My verdict on Madhur Jaffrey’s Instantly Indian Cookbook was “Not bad, but skippable”.  This one is a fair bit better.  Time after time I would make a recipe from the vegetable chapter and think, hmm, that looks kind of underwhelm­ing⁠—but then it would turn out to be unexpectedly delicious.  My notes on the green beans with mustard and coconut literally read, “this seems so plain – how it is so tasty”.  Paneer dishes are also winners, par­ticularly the unusual Sino-Indian chile paneer.  The one weakness is the “dried beans and legumes” chapter, which surprised me, since the first Madhur Jaffrey cookbook I bought (over twenty years ago now! ack!) was a winner primarily for its bean stews.  But this time around, yeah, with the exception of the Uttar Pradesh dal, everything I tried from this chapter was pretty meh.  Still, well worth checking out for the other chapters.

I know Marco Pierre White from my beloved Masterchef Australia, where he shows up on a semi-regular basis to set pressure tests and run the pass during service challenges.  Though he initially intimidates the contestants with his Hannibal Lecter voice and demeanor, he is ultimately a kind of grandmotherly figure⁠—not the sort I would imagine starring in what is essentially a modeling portfolio, full of gritty black-and-white photos of him posing shirtless and sucking down cigarette after cigarette.  Though this was well before I started paying any sort of attention to the food world, apparent­ly Marco Pierre White pioneered the idea that a chef could be a rock star⁠—not a plump and jolly figure in a puffy white hat, but a haggard chain smoker with long hair and a perpetual scowl.  He was known for raging at his employees⁠—he famously made Gor­don Ramsay cry⁠—and often the rage turned physical: every time chefs who once worked for him have appeared on Masterchef Australia with him, they have reminisced about how back in the day, if they overcooked a dish Marco would throw it at them at fifty miles an hour.  What allowed him to get away with this was that the food world had proclaimed him as a genius.  He was the youngest chef, and the first British chef, ever to be awarded three Michelin stars.  And the slim recipe section of this book in parti­cular has been widely hailed as having revolutionized the food world: everyone who has mentioned it on the show has called it the foundational text of modern cooking.  So I decided to give the 25th anniversary edition a look and see what Marco’s food, or at least my approximation of it, was actually like.

But it turns out that what Marco Pierre White will cook and what I will eat have very little overlap.  The book has five chapters: fish and meat appetizers, fish main courses, meat main courses, desserts, and basics.  I wound up making a grand total of two recipes.  One was the mashed potatoes, which came out like sticky dough.  The other was a lemon tart.  That came out okay, I thought, though it assumed a level of pre-existing pastry skills that I did not possess.  Before I returned the book to the library, Ellie visited and I made her one of Marco’s lemon tarts.  She went into absolute raptures over it and declared that she wanted ano­ther one in lieu of a cake for her next birthday.  I have never seen someone so blissed out over something I have cooked.  So it seems that for her, at least, White Heat lived up to the hype!

(the video is just him saying “bre-e-e-e-ead” really slowly)
(no, not really)

Apparently the deal with this channel is that in 2017 a journalism professor at an obscure college in the South uploaded a handful of recipes to his Youtube channel, which had previously been de­voted mostly to music production.  A couple of them went viral, and in early 2019 he shifted the focus of his channel to food; a year later, the channel was doing well enough for him financial­ly⁠—in large part due to the long, obtrusive advertisements in the middle of each video⁠—that he could quit his teaching job.  One of the things that has made his channel so successful was that he doesn’t just churn out recipes, but offers up a variety of food-related content.  Some videos play with the variables that go into a recipe: like, he’ll make potato cakes and vary the type of pota­toes used, the way they’re cut, whether they’re rinsed, whether they’re parboiled, whether they’re buttered, etc., etc., and see how these changes affect the results.  Some videos delve into a specific type of food⁠—What is malt, anyway? What is shortening? What is panko?⁠—while others explore items that can be eaten but usually aren’t, such as acorns and alligators.  Some videos explore food history, like the way restaurant menus have shrunk over the decades.  Some venture further afield and look at food-adjacent issues such as the trend toward banning gas stoves or the sci­ence behind nonstick cookware coatings.  There are videos responding to viewer mail.  But I’m looking at these channels in their capacity as multimedia cookbooks, so it’s the recipe videos I’ll be addressing here.

