Cooking: Art vs. Science

For me, cooking or baking ... it's all an "art," if by art you mean not very precise and thus not very reproduceable. Writing out my own recipes is a pain for me because I seldom measure, except approximately. "How much do you add?" "Enough." Sure, I'll measure things with some precision when it's someone else's recipe I'm trying for the first time, but even then I tend to diverge quickly when I'm "know" what's going to taste good or how my ingredients are different from the author's.

My wife, on the other hand, always measures everything precisely, and never cooks anything without a recipe ... even if it's a family recipe which she's made 100 times before. I know I frustrate her to no end with my imprecision, but on the other hand I do most of the cooking because I'm faster.

What I'm saying is that I thing that there are scientists and there are artists, regardless of cooking vs. baking. And that measurement-cup precision is a requirement of personality ... or of inexperience. That's where Americans get the idea that baking requires some kind of rigid precision: most Americans are very inexperienced bakers. Even for my gourmet friends, even for me, we cook pasta maybe 20 times as often as we've made bread from scratch. So since each bread loaf is a new experience, or a half-remembered one, we tend to a slavish adherence to printed measurements lest something go wrong.

Also, I tend to find that people with a "scientist" attitude tend to be more attracted to baking, than to entree cooking where the cookbook authors tend to say things like "salt to taste."