Just after I turned 11, I took a cooking class in the home of a woman in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Once a week, she taught four other girls and me to cook.
The recipe I remember making most is fettucine alfredo, and I remember it because I made the dough from scratch, cut it into strips, and left it at my dad’s new place, with the note, “Daddy, I made the noodle dough and it is in the freezer, sleep well.”
Reading this, I do not think my father thought, “Well, my mom’s Italian so the kid’s safe there, but I don’t know if the ingredients are authentic so I better dump it in the trash.”
I think he took the pasta for what it was, a gesture of love from a child who, as of a month earlier, he no longer lived with, and which he probably ate with a lump in his throat.
If the editors of Bon Appetit, where I was a freelance contributor for ten years, held sway back then, my dad could not in good conscience have eaten that pasta, not without proof I appreciated the provenance of the parmesan.
That’s my takeaway from “Making Our Recipes Better,” a post that explains the Bon Appetit team “will be auditing previously published recipes and articles that may not have been thoroughly fact-checked or read for cultural sensitivity when originally authored.”
I don’t really care if Bon Appetit wants to rifle through its recipe box for perceived shortcomings. They’re free to decide that their history of not vetting articles with an eye toward “cultural sensitivity” requires a public announcement and a course correction.
Their bet that readers and viewers will want their recipes recast thus might prove a good one. People like new!
What people don’t like is the intimation that they’re erasing other people when they swap out, say, ginger for galangal.
What people don’t like is the intimation that they’re erasing other people when they swap out, say, ginger for galangal.
Cooks play with recipes for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with greed or oppression, because they don’t have ingredients at hand, or because they like to wing it, or because their kid’s got a nut allergy and so they’re not going in the kung pao.
It’s disingenuous for Bon Appetit, for anyone, to look past the fact that every human on the planet cooks according to their climates and their curiosities, with what’s available and affordable, because trends change and because people have terrible taste.
If Bon Appetit is trying to make the point that any dish, once in the American kitchen, slides toward Americana, then this is so, though aside for the national fixation on cheese (seriously, half the comments on recipe sites begin,
“This recipe is great but you know what made it really delicious? I added half a pound of cheese”), which Americana do they mean? Tex-Mex? New York pizza? North Carolina barbecue (which tastes like bile; fight me)? The haute cuisine of Jean-Georges Vongerichten?
The sesame buns sold, hot and oily and wrapped in paper, at my corner bodega in Chinatown? Am I, a not-Chinese person, allowed to make these buns?
Of course I am, and I don’t need permission, and I don’t need a recipe, though I’ll probably look up a few, because that’s fun to do, especially when chefs tell you a little story about how these foods came about.
Because what is a recipe but a story that you transform and have the honor of putting in someone’s mouth?
I remember a chef telling me, someone makes her recipe three times, it’s no longer hers. That’s absolutely true. Sure, people sometimes squirrel away recipes, they don’t want to share, but most do; they press them on you.
My friend Alison’s mother’s kugel; the cole slaw of a colleague’s dad; the taklik-tokse corn bread made of my daughter’s Muskogee grandmother, each written on scraps of paper and handed to me, foods I have subtly or not so subtly made my own.
I’ve given my chocolate chip cookie recipe to hundreds of people, some who tell me, “they don’t taste like yours.” That’s right. Their recipe now, their story now. Yours, too.
Oven to 350
Mix 1 c. semi-soft butter, 1 c. dark brown sugar, ½ c. white sugar, two eggs, 1 T. vanilla until gooey (not fluffy). Add 2 c. white flour, 1 t. baking soda, 2 t. salt, 2 c. chocolate chips, 2 c. walnuts if you like nuts in your cookies.
Mix 1 c. semi-soft butter, 1 c. dark brown sugar, ½ c. white sugar, two eggs, 1 T. vanilla until gooey (not fluffy). Add 2 c. white flour, 1 t. baking soda, 2 t. salt, 2 c. chocolate chips, 2 c. walnuts if you like nuts in your cookies.
Bake in big globs on heavy baking sheet, until browned on edges and still a little wet at centers. Remove from pan immediately.
