It's hard to cook without a recipe at first, specially if you are trying to make something specific like a cake, or trying to replicate someone else's recipe. Of course I use recipes from books and internet all the time, but with time I have learned that cooking is some form of art expression... like painting. When you paint, nobody tells you how much paint to put on the brush or how many strokes you have to make. You just go with the flow. And cooking, sometimes, can be like that.
My mom never used a recipe. And she cooked all the time, even as an informal caterer. She had an old notebook stashed in a drawer that read "Recetas" (recipes in Spanish) but,
when you looked inside, all it had written were the ingredients, and sometimes the cooking time. No exact measure. And when you asked her how she knew how much of each ingredient she should put in a recipe, she just answered "you just put it and see how it turns out".
My husband loves cooking. He is by profession a craft brewer, which means he has an amazing talent for mixing flavors and aromas to develop his recipes. He loves to travel, which means he has tried foods from all over the world, specially street food which is his favorite. He says that street food is how you really get to know the soul of a town or city, because is real food, not fancy stuff that looks pretty on a plate. He cooks like a real artist, adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that, tasting, touching, smelling, until he is satisfied with the result. He says, that when you recreate the flavors of a dish, you are recreating the memory of a country you visited, so you travel again with the food. Beautiful, no?
Then come my in-laws. Born in Calabria, South of Italy. From them I have learned how important food is inside a family. They don´t cook with recipes either... I see a lot of cooking books on my mother-in-law´s kitchen but I never see her open them. Is all in her memory and in her experience.
It started since the first day at their house. They have a tradition, that every Saturday they make pizza. Not one, but 2 or 4 different kinds of pizza. And not the pizza I am used to eat either; for starters, the mozzarella here is real mozzarella made by hand and it comes floating in liquid. You cannot buy industrial mozzarella even if you wanted to. There is no pepperoni here, it doesn´t exists. There is amazingly delicious prosciutto and speck. And you find unusual things on the pizza, like potatoes.
It´s just been 5 months since I moved to Italy, and in this time, this is what I have learned from my in-laws:
- The kitchen is the center of your home
- Food is not an obligation, is a pleasure. When you cook for others, you are offering them nurture, happiness, and love. Is like a hug in a plate, which explains why you should never refuse food when visiting people
- Food should be eaten fresh as much as you can. The real flavor of your food does not come from MSG, or artificial flavorings; it comes from fresh ingredients. When you use really fresh ingredients, you don´t even need to use more than a pinch of salt
- Food should never be wasted. You get vegetables from the fields in large quantities, so you eat them fresh preparing them in different ways and what you cannot use, you preserve it somehow. I have seen my in-laws bottle tomato sauce, marmalade, chutney, hot chili sauce, etc. and then use all the jars during the year. No waste of money. Too many oranges? Candied orange peel it is.
Cooking fresh and healthy food is not time-consuming. Here in Europe they seem to have a different organization of everything, people work and socialize and do shopping and take care of kids and everything, but they still have time to cook and enjoy life
Bottomline, there is no exact recipe. You just take the ingredients you have, and transform them into something delicious and nurturing. Like an artist, you have to let your instincts express themselves. Buon Appetito!
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