Lies My Cookbook Told Me
The claim of this post is simple but facetious. Cookbooks lie to you.
Cookbooks lie about big, important things. I suspect that they do it so that you will not know how to cook. That way you will continue to buy more and more cookbooks. It’s a total racket. I know it sounds paranoid. But I have no other explanation for what follows.
Consider my first exhibit, the recipe for Béchamel sauce given by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child in Mastering the Art of French Cooking vol I. This book is a landmark in American culinary history. It launched Julia Child’s career and changed the way a generation thought about food.
All of which I find incomprehensible. Consider:
Sauce Béchamel
This basic sauce takes about 5 minutes to make, and is then ready for the addition of flavours or enrichments…
For 3/4 pint (medium thickness)
A 3-pt heavy-bottomed enamelled, stainless steel or lined copper saucepan
1 oz butter
1 oz flour
A wooden spatula or spoonIn the saucepan melt the butter over low heat. Blend in the flour, and cook slowly, stirring, until the butter and flour froth together for 2 minutes without colouring. This is now a white roux.
3/4 pint of milk and 1/4 tsp. salt heated to the boil in a small saucepan
A wire whiskRemove roux from heat. As soon as roux has stopped bubbling, pour in all the hot liquid at once. Immediately beat vigorously with a wire whisk to blend liquid and roux gathering in all bits of roux from the inside edges of the pan. Set saucepan over moderately high heat and stir with the wire whisk until the sauce comes to the boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring.
Following this recipe will not give you Béchamel sauce. It will give you a saucepan of warm, oily, slightly salty milk, full of nasty lumps of suspended gluten. In a word, disgusting.
Worse, there will be absolutely no way to convert this saucepan of warm, oily, slightly salty milk into Béchamel sauce, short of chucking it into the nearest pasture, waiting a while, then milking the cows that graze there.
The proper way to make Béchamel sauce isn’t so far off, as it turns out. But rather than adding the milk all at once, you must — absolutely must — add it a few tablespoons at a time, blending thoroughly with a whisk at every addition, until the butter/flour mixture gradually thins and then liquefies. This procedure prevents it from forming any lumps.
Once you’ve added all the milk, heat as directed. The mixture thickens, and voilà, Béchamel sauce.[1]
Botching Béchamel is no small matter, because Béchamel is one of the “mother sauces” in French cuisine. It’s found in literally dozens of other recipes. It’s no exaggeration to say that if you can’t cook Béchamel, you can’t cook French food.
The same is true of mayonnaise. Most Americans just buy mayonnaise in a jar, but this doesn’t taste nearly as good as the homemade stuff, and its texture is more like a grease custard than a sauce. Not French at all. Yet making the real stuff at home is very, very easy.
It’s not easy, however, if you follow the late, legendary James Beard, who in The New James Beard gives the following recipe for making mayonnaise in a blender. It’s almost right, but it has a big, big problem:
Put 2 whole eggs, 1 teaspoon coarse kosher salt, 1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice in the blender and mix for just 5 seconds at the blend or high setting, then, with the machine still running, remove the cover insert and dribble 1 1/2 cups of olive oil in very slowly until the mayonnaise starts to thicken….
The problem again is the technique, which Beard certainly should have known. He says to blend the egg and lemon mixture for five seconds, which is totally inadequate. If you do, then no matter how slowly you add the olive oil, what you are left with is a very liquid, very eggy, slightly salty blender full of expensive — and wasted — olive oil.
I had this problem so often that my husband had a name for it. He called it “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Mayonnaise.” Nothing known to culinary science will turn this stuff into mayonnaise, and unless you happen to like olive oil soup, you’ve got no choice but to throw it out.
Finally I found the trick — you have to blend the egg and lemon for a full, solid minute. Nothing less will do. After that, you can be totally slipshod about your technique, and the mayonnaise still turns out okay.
