Why You Should Follow the Recipe (Published 2021) (2024)

Good morning. I spend a lot of time telling you recipes don’t matter. I know that if you’re cooking a lot and you’re confident and you understand triangulations of sweet, salt, acid and heat that you don’t even need recipes, just prompts. We call those prompts no-recipe recipes, and in a couple of months you’ll see them collected in an exciting new cookbook (pre-order today!). Improvisational cooking can be a blast.

But my going on about that every week doesn’t mean that recipes aren’t important, doesn’t mean that they don’t tell particular stories, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ever follow them exactly when you cook. That’s the argument of our Genevieve Ko, anyway, who has made a resolution to do just that this year: “to follow recipes exactly as written,” she wrote for The Times this week, “to get to know their creators without altering the dishes to match my own experiences or tastes.”

This is an exciting way to cook, as it happens, a chance really to learn new flavors and techniques, not just to approximate them. “The more nuanced reward,” Genevieve continues, “is challenging my culinary framework, to keep moving toward a more expansive and equitable worldview. And my hope is that this form of cooking with empathy, if enough people adopt it, can lead to greater unity and understanding even beyond the kitchen.”

I think that’s right. I know I’ll keep cooking without recipes sometimes. But when I do cook with them this year, I’m going to try to follow Genevieve’s lead. Won’t you join us?

Genevieve suggests you give it a shot with carne con chile rojo, with dulce de leche chocoflan, with coconut chicken curry.

I’ll add Yewande Komolafe’s recipe for jollof rice, and Vallery Lomas’s recipe for shrimp Creole (above), and Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe for an eggplant, lamb and yogurt casserole. Make Gabrielle Hamilton’s cold candied oranges as if you were building a model airplane. You’ll experience the cooking differently than if you simply shrugged and omitted ingredients or changed how you use them according to experience or whim. Walk in the shoes of the recipe’s creator. You’ll learn something every time.