My mother is a baker. I am a cook. She realized this a few weeks after I botched my very first batch of cookies and set the oven on fire. It took me a bit more soul-searching and the acquisition of a paring knife.
The theory goes that cooks and bakers possess fundamentally different approaches to the preparation of food. Cooks intuit and tweak recipes when not ignoring them altogether. Bakers are more scientific and follow recipes to the letter.
Most critics who disagree point out that many bakers go by feel, and that most cooks are governed by general rules regarding what flavors go together and which ones don’t.
But the distinction holds true. What some might consider the intuitive elements of baking and the general rules of cooking are both the simple result of experience.
Baking is unabashedly scientific. The protein content of the flour dictates the difference between crumbly pastries and hearty breads. Leavening agents –– such as baking powder, baking soda, and yeast – all influence the carbon dioxide content to puff up the batter in different ways. And then timing is of precious importance.
In short, you have to follow the rules if you want something edible.
But true bakers, who have played by the rules long enough to internalize them, can make snap judgments based on how brown a loaf of bread smells. They’re not acting on whim, they actually know. It’s just fact. The phenomenon is akin to an expert in ancient Greek statuary who can spot a forgery without consciously thinking about it. They just know, not because of a freakish sixth-sense, but because of experience.
Cooking, on the other hand, actually is intuitive, with hundreds of little variables that can be tweaked or omitted altogether without anything going horribly wrong.
My great-grandmother was a notorious cook. Each of her recipes is peppered with such ambiguous directions as: “add a roughly egg-sized lump of butter when sauce is somewhat thickened, but only somewhat. Stir for a bit.”
As long as my lump of butter is somewhere between the size of an ostrich egg and a pheasant egg, the lemon curd comes out just fine. I can even throw in a dash of orange zest if the mood takes me, and it still tastes pretty damn good.
But I dare you to find an experienced cook who will try to boil skim milk or combine anise, dill, and nutmeg. They probably aren’t avoiding it just because some recipe told them not to. Chances are it just doesn’t look, smell or feel right. At the most scientific, some failed-white-sauce horror story discouraged the attempt, or the attempt ended poorly.
Experienced cooks inevitably develop systems of proportion and contrast that they seldom violate. The consistency behind these systems might even seem “scientific,” but, chances are, the cook simply remembered to replicate happily stumbled-upon combinations and avoid the bad ones.
One method is not necessarily better than the other, but the difference is important to identify. Understanding who is a cook and who is a baker makes sharing recipes and coordinating efforts in the kitchen must easier. It permits bakers to cut the occasional corner when making a pot of soup, and it reminds cooks to set the timer after they put a pan of cookies in the oven. Otherwise, things might end up flavorless or in flames.
vcooney@hillsdale.edu
