I'm gonna put my shades on, so I can see what you ain't doing

The recipe deal breakers piece in today's DI/DO is totally baffling. If the food section is by and for people who enjoy food and cooking, they are not the people who will want to know this:

Some deal breakers are simply a function of place. People in small New York apartments don’t execute recipes that require well-ventilated spaces. They rarely char peppers or broil salmon, lest the apartment stink for days. They rarely deep-fry.

“Not because of health reasons,” said one adventurous cook who divides his time between kitchens in Manhattan and Fire Island. “But because it’s messy, requires disposing of lots of oil afterward, and is a pain to get the temperature right.”

Cooking can be messy. And hard. To a degree, that is the point, in that putting a meal on the table is a gift of time, talent, and treasure. A notably fussy cook I'm fond of is Judy Rogers -- taking the red onions out of the brine, letting them cool, and repeating that process three times is a hassle, but you end up with delicious crisp pickled red onions, and that's a nice thing to have on the table. I am not saying you are a bad person if you do not make Keller's infamous salmon cornets on a weeknight, but there is something perverse about an article concerned with what people cannot be bothered to do.

Worse, the article reads more like a series of twitters than actual reportage. One "friend" won't cook this, the other "friend" won't cook that. I fear, however, this is the future of journalism. As of 9:15 on the morning that the article dropped, there were 128 comments, with people chiming in with their deal breakers: Soy Sauce! Offal! Olives! Garlic! That's about as deep as I could get in the comments, and more alarming still, the boundary between the article, written for pay by a professional, and the comments, written for free by who knows whom, was virtually non-existent. The internet may well be ushering in an era of citizen journalism, but it would be a shame if America's Paper of Record chose Cindy Brady as the citizen to emulate.

Comments

[Paula]

You're right, that was a dumb article.

It reminds me of my constant hunt for the cookbook that's purposefully high-level recipes. There's a book out by a guy from Austin called The Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups, but they're not really that technically difficult. Also Simple to Spectacular by Bittman and Vongerichten...my new obsessions. You should check it out.

[Marco]

Cooking at home has become a lost art. I think it says a lot about the fear of sitting down at a table and talking to each other.

[The Gurgling Cod]

Say it ain't so, Marco. Or atleast come over for dinner sometime.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

You're probably already on this, but in case you're not, here's a nice blog that is sort of the opposite of all of that DI/DO nonsense.

www.fxcuisine.com

[Marco]

Why, thank you. It's not totally true, thanks to the food lovers, like your gurgling self.

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