I think we all have a recipe that’s uniquely our own.
Sometimes I need to come up with something for FiKee’s menu, and my mind goes blank. Well, not exactly blank. More like overcrowded. What’s in season? Will people like it? Is it too ordinary? Too strange? Easy enough to make? Does the cost make sense? Can I get the ingredients reliably? And the most important question of all: does it taste good?
By then, I don’t feel like making anything.
That’s when I go to the market. “Ingredient research,” if you want to make it sound impressive. Really, I’m just going for a wander. If there’s time, I go to a traditional market. If not, the nearest supermarket will do. I notice which fruits have disappeared since last week and what’s suddenly taken over the stalls. “Oh, it’s that time of year already.” Somewhere in all that looking and muttering to myself, my mind starts working again.
But a dish doesn’t always begin at the market. Sometimes it starts with something someone else has made. Once, I had an open-faced sandwich at a neighborhood café. Among the toppings was tomato jam. One bite stirred a faint memory: the tomato ketchup my mom used to make when I was little. I don’t remember the recipe, but I remember ripe tomatoes simmering for ages, and that sweet, tangy taste.
The jam brought it back. Of course—tomatoes are good cooked down with sugar. So I started testing a tomato jam for FiKee’s sandwiches.
I simmer a kilogram of ripe tomatoes with 250 grams of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt. Tomatoes contain a lot of water, so I add a little pectin to help the jam set. At the end, I stir in whole-grain mustard. No precise measuring spoon for this: about two generous spoonfuls with the kind of big spoon my dad uses at dinner. The mustard seeds pop between your teeth, and the tang brings everything together. (Other versions get basil leaves or plenty of freshly ground pepper.) This is the jam that goes into our sandwiches now.
It’s funny how that happens. A sandwich at a neighborhood café brought back my mom’s ketchup, and that memory found its way into the sandwiches I make today. Even a flavor I think I’ve invented often turns out to have started somewhere else. My mom’s cooking. Meals made from family recipes by friends I met while backpacking. Something I ate at a restaurant and remembered.
It all seems to collect somewhere in my head. A food database of my own, I suppose. Just not a very organized one.
When I asked my mom about cooking, the conversation usually went like this:
“How much do I put in?”
“A little.”
“How much is a little?”
“This much.”
And always, at the end:
“Taste it.”
I understand that better now. Some things in cooking come before measurements: noticing the condition of an ingredient, tasting, adding a little more of what’s missing. My job now, though, is to turn that instinct back into numbers. Something we serve can’t be delicious one day and an unidentifiable substance the next.
So I make jam and end up studying pectin. I bake and end up learning how flour and butter work. I try fermenting something and find a whole new subject waiting for me. I just wanted to make good food. How did I end up with so much homework?
Still, I enjoy it. And I’ve realized something lately: the better I know the basics, the more freedom I have to get a little weird. I want to respect the fundamentals, but I don’t want my food to be too well-behaved. Something familiar, with one unexpected detail. You take a bite, go “Hmm?” and take another. That’s the kind of food I like.
I’ve never trained professionally as a cook. Sometimes I still wonder whether I’m doing this properly, or whether I can really call myself a food director. But I keep cooking, tasting, messing things up, and trying again. If something tastes good, I want to know why. If it doesn’t, I want to know that too. Slowly, I’m finding my own bearings.
Notice what’s in season.
Let the ingredients taste like themselves.
Add something unfamiliar to something familiar.
And when I make something I like, offer someone a taste.
Maybe that’s all I’m trying to do. Eat something delicious, bring back an old memory of a flavor, add a little of who I am now, and pass it on. And if it turns out really well, get out the scales. Write down the numbers. There’s the next recipe.
So when I don’t know what to make, I go to the market, eat someone else’s cooking, or turn over an old memory. Perhaps the next recipe is already there. I just haven’t put a name to it yet. It might be waiting in a memory, or in a cookbook I’ve browsed while trying to learn something new.
The first signs of a new season at the market. A meal with someone. The taste of my mom’s tomato ketchup. Things that pass through our lives come back years later, meet our tastes as they are now, and become something we can eat.
Maybe a recipe is never entirely made from scratch. All those years of eating, remembering, liking things, and getting things wrong slowly accumulate. Then, one day, they turn up on a plate. Perhaps our own recipe is simply the flavor of everything we’ve lived and remembered, given time to mature.