When people change your recipe. . .

[LaurieB]

OK, I do not lay claim to the Roasted Cauliflower as MY recipe. But I sure do pass on how to make this yummy goodness to anyone who wants to know.

So here comes my Aunt, a woman whom I adore, who wants to know how to make this dish about which I have raved. I tell her -- it is, after all, so simple and so extremely good.

WELL, she emails me that IT DID NOT COME OUT LIKE I SAID IT WOULD!!!!

She then tells me she followed my directions EXACTLY -- except --

The fresh cauliflower was too expensive. She substituted frozen florettes.

She had no olive oil. So it was roasted dry.

Salt is bad for you, so omitted.

No pepper, of any kind, so omitted.

It came out burnt to a crisp and unedible. Was I crazy to suggest this?

This isn't the first, or second, or third, time that I have given her a recipe and had her so totally ignore and/or alter it that it has come out inedible. What amazes me is that she'll only ask for it after 1) hearing me rave about it or 2) actually eating it at my house.

I understanding tweaking or modifying someone else's recipe. I do this myself on occasion. But what do you do when you give someone a recipe that doesn't work because they've changed it so drastically?

Thoughts?

Laurie

Edited April 29, 2006 by LaurieB (log)

[melonpan]

you know what? even if you do follow recipes to the letter, everyone has their own style and things turn out differently.

that being said...

So here comes my Aunt, a woman whom I adore, who wants to know how to make this dish about which I have raved...

...WELL, she emails me that IT DID NOT COME OUT LIKE I SAID IT WOULD!!!! ...

...This isn't the first, or second, or third, time that I have given her a recipe and had her so totally ignore and/or alter it that it has come out inedible...

....But what do you do when you give someone a recipe that doesn't work because they've changed it so drastically?

all you have to do is tell her that the dish did not turn out because she made changes (ive made it now, and its DELISH). thats it. simple.

in the future, give her recipes and just be ready for the time she calls/writes to you letting you know things didnt turn out so well.

maybe you can consider not telling her about how easy/simple/delicious certain dishes are. maybe you can consider not giving her recipes. if that is not in your nature, just accept it... it is her problem for not following the recipe and dealing with the consequences, not your problem. you gave her the keys, how she drives the car is her responsibility. if you gave her a good recipe, you can sleep in peace.

sounds like a sore point for you. instead of sharing recipes with her, share whatever else you adore about her.

it can be tricky with family. just go with the flow and let it go.

[LAZ]

...WELL, she emails me that IT DID NOT COME OUT LIKE I SAID IT WOULD!!!!

"Gosh, Auntie, I guess I'm a better cook than you are."

[FabulousFoodBabe]

LaurieB., you've hit on another beef of mine. I almost never give recipes unless it's to a group of students, and we're working together in class. In a recipe development workshop I took once, with a bunch of professionals, our teacher had us all do the same recipes a few times so we could see how differently we cooked and keep that in mind as we wrote for mass market. Even if you publish a lead that says, "please make no substitutions; if you are uncomfortable with [full-fat dairy, lots of sugar], choose a different dish. The results will not be the same with [fat-free sour cream, Splenda]." People STILL screw around with your work!

Once, the wife of one of my husband's associates had delcared herrself the best cook in [the town we lived in]. She used to tell people "don't get recipes from Fabby; she changes an ingredient or two because she's threatened that someone will show her up." I had NO problem being blunt and honest about that nonsense. If I give a recipe, I give it all.

[miladyinsanity]

I admit to being one of Those People who have to change something.

But if somebody doesn't get what she wants with my recipe, then I just shrug. Not my fault. I gave you my recipe, with all my little notes and changes, and if you didn't get it right...Well, not my fault.

And if somebody tried the same thing with me, Fabby, I'd have smacked that lady good!

[Apicio]

I opened a pastry shop that I only intended to run for five years. It was a a realised dream, freed me from my thirty year accounting career and also contributed substantially to my early retirement fund. I stayed three months to train the people I sold the shop and the recipes to.

My feeling is that the recipe became their’s when they bought the business from me. Now when I run into old customers who complain about the present version of the products they use to buy from me I just tell them the fact that the business is no longer mine. Distance yourself from your recipe when other people prepare it. It takes real dedication to reproduce your own recipes, even when you do it yourself and do it day in and day out.

[FabulousFoodBabe]

And if somebody tried the same thing with me, Fabby, I'd have smacked that lady good!

←

Yep. And sometimes a verbal punch can take care of things nicely.

[DTBarton]

I've had this situation mostly with people who don't understand the importance of good raw materials to the finished product. Usually someone has a dish at my place and asks for the recipe. Then they make it and it isn't as good. I try to gently encourage them to be more selective in the ingredients, but to a lot of folks, an ingredient is an ingredient.

So, no, that cheap farm raised shrimp won't taste like the wild Carolina or Gulf shrimp I used. That big box store olive oil won't be the same either. Nor the grocery store brand cheese. etc, etc..........

Cooking for me now is primarily a search for the best raw material and then simply preparing it.

[jgm]

Although I'm a firm believer in giving out recipes when asked (having been the recipient of some dearly loved recipes from friends and family), it's frustrating when some idiot screws it up.

A couple of years ago, I gave a white chicken chili recipe to the wife of one of the attorneys I work with. The recipe is designed to be low fat, but to receive flavor from a combination of garnishes, such as salsa, sour cream, Monterrey Jack cheese, and fresh cilantro. It was really irritating when the attorney complained that they'd tried the recipe, and found it unbearably bland. Long story short, they used no garnishes whatsoever.

I just explained to him (trying not to grind my teeth) that the first time I try a new recipe, I make it exactly as written, since it's a waste of money to have it fail. That way, if something does go wrong, I can speak with the recipe provider and will likely be able to pinpoint exactly what I did wrong. (If he was reading between the lines, he understood that I was telling him it was his own fault for not following the recipe.)

There will always be people who do stupid things with perfectly good recipes. Sometimes it's because they're unskilled and don't know better. Other times, it's because they enjoy being victims, and are most comfortable when they're able to focus on the terrible things others do to them. It's a really convenient way of not having to take responsibility for one's own life and destiny. And cooking.

[H. du Bois]

Ever read recipe comments over at Epicurious? They go something like, "... and I substituted Molly McButter for the butter and Eggbeaters for the eggs and I didn't have any french bread so I used Wonder Bread and my husband hates fresh basil so I used Mrs. Dash, and it was wonderful!!!" I sometimes wonder if what they're rating with their stars bears any resemblance whatsoever to the dish as originally conceived.

My mother is a woman who is constitutionally incapable of following a recipe as written - she substitutes all over the place, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom (nor can she fathom why I would follow any recipe as directed). She once served me something that turned out to be from a Joy of Cooking recipe that I'd made several times myself. It wasn't bad at all, but it was so profoundly different from what I'd cooked, I didn't even recognize it as the same dish.

[markk]

For some reason, I once gave Pat Wells's recipe for 40-Clove Chicken to a friend's mother. (The recipe basically contains 40 cloves of garlic in their skin, cut-up chicken pieces on the bone, olive oil, s&p, white wine and brandy at the end for flaming- that's it (parsley at the end). The chicken pieces cook atop the cloves of garlic which basically roast and perfume the checken, then the wine turns it into a gravy. It was all the rage some years ago, and is delish.

As I say, for some reason I gave it to a friend's mother who made it, and told me it was indeed delicious, but at the very end she dumped in a full jar of Ragu Spaghetti Sauce because she was afraid her husband would eat it otherwise.

Dumbfounded!

[torakris]

Laurie, This is a major pet peeve of mine as well, I have started only giving out recipes to people who I know will do them right.

I passed on a wonderful white cake recipe to a friend a couple years back, she came back a week later and told me it was awful.

She had tried to make it "healthier" by substituting margarine for butter, whole wheat flour for white, "healthy"brown sugar for the white and used only egg whites.....

I mean come on, if you want to eat healthy food than stay away from cake!

There is also a woman who regularly attends my cooking classes and has a tendency to make make substitutions or leave things out. She reported back to me that her banana bread didn't come out right and was it possibly because she left out the bananas? Her husband doesn't like bananas....

She also substitutes 1/2 cup of dried basil for 1/2 of fresh basil in my eggplant croquettes, I can't even imagine what those tasted like.

[MissAmy]

Oh god. For some reason, people who do this really, really irritate the bejeezus out of me. This woman who is a friend of my aunt's is notorious. This past Christmas, we hosted an elaborate and elegant dinner party for friends. We made almost everything, and when my aunt's friend suggested she bring dessert, we said, "Sure!" She even went so far as to ask us to suggest a recipe, which we did: my wonderful pear tart, that has a sweet, delicate crust, chocolate bottom, custard filling, and topped with fresh pears. We'd had problems with her bring bad "modified to be healthy" desserts to parties in the past, so we both instructed her, "Make this dish exactly the way it is written. Do not change ANYTHING. Please. And thank you."

Needless to say, what was brought wasn't even a close approximation of my tart. She had used whole wheat flour, omitted the sugar, and used Smart Balance instead of butter to make the crust: it turned out hard and dry and inedible. She used skim milk instead of a mix of whole and heavy cream for the custard: it never set up properly and was runny. She omited the sugar from the chocolate portion: it was bitter and chalky - I think she also used inferior chocolate. The only part done correctly was the pear, but by that point the dish was beyond repair.

I kind of lost it when I took a bite. I was pretty damned rude, actually, and got into trouble with my aunt later. I think my comments went along the lines of, "This is Christmas Dinner, and what part of follow the recipe exactly was misunderstood? I can understand wanting to be healthy, but if you had a problem with this dish, you should have said something. And furthermore, until you take a class in baker's formula it's probably a really bad idea to jack around with baking recipes."

If it had been any other occassion but Christmas I probably wouldn't have reacted so badly, and I do agree that I was wrong. But for God's sake! I can understand doing these kinds of experiments on your own, for your own self to eat, but bringing them to dinner with other people, esspecially when the person who gave you the recipe is right there is just beyond the pale. God that's rude. I do not ask this person to bring food anymore to anything. If she asks to bring something, we just tell her "Bring wine."

[Pam R]

To me recipes are guides ... ones that I like to follow once as written, then change if I feel it is necessary. I've said so 'on record'.

Having said that, it still somewhat irritates when somebody tells you that they've changed your recipe. Even though I've never had somebody tell me they changed it and hated it, in the back of my mind I'm always going "what was wrong with the way it was written?" But really, it doesn't hurt anybody.

Now.. if somebody complained about a recipe of mine, having changed a bunch of ingredients, that would really irritate me. By all means, change the ingredients - but at the very moment that you change anything about the recipe, it ceases to be mine. Accept the responsibility of the end result.

[Terrasanct]

I'll change things all the time, but when you're baking you really have to understand what you're doing. You just can't replace white flour with wheat without drastic changes in the end product. And why would anyone use margarine in the first place? It's not any healthier than butter and it just doesn't turn out the same. Most margarine has the same number of calories unless it has water in it, which really means you don't want to bake with it.

And I have a rule that I don't ever try out a new recipe on anyone outside of family. If I take something to a dinner it has to be good.

[mizducky]

Heh. These kinds of stories always remind me of an old co-worker of my mother's--a very sweet lady, but to be blunt, not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Back when food processors were still very new (and very expensive) in the US, this sweet lady enthusiastically bought one. A few weeks later my mom asked her about how she was doing with her new gizmo. Not very good, this lady said. My mom probed a bit more, and with questioning it became evident that this lady had been under the strange delusion that you just brought this magic labor-saving device home, and food just magically ... happened. I don't think she thought it was like those food synthesizers of Star Trek; rather, she seemed to have just glommed onto advertisements featuring the processor sitting there among beautiful finished dishes, and just didn't think all the way through to the realization that there would still be some actual labor involved in making those dishes.

Where I'm going with this: I am convinced there are numerous people out there who think they're cooks, but are subject to this same kind of magical thinking. You have a recipe, you have some ingredients and tools--voila, cooking happens! Nevermind that you have no comprehension of what the recipe is actually telling you to do; nevermind that you have no comprehension of the properties of the ingredients called for; nevermind that there are chemical and physical and even biological processes happening between the ingredients mediated by those recipe instructions. They have no idea of any of that. By their magical thinking, you just gather together something resembling the Magical Talismans of Cookery; the Food Elves are summoned and make it go poof! and look! There's a Beef Wellington!

You can see children play at "cooking" this way all the time. You know the kind of thing I mean: when they pour all sorts of strange substances into a bucket or such, pretending they're making a cake or whatever. (Variant: pouring a whole bunch of stuff into a bucket, saying they're scientists making a "secret formula". ) Alas, stories like this always suggest to me that there's a whole lot of people out there who just have never quite progressed beyond this childlike conceptualization of the cooking process.

And unlike my mom's co-worker, many of these folks may well be incredibly intelligent and insightful about other fields of expertise. Although, again to be blunt, at least a few of these very bright people may well have some history with not really accepting that someone else might know something that they don't.

P.S. Mind you, I shamelessy screw around with recipe directions all the time. But I seriously research my permutations ... and I would never dream of bitching at the person who supplied the original recipe if one of my experiments falls flat on its face. It was my choice to fiddle with the thing, so it's my risk, my disaster, my learning experience, nobody else's fault. (Heh. And I don't go springing untested experiments on a houseful of guests, either!)

[Pam R]

(Heh. And I don't go springing  untested experiments on a houseful of guests, either!)

Surely I can't be the only one who'd risk it...

[racheld]

(Heh. And I don't go springing  untested experiments on a houseful of guests, either!)

Surely I can't be the only one who'd risk it...

←

Well, there WERE three houseguests the time we deep-fried the honey-injected Turkey.

[mizducky]

(Heh. And I don't go springing untested experiments on a houseful of guests, either!)

Surely I can't be the only one who'd risk it...

←

Yeah, but then again you're a professional, who cooks more quantities of food in one pre-Passover rush than I cook in an entire year.

(Not to say that I've never done so. But the couple of times it backfired on me bigtime have turned me into a real wimp. )

[petite tête de chou]

I make it abundantly clear that unless the recipe is prepared to the letter the results will be different. Period. Hey, if they make substitutions or otherwise sneeze in the batter, it isn't my problem. The recipe is no longer mine. And woe to them that say their crap-on-a-cake-plate is from MY recipe. WOE!

[tammylc]

I had my first experience with this recently. I live in a cohousing community where we have optional shared meals several nights a week. Most of the people who signup to head cook are pretty good cooks. One, however, is remarkably unskilled for someone who insists on putting his "talents" on display month after month.

Looking for something new to make, he asked for my jambalaya recipe. I wrote it out in careful detail for him, with what I thought were ultra explicit instructions. I was cautiously optimistic - it's a good recipe, pretty easy, how could he possibly mess it up?

Oh, by not following the instructions. Yep, that would do it. Somehow it never occured to me that someone (especially someone inexperienced and cooking a recipe for the first time for 20 people) would ask for a recipe and then not follow it to the letter. To be fair, he apparently delegated much of it to his assistant cooks, so I can fault them for not following the instructions either.

And I found out just yesterday that he thought 5 stalks of celery meant 5 bunches of celery! Fortunately, one of his assistant cooks new enough to intervene before all that celery ended up in the jambalaya.

[joiei]

I will make small changes in recipes that I am working with, but only minor adjustments. The exception is pastry and baking, those I follow to the letter.

[John DePaula]

There is also a woman who regularly attends my cooking classes and has a tendency to make make substitutions or leave things out. She reported back to me that her banana bread didn't come out right and was it possibly because she left out the bananas? Her husband doesn't like bananas....

She also substitutes 1/2 cup of dried basil for 1/2 of fresh basil in my eggplant croquettes, I can't even imagine what those tasted like.

←

Eeewwwww! We don't EVEN have a good emoticon for this...

[Swisskaese]

Laurie, This is a major pet peeve of mine as well, I have started only giving out recipes to people who I know will do them right.

I passed on a wonderful white cake recipe to a friend a couple years back, she came back a week later and told me it was awful.

She had tried to make it "healthier" by substituting margarine for butter, whole wheat flour for white, "healthy"brown sugar for the white and used only egg whites.....

I mean come on, if you want to eat healthy food than stay away from cake!

There is also a woman who regularly attends my cooking classes and has a tendency to make make substitutions or leave things out. She reported back to me that her banana bread didn't come out right and was it possibly because she left out the bananas? Her husband doesn't like bananas....

She also substitutes 1/2 cup of dried basil for 1/2 of fresh basil in my eggplant croquettes, I can't even imagine what those tasted like.

←

You just made my day!!!

[jgm]

I kind of lost it when I took a bite. I was pretty damned rude, actually, and got into trouble with my aunt later. I think my comments went along the lines of, "This is Christmas Dinner, and what part of follow the recipe exactly was misunderstood? I can understand wanting to be healthy, but if you had a problem with this dish, you should have said something. And furthermore, until you take a class in baker's formula it's probably a really bad idea to jack around with baking recipes."

If it had been any other occassion but Christmas I probably wouldn't have reacted so badly, and I do agree that I was wrong. But for God's sake! I can understand doing these kinds of experiments on your own, for your own self to eat, but bringing them to dinner with other people, esspecially when the person who gave you the recipe is right there is just beyond the pale. God that's rude. I do not ask this person to bring food anymore to anything. If she asks to bring something, we just tell her "Bring wine."

←

MissAmy, if something like this should happen again, write to me and I'll console you. I, too, am always 'losing it' and telling people what's on my mind . .and getting into trouble for it. It's interesting, however, how often someone will come up to me later and tell me they never would have had the courage to say what I said, but they're glad I did.

The woman's behavior was selfish, rude, and a whole lot of other things. She ruined the dessert course for everybody, deliberately, after being cautioned not to do so. Christmas dinner is special. If it's just Thursday night at Dick and Jane's, who cares; toss the tart and have an apple or a bowl of ice cream. But at Christmas, that's different. You may be in trouble with your aunt, but you performed a service to humankind. You may well have stopped her from trying a stupid stunt like that again.

Give me her phone number and I'll call her and bitch at her some more! Do you have to tell her what kind of wine to bring? I'd be scared she'd show up with Strawberry Hill or Boones Farm.