Hello! If this is your first time reading my newsletter: thank you for popping by – you’re more than welcome here. If you’re returning, welcome back!
First, a bit of news: I’d hoped to publish articles weekly, but a family issue popped up last week and is taking up my time (which is why I didn’t publish anything last week). Because it will take a while to sort through, I’ll share articles when and as I can, but likely on an irregular basis for the foreseeable. Apologies but life happens.
This week’s dispatch is a mind meander, stemming from a chat I had with a friend about the role trust plays in recipes. If that’s not your thing, my recipe for Roasted Honey-Harissa Carrot Soup follows.
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Trust in the recipe
A couple of weeks after I wrote about my adventures with ChatGPT-generated recipes, I chatted with a friend who works in tech. Without trying those meatballs of sadness, he knew the idea of an AI-generated recipe creating palatable food was far-fetched.
“Stochastic parrots!” he said. What the natural language processing whozzits does is rejig its corpus to look for words and spit out a response that fits a predetermined shape: the shape of a business letter, the shape of a haiku about a sleeping cat, the shape of a Moroccan-spiced meatball recipe. Whatever it generates sounds like a business letter, a three-line 17-syllable poem about a sleeping cat, a Moroccan-spiced meatball recipe. But it doesn’t understand what it’s saying.
In as much as the human (and animal) attribute of “intelligence” and the act of “learning” are used to describe what the lines of code do, those lines lack practical experience and intellectual and emotional understanding inherent to human activities like cooking. Sure, it can generate a vaguely plausible but error-riddled treatise about Thai basil. But it has never sniffed the plant’s cinnamonny-anisey scent, flavoured a pho with the herb’s stems, plucked its leaves for a salad, or ground them into a paste to flavour rice.
Like my knowledge of flying to the moon, it’s all book learning and no actual experience.* It feels as if those cheerleaders who ballyhoo the programme’s recipe-generating capabilities are keen on the “you don’t need to know how to do a job to tell someone how to do it” ethos I’ve run into time and time again. I get it: they’re paid to present those ideas or they hope to reap the benefits of getting people excited about this sparkly object.
But what’s conveniently forgotten is why people ask for, search for, give out, and keep recipes. It’s not only about making something to eat. It’s about trust.
Trust and vulnerability
As I said to my friend, hunger, sustenance, health, and culture may play into the search for ideas for those carrots languishing at the bottom of the crisper (ahem, my recipe for Roasted Honey-Harissa Carrot Soup follows), but cooks also want workable ideas with provenance.
They want assurance that someone has previously prepared the dish, worked out the kinks, and can reliably instruct them to replicate it. It would be great if someone could help solve problems. Home cooks often look for empathy towards their realities: time, resources, physical limitations, or other issues. Often, these points boil down to trust.
When we talk about trust, we make ourselves vulnerable to someone else. We rely on their goodwill or professional courtesy to not harm or embarrass us or take advantage of us. It’s a social construct, shaped by our and our communities’ experiences. We learn who is unreliable, whom we can count on, and in what ways they are dependable. I trust my mechanic to do his best to keep costs low. I also trust my furnace company to send decent techs who will recommend unnecessary services and products to pad their bottom line.
With the glut of mediocre underqualified swaggering experts about, it’s easy to be led astray. They’re often the sort of experts who think they know more than the rest of the room: they appear confident, “authentic,” knowledgeable, and can entice others into believing and trusting them. We’ve seen a lot of it over the past few years, especially as pseudonymous players (and others), spread misinformation, disinformation, and unfounded opinion as fact.
Can I get the recipe?
Traditionally we’ve gone to people we know to be good cooks or notable ones (like royal kitchens’ head cooks) for recipes. Later, we relied on publishers, broadcasters, and food manufacturers to present cooking experts to guide us in the kitchen with well-practised recipes.
As self-publishing and social media democratised voices, they brought us a flurry of newly-minted and accessible self-declared experts. Last year, it was estimated there were more than 600 million blogs and 43% of high-traffic blogs focussing on foodish topics. Some are run by excellent cooks who create clear, successful recipes. Others aren’t.
Like lasagne, trust comes in layers.
I know not everyone is like me. I cook a lot, from an ever-expanding set of cuisines, and can wrangle my way through some pretty scant instructions. The kitchen is my happy place where I beat, pound, and hack things before plunging them in boiling oil, setting them on fire, or putting them in a searing hot pan to try new-to-me ingredients, visit different cultures, or time travel via historical recipes. Other home cooks have different levels of experience, confidence, and interest, and different access to resources (space, time, ingredients). Some simply see food as a fuel source.