It didn’t take long for Youtube to decide that this channel was relevant to my interests, because I see that I had tried a soup recipe of Ragusea’s by the summer of 2019.  Then apparently the channel drifted from my radar for a bit, because I see here that it wasn’t until the following summer that I ordered a bag of sodium citrate to try a second recipe of Ragusea’s, sodium citrate maca­roni and cheese.  The idea is that sodium citrate turns any cheese into a good melting cheese, so you can use any variety you like without having to worry about the texture going wrong.  And it works⁠—but I quickly learned that I had to keep an eye on the dish, because the cooking times in Ragusea’s recipe did not work for me.  My first time out I ended up with dry pasta with a cheesy crust on it, pretty much the opposite of the “silky smooth” result promised in the video title.  In the notes accompanying the video, Ragusea attempts to pre-empt this criticism by warning that “I don’t like to be constantly checking a recipe as I cook” and that “my goal with these videos is to give you a sense of how the food should look and feel as you’re cooking it, rather than give you a refined formula to reproduce”.  I can verify that the formula he did offer was indeed unrefined.

And I have found that this is a running theme: Ragusea’s videos may serve as a starting point for a dish, but actually making the food the way he instructs rarely works out.  One of his recent recipes was for broiled sheet pan pasta; asserting that the crispy top of a casserole is the best part, Ragusea lays out instructions for a dish that is basically only that top part.  Broil brussels sprouts and carrots, add some parboiled pasta, mozzarella, ricotta, and seasoned panko midway through, and broil some more.  I guess Ragusea’s broiler works differently from mine, because most of this dish went to waste: the brussels sprouts remained inedibly firm even as they (and everything else) turned nearly black.  The thing is, I know how to roast brussels sprouts⁠—when the stalks hit the market in the late fall, I end up going through three or four of them over the course of a month be­cause roasted brussels sprouts are fuckin’ delicious.  So when I tried making this dish my way, roasting the brussels sprouts in my usual fashion, cooking the pasta normally, etc., and only using the broiler at the end for some color, the dish was sensa­tional.  But at that point I was basically only using Ragusea’s picture of the dish, not his recipe for it.  Again and again, it was the same story: the main value in making food Ragusea’s way was to provide a useful lesson in what I should do differently in my next attempt.  In one video Ragusea says, “I think I have devised some uncommonly delicious cinnamon rolls!”  His tips are to skip measuring the flour and instead just add “as much flour as you can” to the dough, and “don’t stress about rolling this super tight⁠—it’s even better if you don’t!”; as a result, the rolls came out dry and the filling fell right out of them.  Doing the opposite of what Ragusea said⁠—adding less flour and rolling the dough more tightly⁠—produced a superior treat.  The examples go on.  His stuffed shells were too creamy for my taste; lesson: find a way to make the ricotta filling fluffier.  His pretzels swelled up to become round rolls with a faint pretzel pattern etched into the surface; lesson: cut back on the yeast.  As for his macarons⁠—again, his video is basically a long diatribe about how you have to “liberate yourself” from following a standard recipe and just freestyle a lot of the steps, because macarons can never come out “wrong”: each batch will be “a little bit different, but still great!”  Well, here’s what I ended up with following Ragusea’s approach:

This was such a preposterously poor result that I started to wonder whether I’d experienced some sort of neurologic event that had obliterated my ability to cook.  These weren’t just abominable to look at, but were overpoweringly sweet as well.  So I decided to try again, this time setting aside Ragusea’s dicta and consulting a recipe that I selected more or less at random from a web search.  I also learned from bitter experience, cutting back on the sugar, changing the times I spent whisking the meringue and folding in the dry ingredients, and more than doubling the resting time before putting the macaron shells in the oven.  Here’s how all that turned out:

So, yes, I do agree with Ragusea’s starting point⁠—I’m not trying to make a living selling these to a discerning public, so who cares about getting them “perfect”?⁠—but there’s a difference between imperfect and “embarrassing enough to land on Cake Wrecks”, and following Ragusea’s methods left me on the wrong side of that line. 

