David Chang - Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave): A Cookbook

By their nature, recipes tend to promote a western, privileged point of view. Think about the very ability to write down a recipe. First, you have to be able to read and write, and know enough math to provide measurements.

For example, while enslaved Africans built the foundations of so many American culinary traditions, most could not read or write, so didnt write those recipes down. Instead, many of these recipes were written down byand therefore credited towhite people.

That dynamic plays out today, too. In our food media fetish for recipes, we credit the chefs and food writers who, say, write down, or riff off of, or elevate someone elses recipe for phoand more often than not, the home cook who came up with that pho is left behind. Weve got to look at ourselves, too: Why does Dave get to share his take on carnitas, when some of the best carnitas cooks out there arent even on the radar of publishers?

Remind me why you wanted to have this conversation?

There are a lot of dishes that I am a huge fan of and want to make but that I am not an expert on. So why am I writing about those dishes if I am not an expert? That is a conversation we should be having.

Heres the issue I have. In this book, we talk about how when you are cooking at home it is okay to do whats delicious and not worry about whether you are doing things the most traditional way. But we also want to honor the cooks who do things the most traditional way. How do you reconcile those things?

I dont know. I think being earnest about it is maybe the best thing we can do. We are saying, hey, you might be interested in this flavor or this dish, and if you are, dont use us as the main source. Hopefully we are the stepping-stone, and you wont make my version more than once because there is better source material out there for you to explore. Here are som examples.

For more on Black food:

• Toni Tipton-Martin: Jubilee

• Edna Lewis: The Taste of Country Cooking

• Bryant Terry: Black Food

• Jessica B. Harris: High on the Hog

For pho and other Vietnamese foods:

• Andrea Nguyen: The Pho Cookbook; Into the Vietnamese Kitchen

• Charles Phan: Vietnamese Home Cooking

For Northern Italian food:

• Marcella Hazan: Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

• Rolando Beramendi: Autentico

And by the way, if you want to make a really great broth:

• Marco Canora: Brodo: A Bone Broth Cookbook

For regional Chinese food:

• Eileen Yin-Fei Lo: The Chinese Kitchen; Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking

• Jason Wang: Xian Famous Foods

For pulled pork and barbecue:

• Rodney Scott: Rodney Scotts World of BBQ

• Lolis Eric Elie: Smokestack Lightning

For pozole and other Mexican foods:

• Pati Jinich: Patis Mexican Table

• Hugo Ortega: Hugo Ortega's Street Food of Mexico

For Jamaican and Caribbean Food:

• Craig & Shaun McAnuff: Original Flava

• Ramin Ganeshram: Sweet Hands

For dumplings:

• Andrea Nguyen: Asian Dumplings

• Ellen Leong Blonder: Dim Sum: The Art of the Chinese Tea Lunch

For sticky rice and other Thai foods:

• Kris Yenbamroong: Night + Market

• Leela Punyaratabandhu: Bangkok

For oyakodon and other Japanese foods:

• Elizabeth Andoh: Washoku

• Sonoko Sakai: Japanese Home Cooking

For dal and other Indian foods:

• Madhur Jaffrey: An Invitation to Indian Cooking; At Home with Madhur Jaffrey

• Meera Sodha: Made in India; Fresh India

How I Cook Most Meat

Or, The Tempur-Pedic Test

Here is my general approach to cooking all meat: