On the Recipe As Object
Overproduction is the norm, but who’s cooking all this stuff?
Mushroom au poivre was suddenly everywhere. My husband was flipping through Bon Appétit and pointed it out to me, then sent me a New York Times Cooking post on Instagram. The message was clear: He wanted to eat mushroom au poivre. I found the Times has portobello and maitake versions on their site. All of these variations called for heavy cream, and so I pushed it to Christmas. Heavy cream is a holiday-only kind of ingredient in my life.
The mushroom au poivre of it isn’t the interesting aspect of this end-of-year happening; the everywhereness of it is. You can’t copyright a recipe, and a recipe is just an idea, really: One that changes in the hands of everyone who tries it, unless this is a well-oiled fine-dining kitchen we’re talking about. Test kitchens and recipe developers are under pressure to figure out meaty mains for vegetarians around the holidays, resulting in things like the carrot Wellington. I was fine with the mushroom Wellington, thank you very much. But now, I guess, I’m behind—now is the time for mushroom au poivre and carrot Wellington!
If recipes and cookbooks have historically been significant ways to understand people and places better, spanning geography and time, what does the digital glut and onslaught of recipes tell us about our current moment?