Add all the oil at once if you feel like. Tamper madly with the recipe. Other oils work just fine, too. Throw in fistfuls of herbs, whole anchovies, capers, pine nuts, walnuts, sun dried tomatoes, fresh rosebuds, cheese. Use anything really, and you’re totally fine.
The point is that it’s relatively hard to break the suspension once you’ve established it, but actually establishing it is the key, and for that you must blend for a full minute, as noted correctly here, but not correctly here or here.
The Joy of Cooking repeats the error — it says to blend the ingredients “until thoroughly combined” — and adds a bizarre admonition: “Don’t try to make mayonnaise if a thunderstorm threatens or is in progress, as it simply will not bind.” This is false; I’ve tried it. (Really, with thunder.) To her credit, Julia Child gets it all right.
[1]This Béchamel recipe from Mario Batali is a little closer, but I’d still not want to risk it. The only way I’ve found to get a smooth Béchamel is to go a very little at a time, at least until the mixture becomes runny enough that it won’t lump up with the addition of more liquid.
Jason, when you add in the milk (or cream) to the heated roux, is the milk heated first? I’ve had better results mixing cold milk into my warm roux and then heating the mixture. Flour clumps more when it encounters hot liquid than cold.Report
I read halfway through the post before realizing this wasn’t some grand critique of popular conceptions of predatory lending.Report
Cooks Illustrated. Nothing else comes close.Report
@Pat Cahalan, Many, many dittos.Report
I have discovered a new excuse for why I can’t cook.Report
I really recommend Richard Olney’s “Simple French Food.”
And Transplanted Lawyer’s right — add the milk or cream cold. (Trick to rue’s, if the rue’s cold, the liquid most be hot; if the rue’s warm, the liquid must be cold.)Report
It took me three months of screwing around with stovetop custard until my custard would actually set.
I had to put up with online recipes that lied to me as well as people who told me that I should just bake my custard.
AS IF SUCH COULD BE POURED OVER FRUIT AND CHILLED OVERNIGHT.
I kept making proper eggy sauces but never custard, thanks to the cookbooks I had.
I suspect that this is the real reason behind book burnings.Report
@Jaybird,
I can’t remember how many batches of failed rice pudding I threw out over the years. I tried just about every recipe from my cookbooks but couldn’t understand how I kept taking warmed, milky pans of goop out of the oven. It wasn’t until I read an article in The Atlantic several years ago about rice pudding and saw the words “it will thicken as it stands.” Not a single one of my cookbooks stated that; they only said to cook for 3 hours and to serve warm or cold. Now I wait 5-6 hours, and it’s fine. So much for clear instructions.
If you ever want an explanation of why things do or don’t work in cooking, Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” is a classic reference. It explains the science behind just about everything to do with cooking, and it’s very readable and easy to understand.Report
@Debbie, one cookbook told me to use 2% milk… can you believe that?Report
I would agree with Transplanted Lawyer – I always add the milk cold. Never have any problems. I think the trick for me is that the butter and flour have to be completely combined and the milk has to be added slowly. Even if there’s a bit of clumping though, I can usually knock it out with some vigorous whisking.
A bechamel is the key ingredient for our signature Louisville dish, the Hot Brown but I find I make it much more often these days as the start of a killer mac & cheese recipe.Report
This is why I just wing everything.Report
I find a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation. — Madame Benoit
Cookbooks don’t lie. Julia Child’s bechamel is a classic French Recipe. It’s the technique of whisking that gets rid of the lumps. Letting in all the milk at once tempers the roux and prevents it from overcooking. As for the temperature, hot into cold or vise versa.
As for James Beard’s Mayo, you have a point there. True mayonnaise recipes call for egg yolks alone, allowing it to be blended with lemon in 5 seconds.Report
@Ivan Maminta,
But you can’t have it both ways. Either you do the hot/cold technique, or else you follow the “classic French recipe.” Doing it hot/cold purportedly won’t yield any lumps to whisk out. (And have you ever tried to whisk out lumps? Might as well sieve out the oxygen from water.)
