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On cooking and mistakes

I love cooking. I was reminded of just how much I love cooking while reading this reddit thread:

from r/cooking

The gist is, people back ~in the day~ basically didn't use recipes, or measuring cups, or whatever. A lot of recipes were just lists of ingredients. People would measure with their hands or with that *one cup* that was the measuring cup. A couple comment talked about this one jar that their moms or aunts or whatever would use and god forbid somebody think they could throw it away because it was *the* measuring cup.

I loved reading the comments there because they hearken to a time when people would just kind of figure things out. I have this feeling -- and maybe it's me being sort of a luddite, or maybe I'm totally apart from the places where this feeling is wrong, or my head is in the sand -- but I have this feeling that we are too reliant on instruction nowadays, that do-it-yourself-ism is on a decline. Not everywhere, obviously, and not for all things, but in some places, one of which is cooking. Another might be cars, or to some extent computers. I'm sure there are others.

Of course, some of this phenomenon is due to complicating factors: computers are way more complex now than they were when they first came out, and there's a ton of frameworks and stuff -- hell, this space is a response to the over-complication of computers, so I know yall know what I'm talking about with that. And there's famously been lawsuits, with John Deere, for example, about the right to repair -- and cars are way more complicated now than they were even a few years ago. And with cars, that's mostly a good thing -- they're way safer now, and the computers are a big part of that safety.

However, what *isn't* more complicated is cooking. I mean, it can't really be that complicated -- we humans have been biologically the same for something like 100,000 years, meaning we need the same nutrients in the same amounts and our tastes are pretty much the same as they would've been back then. I mean, different cultures have different flavors, but none of them are *that* complicated. The most complex might be some sauce that's super-heavily spiced, or complicated techniques with a lot of steps, but even then, they're doable. And honestly, most of the time when people are cooking, we're making much simpler stuff. The staples of any culture are all pretty simple.

In the reddit thread I linked above, a lot of people were complaining about the lack of specificity in their recipes. I might've been making this up, but I thought I felt some desperation in those comments -- how can we make this dish if we don't know exactly how it was made? etc. I found myself thinking a good amount, "Well, Grandma didn't make it the same way every time either!" And if she *did*, well she got it wrong a lot before she got the system down.

And I think that's maybe the problem we're having currently, we're not as okay as we used to be with getting things wrong. And that's overall a good thing, because it means that we live in a more efficient world. But I see this a lot at the library, where a patron wants me to just tell them how to use the computer (were you wondering when computers were coming back into this essay?) -- they're afraid to just click around and try things out. Some are impatient, sure, but some really are scared -- this one man's hands were shaking as he was trying to input his password because he was worried he'd do something wrong and, I don't know, explode his phone or something. And I saw the same thing going on on that reddit thread.

I guess this long and meandering missive is just to say -- don't be afraid to experiment. I loved Ms. Frizzle as a kid: her catchphrase is "Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!" And that's stuck with me. What's the worst that can happen, really?

With cooking, you might mess up a meal. It might taste really bad. But you know what? You're going to eat something like 80,000 meals in your life (3 a day * 365 days a year * 75 years), so it's okay if a few are duds. And those few being duds are going to make the rest of them that much better, because you'll learn -- and maybe you'll find a weird favorite that you wouldn't have just by following recipes really closely.