The Art of Measuring Recipes: Common problems with recipes

Perhaps the most common and most serious variable is cooking time. The recipe in Figure 5-1 tells you to cook the vegetables and herbs in butter for 5 minutes and to blend in flour and cook for 10 minutes over low heat. The conscientious, unsuspecting recipe follower will go on cooking it for 10 minutes no matter what. However, cooking times vary widely, and unless the cook understands what is sup-posed to be happening, disaster may follow.

In a book the recipe instructions will seldom specify cooking times for the recipes. They may give you a time range as a guideline, but they will hardly ever tell you to cook something for a specific number of minutes or hours. Instead they will give you observable checkpoints such as "when it thickens," or "when it begins to produce an aroma," or "it should feel firm to the touch," or "until no starch taste remains." These checkpoints will usually be more accurate and realistic than exact times, because they adapt to all the variables and avoid the difficulty of measurement.

Many professional cooks use guidelines like these. They do not time things, except in a general way. They know how something is supposed to look, feel, smell, and taste as it develops into a dish, and they act accordingly.

Admittedly, descriptive guidelines in a set of instructions, no matter how carefully worded, can be somewhat imprecise in communicating exactly what is going on. They may not mean much to you until you see something cooked and cook it yourself. Then you too will get the feel, the look, the taste, the smell of it, and you will really be cooking.

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