Just a smidgen, add a pinch of salt, add enough water to cover, a handful of chopped onion, two fingers of butter… the oral tradition has preserved ancient recipes with measurements that guarantee a flavorful and satisfying outcome in the absence of standardized measuring tools. Surely, it has also provided much room for experimentation and personal input. “My grandmother’s” recipe may not be exactly as grandma made it anymore. Nonetheless, it retains its uniqueness merely because it was grandma’s, and because she was a pioneer.

The first publication of recipes on paper had to wait for the printing press to be invented. Before this, recipes were hand written and much fewer people than today knew how to read or write. Hired cooks and nannies were often given verbal instructions by mistresses who could read, or even by the children in their care. Imagine the wonderful relationship between a child who can read and a nanny who cannot, as they teach each other their respective skills.

I am of a different generation. I watched my mother and grandmother cook, but other than helping to mix this or that (especially when grandma made frosting for her wonderful cupcakes), I did not have an interest in learning, nor was I forced to develop one. I feel this was a great gap in my generation’s upbringing, at least in the context of the place where I grew up, in a white-collar neighborhood with professional parents who lived at a time when suburban life was sprouting everywhere as a sort of in-between community; not quite city, not quite country.

Nature is part of our makeup and it was inevitable that even hard-working, career-oriented adults would look at their backyards and long to dig their hands in the soil. Most of the families in my neighborhood (in fact, probably all of them) had the means to acquire all of their food at the store, but gardens began to pop up in every single backyard nonetheless. The previous generation had been close to the land, so it is them, in great part, who transmitted these values. But how do you draw the modern, career-oriented, 1960′s and 1970′s adult to the kitchen? Cookbooks. Cooking shows and cookbooks.

Cooking shows teach by demonstrating, somewhat like mothers had done. We are designed to learn by imitation after all. The cookbook provides the means for one to develop their own wings.

Producing a cookbook is an exercise in technical writing. The author must consider the audience, what language to use to both appeal to this audience and to make instructions user-friendly. The “step-by-step” format takes care of one important aspect of instructions books: breaking down a complex concept into immediately understandable and manageable parts.

Cooking, as you know, is an experiment in physics and chemistry. As with any other experiment, it is in the repeating of the process that we become aware of patterns and that our own miscalculations are brought to light. When we figure out what we did wrong, why we did not obtain the exact outcome the author describes for example, we also instantly understand a bit more about the physics and chemistry of food and cooking.

This knowledge is stored in the data bank of the mind and will be accessed automatically when we find ourselves in a similar situation again; in fact, this allows us to extrapolate, instinctively, and to grasp more and more of the art of cooking along the way. Because of this, over time, our relationship to the cookbook changes. We become hungry for greater challenges, feeling perfectly confident that we can learn something new.

I would venture to say that cookbooks build confidence and would not be surprised to learn that some therapists instruct their clients to buy a cookbook and learn to cook as a means of developing confidence and building self-esteem. How can you not have self-esteem when your own hands create a feast from scratch? Only yesterday you felt incompetent, yet now your own masterfully transformed harvest feeds every eye and stomach around your table.

The oral tradition is not gone; it is transformed by our literature. Cookbooks contain the voices of grandmothers and ancestors, for without their knowledge and teaching their pages would be blank. Opening a cookbook is like opening a book of secrets; as if someone had placed this on our lap saying, “Here. This is all I know. I trust you will make good use of it.” Maybe cooking helps us remember how capable we are, at anything.