mrjeffmccarthy.com

Anthony Bourdain talks and writes about mise en place as a religion, and any cook would agree with this concept.  In the pasty kitchen, an essential piece of this is the recipe.  Understanding the ratio of ingredients to one another and function of those ingredients in a particular execution, one finds themself with limitless possibilites in simple language.  Apply proper technique, and one has delicious on thier hands.  I first learned the importance of recipes at my fisrt professional pastry job at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz New York.  In the visceral thrall of prodigious pastry chef Christopher Boos, I learned many things I still use today.  Cutting my teeth in his shop, I made hundreds of recipes, thousands of times, all obtained from his Book of Knowledge.  2 copies of this “book” were always open on one of the various stations in the kitchen,  a fine greasy feel to the pages, a gossamer layer of food particulate.  The Book of Knowledge was physically two binder-sized pieces of masonite, bound with 3 zip-ties, containg over 200 plastic sleeved, hand written recipes.  The book came to be so much more to me than that crude matter, a luminous being of swirling numbers and words.  Since then, I’ve come a good ways.  I still have so much more to humbly learn, but have since compiled my own recipe collection.  Countless chef’s have tutored me, countess cookbooks have been read, recipes have come to life in my hands, and the good ones were committed to paper, then disk, now the web.  I still appreciate the  romance of scribbling down a formula,  internalization through chicken scratch.  When halving or doubling a recipe, I always write it down.  It’s just good practice, especially when dealing with expensive ingredients.  As a victim of the calculator age, I also can’t cost a recipe without pen and paper.  Technology however has allowed me once again to enrich my life, first with Google Cookbook, and then a through hand-held, web based personal cookbook on The One Device. I kind of skipped getting them up here on my own site, but technology moves fast.  The web based Chef’s Little Helper has a perfect name, once again solidifying myPhone as best hardware ever, and once again reminding me that the future is now.  So where’s the cybernetic human augmentation?  Let’s get those kung fu uploads going, Apple.  Don’t waste your time trying to get this thing to make a phone call, because I didn’t really want to do that anyway.