Funny you mention that. I was ready to rant the opposite (ie, that recipes should not include exact measurements).
I really, strongly believe that our obsession with measurement and repeatability is a net negative that has taught a whole generation to treat cooking like a standardised test rather than a creative form of human expression.
You look at the older generations from cultures that value cooking and they simply don't give a fuck about what the recipe says to do.
I would say it really depends. Some times exact quantities are necessary, some times they aren't.
I hate that almost no recipe specifies salt in grams. How much salt fits in half a teaspoon is pretty arbitrary since it strongly depends on the type of salt. For many dishes it doesn't matter, since you just salt according to taste. But if you are making meatloaf, getting the amount of salt right is essential, and you can't really taste it unless you like tasting raw meat, so an amount in gram would be appreciated.
Most people never have been and never will be interested in cooking as a creative outlet, and trying to convince them to do so is a highly arbitrary goal only fueled by your own subjective interests.
The vast majority of people just want to make some shit to eat everyday. And precise measurements are great for that.
Nothing hard in putting stuff in a bowl over a scale until the scale says 750g. On the contrary, it’s easier than trying to guess what the author had in mind when they wrote “a pinch” or “a handful”.
For many people precise instructions imply that you need to be precise when executing them, i.e. if you deviate you ruined it. Most recipes however are not like that and the tolerances are actually huge.
>On the contrary, it’s easier than trying to guess what the author had in mind when they wrote “a pinch” or “a handful”.
Again, I think you're missing the fact that whatever the author had in mind isn't "right". Do whatever feels right to you and as long as your senses are calibrated (there'll be a short period of adjustment while you learn how ingredients work) it'll come out better than if you'd measured and you'll enjoy it more too.
> Do whatever feels right to you and as long as your senses are calibrated (there'll be a short period of adjustment while you learn how ingredients work) it'll come out better than if you'd measured and you'll enjoy it more too.
You’re missing that this is a lot of work, and far from everybody is even remotely interested in doing that. Most people would rather be doing useful or entertaining things, not cooking the same thing a thousand times to discover how much salt “to taste” means. Do not assume that everybody’s hobby ought to be cooking.
> Again, I think you're missing the fact that whatever the author had in mind isn't "right". Do whatever feels right to you and as long as your senses are calibrated
That requires experience. I have some and have no problem cooking, but a lot of people don’t and have.
I don't think so. You'll fuck up a few times catastrophically in the beginning, but very quickly get a feel for what works and what doesn't (for example, you can go crazy on the garlic without ruining a dish, but you need to be a bit more careful with salt).
If anything, the belief that you must boil the potatoes for exactly 15 minutes is more likely to make you hate cooking than teach you how to enjoy it/excel at it.
Unless you're baking, you could literally use any cup you have in your house (yes, even a drinking glass!). Unless you're baking, it really doesn't matter, and that's the beauty of it.
I was also confused, but about an apparent gripe against cooking in sequential order. To be fair, tbsp is universally acceptable, but the apparent apparent ignorance of metric measures among US-centric authors is ludicrous.
To continue this off-topic rant, recipes have been receiving a lot of attention lately, and the medium is well overdue an overhaul to cut down on the fluff. A comprehensive wiki, with cooking markup (eg. Cooklang) would be amazing and would fill a long-overdue gap that hasn’t been filled since Larousse Gastronomic was released. The idea that recipes are ‘owned’ by someone who happened to publish it first is crazy, but could nonetheless be addressed with an attribution license (eg. the new MIT-0?)
I really, strongly believe that our obsession with measurement and repeatability is a net negative that has taught a whole generation to treat cooking like a standardised test rather than a creative form of human expression.
You look at the older generations from cultures that value cooking and they simply don't give a fuck about what the recipe says to do.