Why Recipes Don't and Do Matter at the Same Time

Don't follow them. Or do. You do you.

Jul 01, 2024

Recipe Swap at Lab Pangan, Bandung (June 2024)

Time flies when you’re busy as hell, so let’s pretend that I am not late by a week sharing this newsletter that was supposed to be out last week hehe. Anyways, happy Monday everyone!

June was a busy month for me. In fact, I hosted five Community Hangouts, making it the busiest month for me so far this year. From a Yakitori Workshop, a Recipe Swap aession, a Pop-up Dinner, to Tasting Sessions.

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Today, you will read about:

🔪 How cooking used to be a stressful activity for me as I was fixated on getting everything done perfectly.

😳 The moment I realised that I don’t need to follow recipes to make great food.

💔 How the act of sharing recipes used to be an intimate and very personal thing, but got ruined by the internet.

🌻 The Recipe Swap session I hosted in Bandung to reclaim the power recipes used to hold.

Enjoy reading!

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When I say that cooking is therapeutic and is my favourite pastime, it’s not always like that. Cooking was once also a chore for me – something that not only requires extra effort but is also an intimidating task that I avoid.

Part of it was because I always thought everything had to be perfect – from getting the right ingredients to following the steps exactly to the dot. Take pecel sayur for example, a staple from Jawa Timur made of blanched veggies and a thick, spicy fried peanut sauce. Even though the ingredients, including ones I rarely use like tamarind and kencur, are available year-round, the idea of going out of my way to find them is enough to make me reconsider making them on my own, when I can just order them, ready to eat, from a delivery app instead.

And don't get me started on how serious Indonesians are about techniques. Just like how Koreans religiously follow their twelve-step skincare routines, Indonesians are the same about cooking; like how for some, it's a sin to cook rendang without firewood, or how It's mandatory to use a cobek (mortar and pestle) to crush peanuts and spices, and also, the unspoken rule to add sugar at the very last step of cooking.

Cooking became very stressful for me when I looked at recipes as a strict set of rules and instructions. So honestly, fuck these rules.

I quickly realised that when I’m cooking for myself, I should be the one who decides on the rules - including going freestyle and being flexible to adjust the ingredients with whatever I have. When I’m making a pecel sayur and I don’t have spinach, I should be OK with swapping them with kangkung. When I’m too lazy to hand-ground my peanut with a cobek, I should be thankful for the fact that I own a food processor. And when I don’t feel like going to the pasar (lit. wet market) to buy a small piece of kencur for the peanut sauce, I say to myself that it’s not the end of the world to not have them.

Of course, making these substitutions and adjustments should still be done respectfully, especially when it comes to cultural food. So while authenticity is being compromised here, for me, this dish still hits the spot.

Instead of being confined to recipes, start seeing them as a reflection of the author's favourite creations - an extension of their creative self. Use them as inspiration, not strict instructions.

Recipes capture who we are, what we like, and the conditions of the time they were written. For example, during my Eyang Uti's (grandmother's) time, popular Indonesian snacks were heavily influenced by the Dutch. Recipes for kaasstengels (cheese sticks), rum balls, and klappertaart (coconut tart) often popped up in magazines.

Back then, exchanging recipes is either a very exclusive thing or a very personal thing to do. You either need to be a writer, TV personality or celebrity chef to be able to share your recipes - via magazine or a TV show. Or, you could also go the other route: unlock a close relationship with someone, close enough for them to have a reason to share a recipe.

Both of these routes have barriers, and we’re fortunate that it is now easier for us to exchange recipes. But what are the costs?

It can’t be denied that social media plays a major part in helping us share and discover new recipes. Which is a slay. Apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Cookpad enable regular people like us to write personal recipes and get them to the right people. But with how noisy our timelines can get and how it is now designed to be algorithm-driven, there's often a sacrifice of stripping recipes down to their bare essentials, just to survive on a competition that is the For You Page.

The results are generic recipes without any personal touch. Snacks like Dalgona Coffee, Es Kul-kul, and Salad Buah are a few things that I consider internet foods. OK, I know. Dalgona Coffee is easy to make, Es Kul-kul is very popular, and Salad Buah is arguably delicious. But where does this recipe come from? Why were they made? What’s the story behind them?

I guess what Charli XCX say is true, we wanna know what’s going on down there.

So to reclaim the power that recipes once held, I decided to host an intimate hangout session where friends from my community could gather and share their personal recipes. We sat together, wrote personal recipes, shared the stories behind them, and swapped them around.

When I say that I have a community, what I really mean is that I’m building one. Those who came to this hangout session, or other hangout sessions that I hosted generally don’t know each other. This makes it super interesting to see how recipes can be a medium or a tool to get to know someone.

I opened the session with a brief introduction and a crash course on how to make a zine - a perfect format to capture the essence of a recipe book. Everyone also came prepared with their own personal recipes, so we just went for it without hesitation. We got coloured papers, markers, coloured pencils, crayons, and several recipe books for reference. In between, we also enjoyed some traditional snacks supported by Seroja Bake - a local bakery in Bandung, specialising in snacks and desserts using local ingredients.

Once everyone is finished we take turns to briefly share the recipes we wrote and why we decided to share them that day. There are a lot of exciting and interesting recipes. From a Buko Pandan hyper fixation during the global panoramic, a passed-down tempe bacem recipe, a failproof cookie, to a veganised chicken kung pao made from tempe (this one is my recipe and I’m calling it interesting).

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These recipes might not be new, they won’t blow your mind, let alone break the internet, but hearing the stories behind them made it special. A recipe is personal. It is inseparable from who made them, their preferences, and what they went through at the time. And not highlighting these aspects when talking about it, is a missed opportunity to get to know someone.

What do you think about sharing recipes? Is it something that you would like to try? Comment down below!