The macaron video was titled “The SHOCKING SECRET to French macarons”, one of several “SHOCKING SECRET” videos on Ragu­sea’s channel.  In fact, that first video of his that I ever saw was titled “the SHOCKING SECRET to great veggie soup (!!!)”.  That secret: all techniques and ingredients that purport to improve the taste of soup are a waste of time and money, because the best vegetable soup is made by haphazardly throwing vegetables into boiling water.  Now, even though the point of Ragusea’s video is that anything works, I wanted to see what the exact soup he was making tasted like, so I carefully followed his steps.  And… it tasted like vegetables boiled in water.  I mean, it was fine.  But it was exactly the sum of its parts.  The same is true for a lot of his recipes.  He made up a dish called “fire beans” that tasted like neither more nor less than its ingredients poured into a bowl.  His chocolate coconut tart was a thick slab of monotonous choc­olate ganache atop a thick slab of pastry tasting of coconut oil.  And, hey, I like chocolate.  I like coconut.  I like beans and chiles.  I like shallots and tomatoes and kale and olive oil.  But good cook­ing involves alchemy.  Yotam Ottolenghi writes recipes that take some simple vegetables, a pile of herbs, and a little bit of cheese and somehow transmute those ingredients into a magical experi­ence.  The Prashad cookbook finds a way to take the same vege­tables and spices that the Indian restaurant around the corner uses and turns them into a meal that no dish on the menu of the restaurant around the corner can touch.  For that matter, the first cookbook I ever bought had a soup recipe that was so delicious that I’ve been making it regularly for over twenty years.  It’s no more complicated than Ragusea’s soup, but when you put the ingredients into the broth you no longer have just a pot full of ingredients⁠—now you have pasta e fagioli.  That is what I want from a recipe.  But it does not seem to be what Adam Ragusea wants.

I say this for a number of reasons.  First, take his reaction to his concoctions.  When he tries his own soup, he marvels, “That is so good!”  The disparity between what it takes to get that reaction out of me and what it takes to get that reaction out of other people is something that I’ve been writing about for over twenty years now.  Take music.  I have met people who have said that their music collections consisted of 11,000 songs and that they adored them all.  Now, I do understand what it is like to adore a song.  I absolutely love… I dunno, maybe a couple hundred songs.  (Here are my top 100.)  There are maybe a thousand more that I like enough to own copies of.  The idea that someone could find ten thousand more that trigger that “That is so good!” reaction is alien to me.  The same goes for movies: the number of movies I’ve seen from the 2010s that triggered that reaction currently stands at one.  One of the reasons food is so important to me is that it is one of the few vehicles for pleasure that don’t get al­most completely blocked out by my general anhedonia.  Whether it’s one of the dozens upon dozens of Jack Bishop recipes in my collection, or a great eatery like La Note or Shalimar here in the Bay Area, or even just a fancy chocolate bar unexpectedly pop­ping up for $2 at Grocery Outlet, food means that I can have at least one “That is so good!” experience every day despite the dysfunction of the reward center of my brain.  But not by eating this soup!  If you can have that experience by eating this soup, then I can see why you would find that looking for recipes with alchemy is so much fussing over nothing.

But I think some other reasons for Ragusea’s sour attitude in his “SHOCKING SECRET” videos become apparent by looking at one of his most recent uploads, “The SHOCKING SECRET to great chili”.  Again, the secret turns out to be not to look for a secret.  You throw some canned tomatoes and canned beans into a pot, then add spices.  “Just dump in stuff from your spice rack until you like how it tastes!” he says, exasperation cranked up to, if not eleven, then at least a solid eight or so.  As an example of how un‑picky he is in this regard, at one point he grabs a spice jar and says, “I don’t even know what this one is, but it’s red, so I’m putting it in the chili!”  I did make this, and you can probably guess that his verdict and mine were a replay of our verdicts on the soup: I thought that it tasted like a mix of canned tomatoes and beans with some random spices, while he declared, “That tastes really good!”  But what struck me about this video was how angry he seems about the possibility that viewers might find the chili kind of pedestrian.  “You don’t have to love it,” he snarls, “just eat it!”  Having snapped at his viewers like a stressed-out parent biting the head off an insufficiently enthusiastic six-year-old, he goes on to make his reaction the cornerstone of a whole philosophy: “I could eat it every day, and we will, for the next three days!”  Food, he goes on, should be something “that you just throw together one night and you eat for the next three weeknights⁠—get your variety on the weekends!”  Then comes the crescendo: “Not every meal has to be like a trip to the amuse­ment park, for God’s sake! How badly have I contributed to that self-destructive expectation? Just eat beans and sauce!”

