How Do Chefs Use Cookbooks?

A glimpse into inspiration, research and development in a professional kitchen

Good cooking, to my mind, is a craft, not an art. It is something to be practiced but not necessarily “redefined” as the Michelin star bros might try to convince. There are rules, to be sure. You should learn them, yes. But a recipe is to be engaged with, to be thought through, to be seen through a curious lens. I’ve long had an issue with modern day recipe writing. It is too rote. It is too exacting. Especially in baking. To imagine, or to lead a reader to believe, that following a recipe exactly as written ought to bring you anything more than a new way YOU prefer to do things like, say, make a perfect meatball or build a quiche, or that it might serve as anything more than simply a guide with advice to a new dish you’ve never made is a bit adsurd. It seems a common belief, and a promoted concept, that recipes will be exacting and perfect upon your first attempt at following someone else’s vision in a totally different kitchen in presumably a totally different part of the world with likely slightly different ingredients and variables like weather. This, as the brits say, is total bullocks. Recipes are, also to my mind, living things that change depending on who is handling them.

There is little room made for conversation in recipe writing guidelines from the NYT’s to the glossy food mags, though the latter often might give you a few hundred or thousand words to talk about the recipe beyond the data and execution. There is also little room made for regional specificities in this day and age - which blows my mind because, now more than ever, you can get sorghum syrup (just as a for instance) delivered to your front door even if you are not in the middle of Tennessee with a literal sorghum syrup mill forty miles away. You might be surprised to find out there is deep rigor and rigidity in recipe writing for national publication. This is, I have to believe, to give the reader the best shot at success, naturally. But, I believe it is also a sad mode of trying to be everything to all people all of the time - a cultural homogenization of correctness that we simply cannot shake as Americans. And god is it ever so boring.

I feel lucky and grateful to be able to write recipes for a living. But I am always left wanting, more than anything though, to talk about the process - not just the execution of the recipe. I think there is a lot to learn in HOW I came to write the recipe and why I made the choices I made. This is the only way to let you, the reader, know that your choices can be, and likely should be, different - that you are part of the recipe as soon as you begin reading it. What you already know should inform how you proceed. What you have in your kitchen already should and can give you permission to experiment. This kind of empowerment is the only kind of recipe writing I am interested in.

SO, I’d love to take you through a typical recipe writing journey for most recipes I write. It starts with what is known and incorporates what I want. Maybe this line of thinking will help you insert yourself into the practice of your own cooking and help you make a craft of it. So, here’s my thought process and practice so you can see that it is not just divine inspiration or that good bakers and chefs have something you don’t. It is literally just practice, curiousity, care and patience (and maybe a little bit of intense, obsessive brain glitching).

This week, I am deep in a baba au rhum rabbit hole. I want to perfect it for myself and for my guests on my cooking retreats in France. I’ve eaten just as many knock-your-socks-off delicious ones as I have truly, truly terrible ones - all in France (even the French get it wrong sometimes, see!).

So how does this process look? I like bullet points. Let’s do that:

1. Get out my cookbooks. For baba au rhum, I need a good sponge cake that absorbs a lot of syrup without getting soggy. I look at new and old cookbooks alike. One of my favorite cookbooks to thumb through when I am looking for a traditional French recipe is Simple French Cookery from 1953 (and it has the most beautiful prints). It has a very basic and “simple” (as the title of the book suggests) recipe for baba au rhum. Too basic. But is it a good glimpse into a baseline recipe. From here, I will look at your traditionalists (Julia! Jacque!) and I will also look at some of my own contemporaries in the pastry field (Sebastien Rouxel, et al) for anything they might have to offer as far as a complete baba au rhum recipe is concerned.

   

   

2. I will take apart the recipe. For a baba au rhum, I basically need a good sponge cake and a good syrup. I am inspired by a beautiful citrus full baba au rhum I just saw on the the Tapisserie Patisserie IG page (one of the most sensational bakeries in Paris) and I just happen to have a bumper crop of oranges, blood oranges and lemons that I need to use up. Local ingredients, seasonality, and what I have on hand is always my first step after I decide what I am developing. They are not exotic, the citrus I have, but they serve my purpose. So, syrup plan sorted! I decide I might also candy some rind and play around with candied segments as well, a la inspo from Tapisserie. The sponge cake will take testing but I have a few good ones I think could serve the purpose. I dig up my tres leches cake recipe. I look at it. Not quite. But maybe for a secondary test, I think. It has cornmeal - I served a cornmeal baba au rhum during my days as pastry chef with Sean Brock and it was good. But not this. I want traditional French but muscled up. I think I want the cake to be more like brioche than the yeasted cake in Simple French Cookery, less eggy, more yeasty. So, I start down a brioche hole. I maybe need a rich brioche but with a few more eggs for structure. I choose two recipes, one is mine that I developed years ago, super rich (high butter content - which might work against me, we’ll see) and the other was one that was written by Bernard Clayton, Jr. in the first bread book I ever bought: The Breads of France. It is a great book!

