Recipes Are Stories

Look at the modern-day recipe and notice how it’s just like the script of most any theater piece.

You’ve got the dramatis personae: the list, one by one, of the ingredients. They’re to be the players upon the stage. You’ll soon follow as they interact with each other.

The recipe’s directions are Act One, Act Two, and so forth. Some plays are short and sweet; others, long and involved.

The curtain goes down at the recipe’s ta-da. “Serve.”

To my way of thinking, recipes always have told their own internal stories. Looked at over time, they also tell the story of how we humans have cooked. You can read recipes as history, from the earliest Babylonian cuneiform to today’s Pinterest or Instagram posts.

Ancient recipes are short, with minimal measurement (or none at all). Run-on sentences weren’t the thing when pushing out words on a small piece of wet clay with a reed stylus. (Neither were spaces nor punctuation, neither of which had been thought of yet.)

Plus, even after the invention of the printing press and books, there wasn’t much point in writing down a recipe. There weren’t readers to read them.

Early recipes were for the benefit of a super select audience of people: the few who could read and the fewer who already knew how to cook. You easily can see how older recipes simply assumed that the cook knew what to do with, for example, mere “blossoms moistened with wine” in Apicius’s first century A.D. directions for “Another Sauce for Fowl.”

What sort of blossoms? How much wine? The cook knew; it didn’t need stating.

Humans are the only animals who cook their food. For a long time, we didn’t even do that and ate paleo, like all the other monkeys.

But when we started to cook—which simply meant tamed and used fire—you will read about how we came to be even more human, that is to say, how we increased the nutritive value of foodstuffs. Wheat, potatoes, or rice, for instance, aren’t palatable or usable as human food unless subject to fire.

Recipes for bread and pommes Anna and congee, therefore, are stories about the history of being human.

Recipes also tell how we learned to preserve our food, hence our nutrition and our energy, by smoking, salting, pickling, and fermenting it.

Recipes tell how some of us were wealthier and more powerful than others, by dint of social status or position or mobility or birth, because some of us could afford or obtain certain foodstuffs that others of us could not.

Today, I read every recipe as a story, whether one in a book from the past or a new posting on a cooking site. It always tells me about itself—it is its own story—and it often tells me about us, about how we came to be who and how we are.

Here are a few of my favorite “recipes as stories,” all found on this:
- By Platina, 1475 A.D., Ravioli for Non-Lenten Times
- Roast Chicken, Five Ways
- From the Harleian manuscripts, 279 A.D., Pears in Compote
- Long-Cooked Vegetables
- Gerard Rudofsky’s Potato Latkes

More here about “recipes,” with more recipes!:
- What Recipes Mean: Part One
- What Recipes Mean: Part Two
- What Old Recipes Teach
- “Authenticity” in Recipes