Recipe turned out wrong? Might not be your cooking (2024)

Many years ago I read an article about how to cure constipation. I don’t want to go into details here — some people are reading this while eating their Cheerios — but it involved a bathtub, bathwater and an open drain.

The article made an impression on me because it was such total, unadulterated lunacy. The method involved physics and anatomy, and the man who wrote it clearly had no knowledge of either one. He acknowledged that he was not a doctor and even admitted that he had never personally tried this particular method. But he was sure that it would work.

It wouldn’t.

This all happened long before the Internet, with its easily accessible mixture of fact and misinformation. But I am reminded of the article with increasing frequency these days when I look through certain cookbooks.

Some of the recipes I find are, well, lunacy.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a kuku, an Iranian version of a frittata. I was writing a story about eggs, and it looked interesting. At least in theory. Or at least the ingredients looked interesting. But their proportions were clearly, abjectly wrong.

The recipe began with five eggs, which, as far as I could tell, was about the only thing it got right. To those eggs were added 2½ cups of finely chopped parsley, 1½ cups of finely chopped cilantro, ½ cup of chopped fresh dill and ½ cup of finely chopped chives or scallions, among other ingredients.

Let’s do a little math, shall we? That’s five cups of herbs that are theoretically being used to flavor five eggs. Because the dish is supposed to serve four, that means each guest is subjected to 1¼ cups of minced herbs apiece.

Those poor, poor people.

I altered the recipe considerably, adding an egg and cutting way, way back on the herbs. I also lessened the amount of fat, from two full tablespoons of oil or butter per person to a more reasonable ½ tablespoon per person. The dish as I made it turned out to be delightful, instead of a mouthful of herbs dripping in oil.

The difference is that I actually made my recipe. There is no way the woman who wrote the cookbook ever made hers.

It’s like someone publishing a cure for constipation without actually trying it.

Mark Bittman is one of the most prominent and beloved food writers in the country. He has co-written several seminal cookbooks with chefs and written even more seminal books by himself, including the hugely popular “How to Cook Everything” series. By my count he has at least 29 cookbooks to his name. He has made appearances on hundreds of television shows while hosting four series of his own, he wrote a food column for the New York Times for 13 years and is now one of the paper’s columnists.

When I was the food editor in another city, I used to run his recipes in the food section with some frequency. And then I stopped.

The recipes were sloppy. They left out ingredients or listed ingredients that were never used. Sometimes the proportions were clearly wrong.

Writing and editing recipes is a labor-intensive business. Mistakes can be made; I certainly make plenty, myself.

I once asked a well-known cookbook writer if she knew what his problem was. She did not know for certain, but she had a theory. It takes her several years to write a cookbook, she said. Bittman has written at least 29, he is on television all the time and he writes newspaper columns. He simply does not have the time to be accurate, she said.

I once reviewed a cookbook entirely full of recipes that could be cooked inside a single pot in a 450-degree oven for 45 minutes. The author claimed that the secret lay in her method: She put the sturdiest ingredients — grains, and then meats — in the bottom of the pot and the most delicate ones at the top.

This, of course, is nonsense. Ovens heat from all sides simultaneously, not from the bottom to the top. The delicate ingredients on top, such as shrimp, get blasted in the same furnace as the ones on the bottom, and for the same amount of time.

Yes, shrimp. I tried three of the recipes, and one included shrimp. After 45 minutes at 450 degrees, it had the approximate taste and texture of a garden hose but not as chewy.

All three meals were fairly indigestible, which led to a couple of stomach problems. Fortunately, I once read about a good way to cure those in a bathtub.