matter or not...
Yes, but not an intractable amount of experience. There are very few ingredients for which inaccuracy of measurement yields a clear "pass or fail" to the dish. In most cases, you would just make a mental note to add more or less of whatever ingredient it was next time.
Accuracy-sensitive ingredients that come to mind are usually powerful spices like asafoetida, saffron, cloves, garlic. Or, in baking, leavening agents (which can usually be compensated for with time and temperature). There's not a lot of them.
Nathan Myhrvold (of excel fame) used his microsoft money to create a test kitchen and explore the physical foundations of cooking. His published results were a spectacular success, citing https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/1734386142/ref=sr_1_2?crid=36... :
"Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is a revolutionary treatment of cooking that pushes the boundaries of the culinary arts. Winner of the 2012 James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year, inducted into the Gourmand Cookbook Hall of Fame, and named one of the best cookbooks of the century by the New Yorker, its six volumes explore the history of cuisine and explain the science of cooking in a way that’s accessible to both professional chefs and home cooks."
The pumpkin pie recipe made Thanksgiving for my wife and I the years we spent living in New Zealand (and since). I grew up with canned pumpkin in pies like many americans. This canned filling does not exist in New Zealand, however raw pumpkin is sold in supermarkets and is a common vege in savory dishes.
From our first time baking this pie recipe, all other pumpkin pie is dead to us. The pumpkin we bought in NZ turns out to be superior to sugar pumpkin or butternut squash. It is Japanese winter squash or kabocha.
If using this recipe with kabocha, cut the sugar by 1/3 to 1/2. It doesn’t need much.
Every time I see an article about cooking, my first instinct is how I can code this information so machines can cook it for me.
But there's still so many unsolved problems at the moment, especially around object recognition. Maybe in a few decades.
Once that's solved, I imagine there will be a lot of engineers tinkering at home with their robots, sharing code for say cooking the perfect steak, the best coffee, and a general recommendation engine that can predict what you'll probably like.
Can't wait. I don't get excited about cooking, but coding cooking machines gets me going.
my first instinct with cooking is to experiment with tweaking variables like salt, heat, etc and see how many different outcomes you can get. unfortunately I hate waste so I don't experiment very much. this is one of the things that drew me away from hardware and towards software: you can test anything, as many times as you want, scrap everything and start over, and all it costs is storage and power. anything physical costs storage and power too, but with the added cost of a lot of waste
You can buy "bean to cup" coffee machines, and the high-end models are fairly programmable. It's a single purpose robot, sure, but if you want a fully-automated cup of coffee with minimal human interaction, this is obtainable today.
In a similar vein to this idea, I have also been wanting to start some sort of cooking blog. The main intention is to write down family recipes and have some sort of reference later on how to cook them. I have so far a single recipe, in a format which I would like to see more recipes in. Intersted in what other people think of it.
In particular, it was important for me to focus on the liquid densities, as a person that wants to attempt this recipe for the first time probably has no reference on what the ideal density of e.g. a cheese fondue is, so I wanted to add videos and pictures to showcase it.
I started late (late 30's) but it's never too late and this site started me on the road. Now I do the majority of day to day cooking. My wife does most of the baking.
Surprised to not see an outcry about this site's lack of https support. I personally think the importance of https is overstated for casual sites like this, but the argument gets always ridiculed on HN.
My favourite example of this is the schematic for the "meat lasagne" recipe, which is at the end of the instructions and before the comments:
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna