The Recipe for a Great Recipe Is Not a Recipe

You may not believe this, but I occasionally get angry. Not “angry on the inside at the absurdity of existence,” but actual anger—the kind you can hear and see and feel and almost smell. Less than an hour before I started writing this essay, I was that kind of angry, and the thing that did it to me was a recipe.

The recipe was for katsudon, the homey Japanese dish of deep-fried pork cutlets cooked with eggs, onions, and dashi, and slipped gently onto a bowl of rice. It’s one of my absolute favorite things to eat, and in fact I had loved the dish for years before I ever tasted it. That’s because katsudon features prominently in the novel Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, which I read in college. In one pivotal scene, Kitchen’s narrator, craving “something heavy and filling,” finds a little eatery that was ”new and smelled of clean, white wood” and orders the dish. While the counterman is cooking, she telephones her friend Yuichi, who’s staying at an inn in the mountains, and with whom she’s been having a flirtation that she’s not sure will blossom into romance, and they chat for a bit before her food arrives. When she finally digs in, it’s beyond her expectations:

Then she hops a taxi to the mountains and brings the katsudon to Yuichi.

I haven’t read Kitchen in 30 years, but I can still remember how it affected me: It was the first novel I’d read that was full of quiet moments, some revelatory, others simply atmospheric, where food was at the center of the characters’ lives, yet never overblown. Today we have a lot of food fiction, food movies, food TV, but it tends toward the cartoonish—there’s too much food. Kitchen felt real, its food utterly normal in its ability to transform emotions. After reading it, I craved katsudon. It would be two or three years before I first tried it, at Akatonbo, a Japanese restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, and while that was pretty good, it wasn’t quite Kitchen-worthy. Nor was it anywhere else I tried over the years, in Japan and in other countries, and I often wondered whether Kitchen had overhyped it. Could katsudon ever really be “incredible”?

Meanwhile, in all these years, I had never tried to make it myself. Perhaps again I was afraid of ruining what felt like a perfect memory of my youth, or I thought I needed to first taste the epitome of katsudon before attempting my own version. I don’t know. But I do know that I was capable of preparing every element of the dish: I make my own dashi, often for oyakodon, a cousin of katsudon that employs simmered chicken instead of tonkatsu, the fried pork cutlets. But I cook tonkatsu, too, maybe once every two months, and it turns out quite well, if I do say so myself. First I pound the pork chops thin—maybe a half-inch at most—then marinate them in a little sake and mirin while I prepare the dredges: white flour mixed with salt, eggs beaten with soy sauce, lots of panko. I fry them in a couple of inches of oil in my big cast-iron frying pan, set on medium-high heat, then drain them while I crank the heat up to high and skim off the fried bits, then cook them again for maybe a minute, to get the crust really crackling. I spread them out on a wooden cutting board, sprinkle them with flaky salt, and that’s it.

Want the recipe? There isn’t one. There’s nothing to measure, no precision to rely upon. I know how to make it because I have tried so many times already, with often uneven results: not enough flavor in the pork, not enough crackle in the crust. Only through those attempts and failures, performed over many years, have I gotten to a point where I know the ingredients, the pans, and the timing well enough to cook tonkatsu with confidence.

Or, I guess, overconfidence. Because when I began this katsudon recipe—one of a handful I’m testing for a friend’s forthcoming Japanese cookbook—it felt wrong. Off. Different in a way that I couldn’t adapt to¹. First, the pork was left thick and unmarinated, which might be more traditional but isn’t necessarily, to my mind, better². The 4 cups of oil specified in the recipe didn’t fill my frying pan nearly enough, and the precise temperatures called for—320°F, rising to 350°F throughout the 7-minute cooking process—filled me with dread. When I couldn’t find a replacement battery for my digital thermometer, I began to freak out, yelling at my daughter Sandy to stay out of the kitchen when she came in for a snack, and at my wife when she tried to help³. Why this obsession with precise temperature? I railed silently. Can’t we just say ‘Fry medium, then fry high’? But even after we found the battery, and measured the temperature, and converted it from Celsius to Fahrenheit with an assist from our dumb Google Home voice thingee, I couldn’t nail that slow ascent from 320° to 350°, and the 7-minute cook time didn’t make sense either, because it left some crust unbrowned. Also, I was trying to make a salad, and keep the counters clear, and then I was trying to cook a “runny omelette” in a nonstick pan that kept sticking, and by the time I scraped it all onto a bowl of rice, it looked like a pile of fried shit. When Sandy ignored, for the nth time, our request that she set the table, I exploded. I YELLED. Frankly, it felt great. I was stressed, and surrounded by deadly instruments—boiling oil, sharp knives—and needed some kind of release, even if it was directed at my mostly (but not entirely) innocent daughter. FUUUUUUUUUUU—

🪨

I don’t like recipes. I don’t like using them, so most of the time I don’t, which is fine, but I also don’t like that the cooking world is so dependent on them. They are necessary, but only to a degree—only, I think, when you’re first learning how to cook⁴. That’s how I learned, 30+ years ago, because I didn’t know what I was doing but had books to show me the way.

