The Tart Little Piggy

Recipe

This is a dish my mother made fairly often. I’ve been listening to Lynn Rossetto Kapser’s The Splendid Table lately and I find her advice to be pretty sound and her conversations with guests are always interesting. She has some advice on her website regarding “How to Spot a Good Recipe”

One bright red flag is the extremely short recipe. It looks so easy and it can betray you in a nanosecond. That brevity often comes from cutting out the specific information you need to know to end up with something worth eating.

Here’s the rest of the list:

  •    Does the recipe tell you what you can prepare ahead?
  •    Does it tell you how to store the food and for how long?
  •    Are the ingredients specific — not “1 pound beef,” but “1 pound well-marbled beef chuck”?
  •    Do the instructions tell you …

·What kind of pot and utensils to use?
·The level of heat and/or the timing needed for each step?
·What the food should look like, sound like, and/or smell like?
·How to know if it’s done?
·How to serve?

 

Turns out, most of the family recipes I have don’t meet these criteria, but I suppose this is the beauty of foodways as they’re passed down in families. So much gets lost in translation once we try to fit a recipe onto a 3×5 card. I rarely write into a recipe that I sautee most of my vegetables in a cast iron skillet on glass top stove in coconut oil, but I have no doubt these things shape the quality of the food that comes from my kitchen. My failure to make the Danish Grandmother’s poppy seed cake serves as a good example of the inadequacy of brief recipes without the subtle details that might allow us to genuinely recreate a family dish.

I had an argument with a friend a while back about whether one needs a detailed recipe to make bread. This friend insisted that I needed to get a scale and use one of Julia Childs’ complicated bread recipes in order to do it right. I took that as a challenge to learn to bake bread without all the scales or recipes or even measuring cups. At this point, I can actually make a damn good loaf of sourdough without any of those things. However, I discovered that trying to share my methods with someone else poses a problem. In order to allow someone to recreate my bread, I’d have to provide the same complicated level of detail in a recipe that I have such a revulsion for.

I prefer mixing and shaping ingredients in the same way that I mix and shape paint: intuitively, spontaneously, without too much regard for tradition, and a preference for novel results. The recipe for this grits casserole is pretty spare. So here is my attempt at recreating this recipe and you should

 

 

Reading: “HAPILABS introduces HAPIfork (and spoon) smart utensils, brings metrics to your mouthfuls (hands-on)”

“Las Vegas, NV – January 7, 2013 – HAPILABS, a company aimed at helping individuals in the 21st century take control of their HAPIness, health and fitness through applications and mobile connected devices, today introduced the HAPIfork at CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.”

Read More: www.engadget.com/2013/01/06/hapilabs-introduces-hapifork-and-spoon-smart-utensils-brings/

Reading: “A Lot on Your Plate”

“A new London restaurant, Dishoom Shoreditch, is inviting their customers to submit their own stories and memories, which will be baked onto their dinner plates. The idea was modeled on the old Irani cafes of Bombay, where food and stories are shared around the table.”

Read More: acqtaste.com/the-feed/a-lot-on-your-plate/

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