There Is Some Good in ‘No-Recipe’ Cookbooks

A few years back, a chef who shall not be named made waves in a tiny pool by declaring the recipe “dead . ” Boy did that make me angry. He pitched this idea of some choose-your-own-adventure mumbo jumbo instead of a well-written recipe, going out of his way to vilify the trusted form, which immediately felt both bold and incorrect.

I get it though. Get excited for a meal, spend time and money getting the food, then more time doing all the prep and cooking and then … it’s not good? That’s frustrating. Whether you find your recipe on a smart kitchen app, on the web, or in cookbooks you paid good money for, there are a lot of mediocre-to-bad recipes out there.

Sifting through the wilderness to get the good stuff can be tough. A classic recipe is made up with a headnote, an ingredient list, and a procedure—a perfect road map that tells you where you’re going, gets you excited about your destination, lets you know what you’ll need, then provides expert directions to get there. A thoughtfully written recipe is an underappreciated work of art that answers a question before you ask it and safely guides you to a place you couldn’t have gone to on your own.

The “no-recipe” recipe is usually—there’s no easy way to say this—a recipe , just in a slightly tweaked form. Recently, there has also been a separate kerfuffle about lengthy headnotes—the introductions that precede most recipes on a blog or in a cookbook—as some people just want to skip the story and get cooking. Also, the influencer-chefs of TikTok and Instagram have popularized a new recipe template where most of the instructional work is handled by tightly edited visuals.

Perhaps all of this questioning of recipes is part of what’s led to the rise of the “no-recipe” recipe, which is usually—there’s no easy way to say this—a recipe , just in a slightly tweaked form. Ingredients are often named casually, appearing in the narrative once they’re needed instead of arranged in a bulleted list before the action even starts. Specific quantities and cooking times are usually elided.

Two recent cookbooks pick up this “no-recipe” idea and fly off in wildly different directions with it. One of them, from a prominent superchef, was such a mess it made my head spin. The other was such a joy to use it felt like a Pocket Guide to Cooking City, helping you put a fulfilling meal on the table without too much effort.

It’s good home-cooked food for people in a hurry. If recipes are the problem, David Chang’s Cooking At Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (and Love My Microwave) is not the solution. Chang is the chef behind big-deal restaurants around the world like Momofuku and Majordomo, and he stars in television shows like Ugly Delicious and The Next Thing You Eat .

Yet his cookbook is one of the most confusing I’ve ever come across. In the introduction, he describes how he’s going from restaurant chef to someone now responsible for feeding his growing family in a “seat of my pants” style. “Or,” retorted my wife Elisabeth when I described this to her, “like women have been doing since forever.

” The book has the confounding idea of rebelling against recipes as a sort of villainous straw man. It is full of fun art, yet it really feels like a giant brain dump that his coauthor, New York Times food reporter Priya Krishna, had to sift through to create something akin to order. (She even describes some of those challenges on page 83.

) Cooking At Home promises delicious food fast, yet while the other book I’ll tell you about in a moment starts off with a four-ingredient smoothie on page 10, it takes Chang close to 100 pages of philosophy before the first thing we cook is brisket , which can then be broken down into ersatz versions of beef noodle soup, pho, salad, sukiyaki, and … wasn’t this supposed to be simple? I also noticed something funny that I cross-referenced with Elisabeth, showing her a few of the meals Chang features in the book—descriptive instruction with mostly quantity-less ingredients (cleverly underlined and colorized so they stick out) all tucked into meaty paragraphs. “They’re recipes in prose form,” she said. “Is that helpful?” I tried to answer that question by making Chang’s no-recipe recipe for shrimp with corn and potatoes, where the spuds cook with bacon, onion, and garlic then get a squirt of miso or a sprinkle of chaat masala.

It’s a fun, tasty dish, with an unspoken reliance on a home cook’s existing skills to get it over the finish line. Potatoes, diced to the size shown in the photo, took way longer than the five minutes it says they need to cook, and while the bacon I used had plenty of fat, it didn’t render enough to cook the onion and potatoes like the recipe implied it would. I also found myself reverse engineering the recipe to prep things and figure out quantities.

Similarly, Chang’s microwave eggplant parm turned out like you might hope a recipe for “weeknight eggplant parm” might, but in this case it was fussier. The recipe calls for “a few” eggplants cut in half-inch thick discs, arranged on a platter and nuked for five to ten minutes. My microwave is a small but mighty GE we’ve dubbed Sparky Jr.

, and while microwaves can be fantastic kitchen helpers, cooking this quantity of eggplant in it was a pain in the butt. I was forced to do multiple rounds on different plates, a problem I think almost everyone trying this recipe will have. (Sparky Jr.

is small, but not that small. ) Eventually, though, I layered everything into a baking dish (Chang and Krishna suggest an oven-safe pot of indeterminate size) and 30 minutes later, we had a nice little dinner. I’d had enough of this book, but just to be sure I was reading things correctly, I DMed a food writer colleague.

“I hate this ‘no-recipe’ crap,” she responded. “Recipes, when they are well written and edited, are designed to be clear instructions to get you to a specific destination. Why is that a bad thing?” There’s a good book in here somewhere, perhaps something called David Chang’s Weeknight Cooking.

But being cloaked in the no-recipe format just bogs it down. The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes by Sam Sifton, on the other hand, is sleek and nimble. Clothbound in a dashing red and roughly the size of a thick iPad, it’s chockablock with low-effort, high-reward food.

Outside of the table of contents, there are exactly four pages of text before it dives into the recipes, and three of those suggest good stuff to have in the pantry. I came to think of the book as a collection of good ideas for people in a hurry who know how to cook and just want some guidelines. And those “recipes?” They’re still recipes, with a classic (super short) headnote, ingredient list, and procedure, all quite streamlined.

Quantities tend to rely on your good judgment. I came to think of the book as a collection of good ideas for people in a hurry who know how to cook and just want some guidelines. One cool evening when I didn’t want to go to the grocery store, I made anchovy butter, mushing a tin of tiny salty filets into a stick of softened butter with some minced garlic, paprika, and lemon.

That got smeared on toast homemade bread, topped with a soft-boiled egg, and Elisabeth and I washed it down with a glass of cava. For a moment, the news of the world faded away and everything was good. Spring 2022 in Seattle was a bit of an extension of winter, and during a streak of crummy weather I opened to page 192 where the headnote reads, “This is a bulwark against bad weather, one of the great rainy-day feasts,” and boy, did smothered pork chops hit the spot.

Sifton calls for the vague-sounding “your favorite spices” in the list of ingredients, but for those of us numbed into submission after a week of bad weather and two years of pandemic, he later suggests classics like Lawry’s and Old Bay. Seared, then bubbled away with stock and “an enormous amount of sliced onions,” it was food reminiscent of Mom’s and growing up. For a few good hours, it felt like it kept the wet weather at bay.

(If the weather had kept on that way, I had plans to make his meatball salad. ) When recipes are cleanly pared down like this, you notice that something like roasting a head of cauliflower whole can be described in a sentence and a half, and you just might add it to your repertoire. In that vein, the next day I made pressure cooker split pea soup, roasted sweet potatoes with miso butter, curried beans and rice, and a salad with cucumber ribbons in a peanut sauce, all within a few fun hours.

There’s a fair amount in here that would go over a beginner’s head—but what was there was well honed. It reminded me of the trick where line cooks write out shorthand procedures for the different dishes at their station in their kitchen notebooks, with just the key steps that cue them along as they blast their way through a dish. The trick for winning with this book is having a decent amount of ingredients on hand.

The first page of text in the book is titled “You Don’t Need A Recipe,” but the next page starts with, “You Do Need A Pantry,” and it’s often flavor-packed stuff that saves time in the kitchen. It reminded me a lot of the philosophy behind one of my favorite cookbooks of 2021 , Michelle McKenzie’s The Modern Larder . “Nowadays, I’m prone to bypassing a lengthy [flavor] building process and instead employ hardworking ingredients from my larder,” McKenzie says in her book’s introduction.

“In this way, I get maximum impact for minimal effort. ” What I learned is that with a steady guiding hand like Sifton’s, “no-recipe” doesn’t necessarily mean no recipe. For the right person, though–confident home cooks who do not need hand-holding, but would appreciate a nudge of inspiration—they can be a well-written guideline to getting good food on the table without too much fuss.

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