But after I’d been cooking for a while, especially after I started cooking almost every day for my family, the formulas became clear, they broke free of the recipes. I could see the structure of the dish apart from the instructions: Sear meat in fat. Take the meat out and cook aromatics—onion, garlic, carrots, celery, fennel, bell peppers, whatever—in the remaining fat. Add dried spices and herbs. Add liquid (stock, wine, water, beer, tomatoes), and cook a bit more. Season with salt throughout. That’s like 80 percent of European cooking right there. You can vary all of that, remove stages, add other, less common flavorings, but the formula holds, whatever the variations. Boiled and simmered dishes just skip the searing stage, for instance. Salad dressings work the same way: figure out your preferred balance of vinegar and oil (a 1:3 ratio to start—yeah, you can measure it, but don’t get finicky), then add other flavors and emulsify. If you get it wrong, well, do better next time. Because you’re going to have to eat every day of your life until you die. You’ll get another chance to screw it up, or not, don’t worry either way.

Once you’ve got a feel for these approaches, the idea of a recipe becomes constricting, the measurements unnecessary. Look, I will add preserved lemon paste until it just looks right. I will drizzle soy sauce around the edge of the wok when I’m making flies’ heads until—just until. I could measure it, so that I could communicate precisely how to replicate my work, but that feels like a violation: The dish is the experience, the improvisation, the imperfection, the attempt. The final product may be “incredible!” or it may be good enough for a hurried Tuesday, but I want to feel that what got me to either ending was a narrative in which I fully participated, not the table reading of a script.

A lot of you, I know, love recipes. And a lot of you are probably better cooks than me. For many serious chefs, precision is the point—precision and consistency, so that every dish coming out of a restaurant kitchen comes out identical, no matter who’s making it. For them, teaspoons matter, seconds matter. So, too, for the recipe nerds at Cooks Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen: They’re all about finding “the best”—the best borscht, the best yogurt, the best japchae—which is admirable but which requires a level of preparation, organization, and discipline I’ve never been able to muster. It’s only when they work out broadly applicable techniques that my ears perk up. In one Serious Eats story I can’t find a link for, Kenji López-Alt salted a ton of steaks at 10-minute intervals to find the ideal time to season (result: either right before grilling or 40 minutes before). Likewise, his parchment-paper method for cooking salmon with crispy skin is genius. No clue how long he sears it, or anything else he does, but that doesn’t matter. I got the gist. It’s more important—more useful long term—to know how to do things generally than how to do one or two things very precisely.

Instead of recipes, what I want are more of these useful blips: Turn down the heat—meat will still sear on medium, and a low simmer keeps it tender. Learn to sharpen your knives. Buy two of every useful tool, because one will always be stuck in the wash when you need it. Dry your herbs. Grate your tomatoes. You can never go wrong with butter and miso. Water is always the secret ingredient. To learn these, to integrate them into your daily cooking, to have them at the ready—that is kitchen wisdom.

In the end, the katsudon was good, if not “incredible!” I worked out the temperature of the oil, and I realized why the nonstick pans were sticking (not hot enough). I’ll have solid notes for my cookbook-writer friend that won’t be too crabby and may even be helpful. And the katsudon I produced, for my oldest daughter, Sasha, was a thing of beauty: crusty slices swimming gently in a runny omelette, streaked with tart homemade tonkatsu sauce. It only took me four tries to get it right.

But I didn’t get to see her eat, because she was finishing up a tutoring session.

And she didn’t finish it anyway, because it was just too much. Don’t worry, she noted, she’d have it for lunch tomorrow. “I like eating katsudon,” she told me before going to bed. “Thank you for making katsudon.” 🪨🪨🪨

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Notes

1. When you’re testing recipes for a cookbook, you are supposed to follow them exactly, so the author can understand what’s working and what isn’t.

2. When I’m cooking at home, I’m almost never trying for “authenticity”—whatever that means. I just want it to taste good.

3. I might have been hangry, but that’s no excuse.

4. Which, I know, people learn at different stages in life, and to different degrees, with different levels of access to tools and ingredients.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt