Experiments vs old favorites

[mamster]

As a food writer (and presumably non-food writers who cook struggle with this too) I'm always torn between the need to make new dishes and the desire to play it safe and content by making an old favorite. How do you balance these out? When you're working on an issue of Simple Cooking, how do you work on the recipes? Satay five nights in a row?

[John Thorne]

Well, that depends. If I'm working on an essay called "Too Drunk To Cook," then I don't have to worry about that. Like you, probably, a lot of what I write springs from my own efforts to work out a way to get a dish right. This starts with making it several times until I feel I'm getting close and then making it regularly but not so intensively so that it can unfold itself on its own terms. I feel that a lot of food writing that appears in magazines have recipes that were force-ripened to meet a deadline and so don't have the full flavor that they should. This isn't because of ingredients so much as the little things you learn along the way to coax out the best from a dish. On the other hand, there are certain projects that I've had to shelve because I just didn't seem to be getting any further than a particular point. It was good but I just couldn't make it as good as I wanted it to be. (The worst situation is to make a dish so often that you come to hate it just as you perfect it...something that definitely can happen when you're forced to cook to a deadline.)

[mamster]

If I'm working on an essay called "Too Drunk To Cook,"

Steven Shaw, are you reading? This is going to be the subject of my next six columns.