Recipes for Cooking Need to Get Real

[BakerAunt]

When I look at recipes from Bon Appetit emails or those from newspapers such as the New York Times or Los Angeles Times these days, they always seem to call for ingredients I am unlikely to have in my house, and in some cases, would find it hard to source unless I ordered them on the internet and had them delivered.

As Cathy exclaims:

https://www.gocomics.com/cathy-commiserations/2021/02/06

The recipes landing in my inbox often call for hot spices I cannot feed to my husband--and perhaps not to me.

When I look at cooking recipes from nutritionists, a lot of them appear to depend on out of season ingredients, which means that lots of people who would benefit from better nutrition will throw up their hands because they either cannot get those ingredients most of the year or they would be too expensive.

I'd like to see recipes that give alternatives to ingredients that are not readily available, and that state what the change would mean in overall taste. It would also be nice to see more seasonal emphasis, especially from some of the recipe sites who consider themselves so socially aware.

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[Italiancook]

I agree with you and Cathy.

[cwcdesign]

Me, too. I love it when authors give you alternative ingredients and recommend you make substitutions.

[Joan Simpson]

I agree with ya'll!

[aaronatthedoublef]

It's interesting. I have two books by Bill Buford sitting in my shelf, "Heat" about his adventures learning to cook and butcher in Italy and "Dirt" about baking and cooking in France.

It re-emphasized some lessons I learned years ago which is you can cook authentic, Italian dishes or you can cook using an authentic, Italian method.

If you want to cook the dishes you'll need to find some uncommon special ingredients. If you adopt the method your cooking will emphasize what is local and fresh.

I suppose these days with modern supply chains we can do a hybrid of this but there really is something to keeping it simple.

[Author]

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