How Home Cooks Work Smarter, Not Harder
Several years ago, I went on a somewhat fanatical quest to find a satisfying version of what I called a “metacookbook”—a book that doesn’t just list out recipe instructions, but also explains the thinking behind them.
The food journalist Priya Krishna and David Chang, the founder of the Momofuku family of restaurants, have together written a charming new entry in this subgenre, . The book’s “recipes-that-aren’t-really-recipes” tend to forgo precise measurements of ingredients and time, and instead emphasize intuition, personalization, and experimentation. Krishna and Chang provide a set of adaptable culinary blueprints for readers to iterate on—for instance, a general formula for cooking a cheap cut of meat or whipping up a vinegary condiment—and envision a recipe not as “a rigid instruction manual, but