Many factors go into why we make a new-to-us recipe, including cuisine, ingredients, skill level. When a recipe writer’s site, video channel, television series, columns, or social media gives followers a feel for their personality, likes, dislikes, and style, it makes feel like they have a relationship with the writer. That parasocial relationship is sometimes enough to get them to try a recipe.
But regardless of who we are and why we’ve selected a particular recipe, whether we realise it or not, we’ve likely placed several layers of trust in the writer, including:
Provenance: The dish has been made before, as written, and the end results are within the realm of acceptableness.
Honesty: The recipe does what it says on the box: the Tunisian shakshuka tastes like ones made in Tunisia; the easy chicken fajita traybake is easy; the 15-minute miso-mustard pork chops with sesame green beans are done within a quarter-hour. Caramelising onions takes 40 minutes, not 10.
Respect: The writer understands cooking involves resources, and not every cook can afford to waste time, money, or food.
Trust is an everyday word, a concept that’s been rooted in society since time immemorial. Sometimes it feels as if it’s so much of a given that it’s an afterthought. When it comes to feeding ourselves (and our family and our friends), that sense of security thrums throughout the cooking process. And it often starts with the recipe.
*Although I argue my ability to jump into the air puts me ahead of ChatGPT in space flight.
New from me:
· My latest restaurant came out. This time, I went to Pho Vietnam K&W in dtk for Vietnamese dishes.
What I’m reading:
· I wish I could have put something here.
Foodish things I’m doing:
· Working on a few cool stories for The Record
Roasted Honey-Harissa Carrot Soup
This soup came about as a way to deal with leftover Harissa-and-Maple-Roasted Carrots but has since been played with enough that it’s its own dish. Adjust this to your taste – increase or decrease the honey, garlic, or toasted spices. Make it as thick or thin as you wish. The important note is harissa’s heat varies from brand to brand and kitchen to kitchen, so use as much as you’re comfortable.
Preparation time: about 15 minutes
Cooking time: About 90 minutes
Yield: 1.75 L
For the roasted carrots
60 ml (4 tablespoons) honey
45 ml (3 tablespoons) olive oil
1 tablespoon harissa, to taste
2 teaspoons toasted cumin seeds, ground
1 teaspoon toasted coriander seeds, ground
1 teaspoon pepper, to taste
1 garlic clove, minced
¾ teaspoon salt, to taste
1 teaspoon pepper, to taste
1 kg (approximately 2 lbs) carrots, peeled, trimmed and cut into chunks
For the broth
2 tablespoons, olive oil, as needed
150 g onion, chopped (1 medium)
1 to 2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 red bell pepper, cored and seeded, and cut into chunks
125 g tomato, cored (if the centre is white and hard) and quartered (about 1 medium)
1.5 litres (6 cups) vegetable broth, or more as desired
6 fresh coriander stems with leaves (just a small, small handful)
Garnish (optional)
Sour cream
Minced fresh coriander
For the roasted carrots
Preheat oven to 220C (425F). Add carrots to an ovenproof baking dish (ideally one capacious enough to keep the veg in one layer). In a measuring jug, mix honey, olive oil, harissa, cumin, coriander seeds, pepper, garlic, and salt. Pour over the carrots and mix well. Roast for 30 minutes, or until they’re parcooked.
For the broth
While the carrots roast, heat a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Pour in olive oil. When warm, add the onions and stir until they soften and are translucent – about 10 minutes. Stir in garlic until it perfumes air, then add pepper and stir for a couple of minutes before adding tomatoes. Stir for another couple of minutes, until everything is well mixed. Add the vegetable broth. Strew the coriander stems on top and let the broth heat up until it’s time to add the carrots
When the carrots are ready, tip them into the pot, scraping out any marinade and juices from the baking dish into the soup. Let come to a rolling boil for 5 minutes and then decrease heat so the pot is at a low boil. Cook until the carrots are fork tender, which could take about 30 minutes, depending on your kitchen’s mood.
Discard the coriander stems. You can leave the pepper and tomatoes in or remove them – I leave them in because they enrich the colour and add flavour. Purée until it’s as smooth or chunky as you wish. Add more broth, if you want a thinner soup. Balance flavours to taste.
You can serve this as-is or garnish with sour cream (which will temper some heat, if you added too much harissa) and/or minced coriander.
Trust in the recipe
Trusting the recipe writer to respect resources of the reader is a valuable observation, well said! Trust lasagna :)