To Recipe or Not to Recipe
Spoiler alert: there's a recipe at the end
Sorry the newsletter is a little late today. I just got home from a long day and threw together dinner from the fridge. It was nothing fancy, just a stir fry — a combination of frozen stuff, leftovers, and fresh vegetables I wanted to save from the compost bin. It’s the first real dish I ever learned to cook without a recipe, and I’ve made it in Chicago, Indiana, New Mexico, California, even on a hot plate in the basement of a pensione in Rome. It’s the dinner path of least resistance.
And yet, I can’t recall when last I made it. For the past year or more, I have been cooking dinner almost exclusively from recipes. I feel faintly ashamed of this fact, given my culinary upbringing. When I was growing up — and to this day, in fact — my father always excelled at conjuring meals from seemingly nowhere. Dinnertime would arrive, and he’d simply open the fridge, check the pantry, and spring into action. The resulting meal wasn’t just tasty; because of the nature of its creation, it had panache, it had ingenuity, it had an unfussy je ne sais quoi. If I appreciated this as a kid, I grew positively astounded by it once I had to start cooking for myself.
Perhaps it’s foolish to hold myself to my father’s standard of kitchen wizardry. After all, this is a man famous in our family for tricking his nieces, nephews, and even his mother-in-law into eating and enjoying vegetables they’d claimed to despise. But the thing is, over the years, I HAVE learned to be a pretty decent chef. I enjoy the creativity inherent in “throwing something together,” I delight in solving the puzzle of what a given dish is missing.
Yet, sometimes1, by the dinner hour, I simply don’t feel like solving a puzzle. I don’t have any more creative energy to exert. But I still want/need to cook dinner. So I crawl into the welcoming arms of a nice, comfortable recipe.
A well-written and fully understood recipe offers something that is very rare in this life: a step-by-step guide with promised results. Apple Maps doesn’t know if my exit is closed, medical science can’t tell me how long I’ll live, and no one has a damn clue how to make it in Hollywood, but a good recipe can make good on its assurances. There are usually even pictures to show you if you got it right.
I have come to think of “recipe cooking” and “non-recipe cooking” as two discrete activities. Either I’m molding a slab of clay or I’m assembling IKEA furniture. When I cook from a recipe, I don’t do a lot of creative freestyling (that’s how you get a KALLAX that looks more like a SMÅGÖRA).
But maybe a decade or two of kitchen practice, plus a little paternal influence, topped off by the Year Without Restaurants, has begun to change me. Last night, I found myself in the mood for both biscuits and chocolate2. I recalled two recipes I’d made in recent months, recipes that already reminded me of one another. One, from Molly Baz, was for savory buttermilk biscuits; another, from Deb Perelman, was for sweet cinnamon scones. Both recipes had been easy and quick; neither contained chocolate.
So I did what I rarely do in the kitchen: I improvised around an existing melody. The result was exactly what I wanted, something that would satisfy as dessert and pass admirably as breakfast. Lighter than a brownie, denser than a cake, fluffier than a cookie, flakier than any of the above.
I hope you’ll make it, if you care to, and that it will deliver on all the above assurances.
DOUBLE CHOCOLATE IMPROV SCONES
Ingredients
1 1/2 c (200 g) all purpose flour, plus extra for flouring the counter
1/4 c (25g) unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons granulated sugar, plus a little extra for dusting
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1 stick (8 tablespoons) cold, unsalted butter
1/4 c buttermilk, plus a teaspoon or so for brushing
1 egg
1/4 c chocolate chips
Steps
Preheat the oven to 375ºF and line a baking sheet with parchment.
In a mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients.
Cut the butter into small pieces, then cut into the dry ingredients with a pastry cutter (alternately, rub the butter into the dry ingredients, but a pastry cutter will be better. Bonnie Nickel, if you’re reading this, thanks for mine!).
In a small bowl, lightly beat the egg and mix in the buttermilk.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and use a fork to being mixing into a shaggy dough. Once the fork stops being effective, use your clean hands to being pressing the dough into more of a uniform mass.
Lightly flour the counter and dump your mostly formed dough mixture onto it. Press stray bits into the mass and begin to flatten it out into a roughly 8” x 4” rectangle. If you’ve got a bench scraper, square the edges so they’re neat; otherwise, use your hands to get it as neat as you can.
Sprinkle some of the chocolate chips on top of the dough rectangle and press them in lightly.
Working from the short sides, fold the dough in thirds like you’re folding a fat piece of paper. Then rotate this (roughly 3”x4” tower) of dough 90º, then press it once again into an 8”x4” rectangle. Sprinkle with the rest of the chocolate chips.
Repeat this folding, rotating, and flattening procedure once more. You should once again have an 8”x4” rectangle. Square the edges again if you like.
Cut the rectangle in half lengthwise, then into thirds — you should have 6 scones. Space evenly apart on the prepared baking sheet.
Brush each scone with a little more buttermilk and sprinkle with a bit of sugar before placing in the oven.
Bake at 375ºF for about 15 minutes. The scones should look shiny but dry. Because they’re dark in color, it will be hard to tell if they’re browned or burned. Worst case scenario, they’re a little gooey inside, and that’s the best kind of tragedy.
Let them cool if you have the patience.
Enjoy!
— Marissa
Read: most of the time
Who knows, it was a busy weekend