Rant: We Don't Need Recipe Photos!

I highly recommend you check out Culinary Class Wars on Netflix. It's a South Korean cooking competition series which pits 100 chefs, broken down into 20 celebrity chefs and 80 other chefs, against each other in an intense contest. The contestants are competing for a prize of 300 Million Won, equivalent to about U.S. $222,000. There are two primary judges: Paik Jong-won, a restaurateur and celebrity chef, and Anh Sung-jae, the only Michelin 3-star chef in Korea. The competition is fierce and riveting, especially during the period when the two judges are blindfolded, judging each dish solely by taste, and where they are fed these bites by assistants. It's one of the best cooking competitions I've ever seen.   

One of the celebrity contestants was Chef Edward Lee, who was born in New York to Korean parents and currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky and Washington, D.C. He's the chef/owner of 610 Magnolia in Louisville, and culinary director of Succotash in National Harbor, Maryland, and Penn Quarter, Washington, D.C. Lee is also a nine-time James Beard Award nominee, and the author of three books: Bourbon Land, Buttermilk Graffiti and Smoke & Pickles. On Culinary Class Wars, he showed his innovative culinary skills and impressed me with his many creative dishes. 

Buttermilk Graffiti details Lee's travels across the U.S., from Lowell, Massachusetts to New Orleans, seeking fascinating culinary tales. It's a well written and interesting compilation of food stories, and well worth reading. The book also contains about 40 different recipes, and contrary to almost every other modern cookbook, it doesn't contain any photos of the completed dishes! 

Lee noted, "This was done on purpose. I want you, the reader, to trust your instincts and cook the way I know you are capable of. Having a recipe published with an accompanying photo is a pretty modern invention. We have been following recipes without photos for centuries. When we don’t know what the end result is supposed to look like, the imagination is allowed to roam free and we come up with our own conclusions. Pictures are excellent guides, and can give you a goal to aspire to, but they can also have a negative effect. If you make a dish and it doesn’t look exactly like the photo, you might feel a sense of failure. I don’t want that."

He then continued, "None of these recipes are restaurant-style dishes, so the accuracy of plating is less important than the taste of the food. I want you to pay attention to the aromas, flavors, textures, to the feel of the food in your mouth. Don’t worry if what you make doesn’t look good enough to be on the cover of a magazine. If it tastes good, you’ve succeeded."

It's true that if you consult old recipe books, they rarely had photos of the various dishes, although occasionally there was a drawing of a dish or two. Nowadays though, photos in cookbooks are the norm, and making the dishes look beautiful in those photos is very important. It's true on social media too, where photos of your dishes are so important to many. However, how many times did they have to create that dish to ensure it looked perfect? 

How many times do home cooks prepare a recipe from a cookbook, and the end result doesn't resemble that perfect photo in the cookbook? I suspect that for most home cooks, their dishes rarely emulate those photos. The photos tend to emphasize the superficial aspect of the dish, its look, rather than its taste. And in the end, isn't the taste of the dish the most important aspect of any recipe? 

When you prepare a recipe from an old cookbook, which has no photos, is it really any harder to create? It shouldn't be difficult at all, and maybe is even easier as you have less expectations, as you don't have to make the dish look a certain way. It can be liberating, to make a dish in your own way, and simply ensure it tastes delicious. Stop judging your own dishes by glossy photographs of perfectly prepared food. Just make it your way and enjoy.