A Recipe Is A Story

In English, to “cook something up” means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing, I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I am perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the world and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything.

Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You are invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other.

A recipe is a story that cannot be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks and you will find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – “Julia’s Apple Tart” – or in a sub-line – “Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi”.

Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially now, with food blogs abounding and once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket.

Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it is tradition.

No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. In the Middle East, hummus may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dish, a group of Lebanese aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever, in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you will need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household.

Being asked how you made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations. Recipes can be both continuity and change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered … recipes are records of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly “authentic”: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality. [...]

Hospitality, were I to draw it, would be a series of potentially endless concentric circles extending outwards from each of us. In their crisscrossing and overlapping, in the expanse of their reach, might be the critical pattern of our time. A pattern revealing – just as contour lines on a map indicate the gradient of the land – the true topography of a society: its landscape of reciprocity, its borders of generosity, its peaks and depths of give and take. Yet, however far those circles spread, unconditional hospitality remains outside their furthest perimeter. It lies, for the most part, in unknown territory, off the map.