Kind hearts and (salmon) cornets

Michael Ruhlman checks in on the Severson cooks who don't care piece, and begs to differ. Not surprisingly, the kind heart is Ruhlman's and the cor(on)nets are Keller's. And he does warm the Fessering part of me's heart but pushing on the textual aspect of the question:

 And this is what annoys me most about chef cookbooks—or perhaps the publishers of chef cookbooks.  They all want to simplify great technique so that the chef's work is accessible to the home cook, which hurts both the chef and the home cook.  One of the great values of the French Laundry Cookbook is that the recipes are pretty much exact documents of how those recipes are done at the restaurant.  I’ve never made the coronets because I don’t own cornet molds, but it’s a pretty cool tuile recipe—with a little imagination you could bend it to your own desires.  And if I want to know how that tuile is turned into a little cone, I can read about it exactly.

I’m midway through Julian Barnes’s Pedant in the Kitchen.  Barnes wrote one of my all time favorite novels* and is one of Britain's best writers period, but this collection of columns from, I believe, The Guradian is one long whine about how hard recipes are.  His problem, and it's the same frame of mind Severson describes, is that he insists on following recipes before he understands anything about basic techniques.

Really good cooking is a craft, and those recipes that best describe that craft, whether simple or advanced, move all cooks forward. Those recipes that help you avoid craft, to get around it, set people who want to become better cooks, back.

*The Cod's too! New BFF!

Comments

[gastropoda]

Talk about a deal breaker! Shaping tuiles into coronets? Oy. Cornets are bad enough. Well, trombones would be worse.

[The Gurgling Cod]

Fixed, sort of. I used to mix up "petunias" and "pontoons," not to mention "liquor" and "liquorice," to the dismay of my mother when I was little, and would ask in the checkout line if I could have some liquor.

[gastropoda]

I figured you picked it up from the source -- it was spelled both ways over there. Made me laugh on two sites. As I always say: Once a copy editor, always a nuisance.