And as to the mayonnaise, even just using the yolks won’t work if all you do is blend for 5 seconds. Trust me, I’ve tried that, too.Report
I don’t particularly believe that cookbooks lie. The cooks who employ these methods are simply saying that this is what works for them. There are too many factors that affect the outcome of these recipes: how you whisk (as in speed and even the angle at which you hold the whisk) to what sort of blender you use. A stick blender versus the usual blender sometimes is the trick for some people, or vice versa for others. Even the brand/model you use is a factor because they’re all rather different in my opinion. You may have a point with James Beard’s mayo; the technique seems faulty. However, I can’t say that cookbooks really lie. Honestly, most people who love to cook versus bake like it because it can be tweaked more easily. Therefore, when approaching a recipe from a cookbook, you could tweak it as necessary. Not all methods work for everyone. While it’s true that most people expect a recipe’s outcome to be consistent, sometimes the directions are just not clear enough (though not always to the fault of the author). I’ve always been wary of this problem myself but I find that a recipe should be tested by you more than once. I typically do not make something from a recipe I haven’t tried out a couple times before for a dinner party; I typically stick to tried and true recipes for those occasions to minimize the stress of wondering why this sauce came apart or why something else went wrong and how I could try to fix it.Report
As I said, the bit about lying was facetious. It was just too good a play on Lies My Teacher Told Me. I couldn’t pass it up.Report
If you want to learn technique, go for Harold McGee. His explanations of the ‘why’ behind how cooking works can be a godsend if you’re trying to understand why doing things a particular way works. If he’s too science-y then I like Mark Bittman. If he’s not fun enough, then Alton Brown.
I think he old Mastershave a problem of things being so ingrained with them that it’s hard to actually explain how and why they do things to people who aren’t trained.
(I also do bechamel cold into hot and slowly, btw.)Report
I’m not up to sauces yet, having really only perfected mashed potatoes, and that with great help from a chef friend of mine. I am, though, very happy to read about cooking here, since I’ve been wanting to post about beer for some time and was worried the topic might be too apolitical for the League. Also I fully intend to try this recipe out. Lastly, I laughed out loud at the post title.Report
@Rufus F.,
Seeing the interest, I’ll definitely post more about food in the future.
The next time you make mashed potatoes, top them with Béchamel sauce, flavored with some minced shallots, sautéed until transparent, and a generous grating of both black pepper and nutmeg. Use red-skinned potatoes; leave the skin on for color and texture.
I’d make potatoes that way all the time, but for the lactose intolerance in my house. Lactaid-based Béchamel is too sweet to use as anything but the base for a dessert sauce. Even adding lots of very sharp cheese doesn’t help.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, “I’d make potatoes that way all the time, but for the lactose intolerance in my house.”
Lactose BIGOTRY, you mean!
Jason once said that I tolerate lactose like Fred Phelps tolerates gays.Report
I think its down to the cook testing in many cases. Recipe publishers employ people to check that the recipes can actually be executed in a normal home kitchen with one oven, four burners, a sensible number of pans, and above all, only one cook. Most cookbook authors are professionals who are used to having multiple cooks, each with their own station and almost endless supplies of pans. The translation can be tricky. I’m pretty sure the mayonaisse thing comes down to cook testing – a commercial kitchen blender probably can make mayo in 5 seconds. Not sure about the bechemal, though.
Cook testing is expensive. My personal conspiracy theory is that this explains the move away from technically complicated French food which is quite hard to make decent recipes for, towards quick non-really-Italian/Asian food thats much easier to make recipes for (and cook) in the cookbook market.
I like the French Laundry cookbook – its makes no pretense to being something you could cook from in a regular kitchen. The recipes are broken down the way they would be in a commercial kitchen – by station and with prep separated from final cooking.Report
@Simon K, I bought one of Emril’s cookbooks after having a fantastic meal at his restaurant in Las Vegas. The recipes were insanely complex (IMO) and after a few failed tries I donated it to the library.Report