And… wow.  Where is all this anger coming from?  Why scold us for leading insufficiently dismal culinary lives?  One hint comes from the notes accompanying the video, which conclude with a direction to “Eat and go do something else with your life.”  This goes hand in hand with the video’s claim that food is “fuel for your body so you can do the things that you want to do”.  But… if I’m looking up a cooking video, doesn’t it stand to reason that “what I want to do” is cook?  The idea that the need to cook is holding us back from pursuing our real interests⁠—that sounds like it’s coming from someone who was into journalism and music, found that he suddenly had the opportunity to make a better income cranking out food videos, and has now come to resent getting shackled to an endeavor that doesn’t really mean much to him.  After all, I can imagine that you might find it a chore to devise new recipes on a weekly basis if you’re perfectly happy just eating beans and sauce.  Why not just quit, then?  Here’s another clue hidden in the macaron video: “One time,” Ragusea muses, “back when I had no children or real responsi­bilities, I spent months trying to make perfectly smooth maca­rons”.  That seems telling, no?  Again, the resentment is palpable.  For some of us watching this video, cooking is still a hobby we like, and we have plenty of free time to devote to it!  It’s not a career we’re stuck in because we made the decision to have a bunch of kids we now need to support!  It’s not a grim necessity because we need to keep those kids fed⁠—it’s fun!  So if you’ve chosen to take on the burden of “real responsibilities”, and are speaking to an audience with enough leisure to be able to pull up a video about how to make macarons, it’s not hard to see how that might lead to some bitterness.  Sure, maybe a lot of the anger in the video is schtick, but it comes off as the “ha ha just serious” sort of schtick.  And there is a whole industry devoted to stoking this sort of anger.  The last forty years have seen produc­tivity soar, while real wages have leveled off⁠—meaning that near­ly all of the wealth resulting from that increased productivity has been captured by the owners of capital.  They benefit from a populace working the punishing hours that come with having to pay for a mortgage and day care.  But at the same time, either by choice or circumstance, many have found themselves on a differ­ent path.  If you’re one of these people, you may find yourself with no equity in the place you rent and no children to propagate your genetic line, but in exchange, you may see some small com­pensation: the ability to take vacations, to pursue hobbies, to eat out or make something a little fancy.  But those are activities that don’t directly enrich the owners of capital!  This cannot be borne.  Luckily, human nature dictates that those who have elected for one set of tradeoffs will often be resentful of those small com­pensations that go to those who have selected a different set of tradeoffs, and that resentment can be leveraged.  Look at these fuckin’ hipsters!  They’re so self-indulgent⁠—immoral, even!  They shirk “real responsibilities” like the ones you’ve heroically taken on!  They sometimes eat (gasp!) avocado toast, on weekdays even, rather than saving the variety for the weekends and eating the same slop Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday!  Grrr!  Don’t you just hate them?  Don’t you want to vote for candidates who’ll punish them if they don’t follow the path you did and work the kind of hours that leave you scrambling just to find the time to make dinner?

I dunno.  It’s a big Internet.  Maybe there is an audience out there who goes to Youtube looking for something “comically easy and cheap”, as Ragusea says about his soup.  But you know what’s even easier than making one of Ragusea’s recipes, and very near­ly as cheap?  Trader Joe’s!  You just open a jar or toss something in the microwave⁠—and a lot of Trader Joe’s premade stuff is sig­nificantly better than what you’ll find in Ragusea’s videos.  None of it is great, but if great is what you’re looking for, you can find a ton of genuinely great stuff that really takes no more effort than Ragusea’s “comically easy” recipes: Jack Bishop’s hot pink broc­coli or Vij’s scallion curry come together in just a few minutes, and even the hundredth time around still earn those “amuse­ment park” wows.  And, again, I suspect that when people set time aside to go visit a cooking channel, it’s those sorts of wows most of them are looking for.  So Ragusea’s rant seems to me like creating a huge sign saying “Not every day has to be like a trip to the amusement park!!”⁠—and putting it up over the entrance to Disneyland.

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