Going on book tours has taught me that once recipes leave our kitchen, it’s impossible to own them. As an author, whether you like it or not, your creations are on their way to a new life. Even something truly unique -- a dish you feel is yours -- becomes someone else’s when they cook it. It’s inevitable, and the result is often interesting. And, of course, you learn something about yourself when you see your food transformed by another’s hands.
On my first book tour, I signed “The Greens Cookbook” in a supermarket where I was told the resident home economist would be making a few salads. I was chatting with her when I remembered that my recipes would be used. When I asked her where they were, she said, “Well, you’re looking at them!” waving her hand towards several large plastic platters. Everything on them was perfect and symmetrical -- asparagus spears all radiating out from the center, halved hard-boiled eggs nestled between them, olives and capers placed just so. Because I never arranged food that way I didn’t recognize the dishes as “mine” at all. Of course I was a bit embarrassed, but it had never occurred to me that the asparagus, eggs and whatever else was on the plate wouldn’t simply be tumbling over each other the way I had visualized their arrangement.
Years later when traveling in Tunisia, I saw that a lot of the dishes there were meticulously set out in decorative, articulated patterns, all colorful starbursts of one kind or another. But somehow it looked right in that context. The patterned foods mirrored the symmetry of the tiles and architecture, and there was a grace I hadn’t seen before in such deliberate order. Still, I don’t tend to arrange food, except for fruit tarts (mostly when if I’m making one for someone’s birthday when a careful and stunningly arranged pastry honors the occasion by saying, in effect, that care was given).
 On another occasion a different home economist (do we even have these anymore?) made a vegetable stew from “The Savory Way,” cutting all its components into large, rough pieces. Again, I didn’t recognize the dish. My version had a different look and feel about it that came from cutting things finely but unevenly. I was surprised and delighted with hers: It had a rustic allure and made such a bold statement. My own tendencies had never allowed me to imagine what big and rough might be like. Seeing her dish, I realized how often we do things just because it’s the way we do them; we don’t really think about it and we probably don’t know why we see the world the way we do. We just go on repeating ourselves for better or worse.
Similarly, when touring for “Vegetarian Suppers,” a chef in Seattle prepared a menu of my dishes in his restaurant. I was delighted to find that the food tasted good (always a concern). It helped to have a little distance from the cooking to be able to enjoy it. But I was even more impressed with how the dishes looked. They were chic, interesting and unpredictable. Portions were small. Crepes, cut into halves at jaunty angles, leaned against one another. Vegetable salads resembled low towers that looked hard to make and semi-precious. Privately, I was mortified to see that I had, over the past many years as a declared home cook, gradually ceased to care about pushing my food to the aesthetic heights that a chef would. His little tricks weren’t difficult; they were mostly about a way of seeing.
Suddenly my plating seemed pedestrian and dowdy. Without seeing it happen, I’d gotten mired in time, and my food no longer looked up to date. I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing -- I have my own particular style, as we all do -- but then when I saw the chef putting out his plates I found myself asking, “Why didn’t I think of that? That looks so great!”
Not all moments like these are so elevating. As the spokeswoman for the California Artichoke Board, I did some touring on the agency's behalf. On one trip, the director and I were given a tour of a large publishing complex where I was to demonstrate a number of artichoke dishes. As we hiked through the vast facility, I noticed a young woman dressed in a white lab coat, her brown curls captured under a hair net, her hands sheathed in plastic gloves. A ruler lay on the counter. I watched her pick it up and measure a piece of carrot, a slice of artichoke, a bit of onion, then return to her cutting. When I finally realized that she was prepping the vegetables for one of my dishes, I rushed over to her and said that she didn’t have to measure everything so precisely. But she replied that the recipe called for ½-inch cubes and she was going to stick to those directions. It didn’t seem to matter that I was the author of the recipes. I explained that my suggestions were more ballpark than literal. All her tedious cutting -- not to mention the waste of time and food -- produced a dish that looked as if it had made from frozen vegetables. My heart sank. The life was gone from the food. It’s moments like these that I despair of recipe writing and long to get by with suggestions to slice something thinly or thickly, rather than 1/8- or ½-inch thick.
On the other hand, a certain close relative of mine cooks and serves my recipes to her friends with scant regard for my instructions. And while I heartily believe that recipes themselves are to be taken as suggestions, there is a point where I draw the line. This one blithely substitutes ripe persimmons for dried plums in a dish, refuses to spend a few minutes on a crucial step or a few dollars on an essential ingredient -- possibly the one that makes the dish. She cooks a simple soup that pleads for ripe, summer tomatoes using winter tomatoes from the supermarket, and then announces to one and all at the table that this is my recipe. I really do want to just slide out of my chair and disappear. Sometimes I wish that she would be just a little more responsive to my suggestions. But then if she’s happy with what she’s made, does it matter? It doesn’t. But still, I’d rather not be present and have to take the blame.
I was once invited to speak to an extremely nice group of vegans. They had bothered to make some dishes from my book to serve during my talk, so before the program started, I asked my hosts what they had made.
“Your onion and rosemary tart with fromage blanc,” a young woman answered with an enthusiastic smile.
“How did you do that?” I asked, knowing that the recipe called for butter, eggs, and fromage blanc, none of these suitable for vegans.
She explained that they had cooked the onions with rosemary and put them on toast, and that was that! Now, caramelized rosemary-scented onions on toast can be delicious, but these weren't. The rosemary was overpowering, there was too little salt and there was nothing to contrast with the onions’ sweetness, like the tart fromage blanc or a nutty Gruyere. On top of that, the bread was thick, the dish was cold and its looks were dowdy and depressing, as if we were back in the 1960s.
Everyone but me seemed happy, so did it matter that the food was drab? Not to them, apparently, but it did to me. This event reminded me that there are those who are happier eating food that’s minus something (meat, dairy, eggs) than a dish that weighs in on flavor and beauty – a glistening tomato, perfumed oils, rugged grains. The way I see it, we eat with our senses, not a belief system. Without appealing sight, smell, and taste firmly in place -- and the pleasant sounds of good eating and talking -- we tend to be eating from our heads rather than our hearts and, somehow, that always feels like less.
Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, includeing "The Greens Cookbook," "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," "This Can't Be Tofu," and "The Savory Way." Her next book, "Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market," is due for a spring release in 2010.
Photos credits: Deborah Madison
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