In retrospect, I went through what I now believe are the four stages of learning how to teach yourself to cook. (If your mother teaches you, it’s a different story.)
First, you slavishly follow recipes; this is useful.
In stage two, you synthesize some of the recipes you’ve learned. You compare, for example, Marcella Hazan’s pasta all’amatriciana with someone else’s, and you pick and choose a bit. Maybe one incorporates Pecorino and the other Parmesan. Maybe one uses less onion, more bacon or pancetta, a hot pepper, a ton of black pepper. You learn your preferences. You might, if you’re dedicated, consult two, three, four cookbooks before you tackle anything.
The third stage incorporates what you’ve learned with the preferences you’ve developed, what’s become your repertoire, your style, and leads you to search out new things. What are the antecedents of pasta all’amatriciana? What’s similar? What have the Greeks or the Turks done that’s related? Are there Japanese noodle dishes that you might like as much? Are there cookbook authors who’ve succeeded Marcella who might have a different approach? This is the stage at which many people bring cookbooks to bed, looking for links and inspiration; they don’t follow recipes quite as much, but sometimes begin to pull ideas from a variety of sources and simply start cooking.
Stage four is that of the mature cook, a person who consults cookbooks for fun or novelty but for the most part has both a fully developed repertoire and — far, far more importantly — the ability to start cooking with only an idea of what the final dish will look like. There’s a pantry, there’s a refrigerator, and there is a mind capable of combining ingredients from both to Make Dinner.
[posted EA]