   

3. I start playing in the kitchen! The best part. Test, play, write things down, what worked, what didn’t. This part is where you can do the Mess Around. If you feel inspired to try some thing, or are curious how a change in a recipe might go, this is where you do it. Here’s how it looks:

   1. I will start with Mr. Clayton, Jr’s. brioche. I do a quick study of the recipe and decided I will do a half batch as he has it written and a whole batch with an additional two eggs (and some vanilla paste and lemon zest because I think it will suit the baba). I think the latter is going to be my best baba bet. *If you’re worried about waste, typically everything is freezable! In this case, I will not mind having some quick brioche in my freezer for a rainy day.

   2. While my brioche is rising and baking, I play around with my syrup. I think I can nail this on first try, syrups aren’t hard. But I do want to play with some spices so that the rum has some friendly bedfellows. So I toast and play around with some cloves and cinnamon and cardamom…. This is also a good opportunity to freeze the juice and candy any of the peel or meat I am not using to test but will one day use for my final recipe once I get there.

   3. I go about my day and let the test syrups rest and the brioche bake - there is some down time in this process. It does not have to be overwhelming. A lot of times, I’ll press pause and get back to things when I can. Obviously, baking requires some timely attention, but not always.

   4. I have two moderately different brioche buns (one as written and plain; one embellished and changed) and two syrups (one a simple, highly reduced citrus rum syrup and the other a spiced, highly reduced rum syrup) to play with. I make a quick chantilly cream and start playing the “make the perfect baba au rhum!” game.

   5. I take notes. I freeze leftovers. I think about what needs changing. This is not my final dish and so it gives me room to be objective. I will only serve this to my family and they like anything, mostly.

   6. If I am (very) happy with it or with parts of it, I write the recipe down at that moment (never later!! this is very important! you will not remember small details!) with an understanding that it might take me one or two more passes to get it exactly right. If I am only moderately happy or disappointed about it, I leave it be, think about it for a day and then regroup. These couple of days in between is important. I do more research, I read more cookbooks, I think about what it needs and I find a better solution. Honestly, sometimes I don’t come back to a test for months or years (unless I’m on a deadline) or until I’ve had another version that inspires me to get back in there and try again.

   7. Eventually, I have a new recipe written and, while it comes from many places, it is unique to my experience of playing with the craft. Sometimes I nail it on the first try, sometimes - don’t be scared - it takes me years to get something how I envision it.

I hope that gives you a little, useful glimpse into ways to think about recipes and developing your own sense of involvement in the process. Of course, you are well within your rights to just follow a recipe and be completely pleased about it (we recipe writers are fine with that), but also I just think it’s way more fun to think about how to be a part of the process. Your food should taste like you made it. Not me.

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Finally - I have many cookbooks that I seek out when I am writing recipes or just looking for inspiration. A lot of them are in the first photo on this post. Though, I have to admit, it is rare that I ever truly follow a recipe from start to finish at this point in my life. Mostly, I just thumb through as a way to think through my own ideas and processes.

Two that I want to leave you with as books / chefs you might like to add to your repertoire:

I studied all of Pierre Herme’s recipes like they were textbook gospel and they were for me for many years when I was starting out. I had Desserts by Pierre Herme by Dorie Greenspan checked out of the Nashville Public Library for so long from 2004-2009 that I am certain I forgot it wasn’t mine and made notes in the margins and stuffed scraps of kitchen tests in the pages (sorry to whomever had it after me!) If you are an aspiring baker with french technique aspirations, he is a remarkable place to start.

Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand is a masterclass on the craft of cooking (he even has a few gold star baking recipes in there as well). It is a brilliant and inspired read and his recipes are written impeccably. I aspire to write a recipe book so important and smart someday.

That’s all for now.

Yours in baba au rhum,
Lisa