Shouting into the Void, Part I
The New York Times recently published an article called Scaling Down Recipes for Small Batches by Erin McDowell, a resident baker at Food52 and author of The Book on Pie. The article talks about a growing need for small batch recipes in light of the pandemic, when smaller households don’t want to be stuck with leftovers or when baking ingredients are in short supply.
One line jarred me immediately. “I love to bake,” McDowell says, “but I live alone with my husband.” This is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms that a second grader could spot but that the Times chose to overlook. One commenter provided the basic math: “Alone is just one person. Add a person—the first is no longer alone.”
Cooking for two is often lumped together with cooking for one, but they couldn’t be more different. When you cook with and for another person, the entire dynamic shifts. A negotiation takes place at every meal: what to eat, who is doing the shopping/cooking/cleaning, whether or not to order takeout/where from/what to get. You also have someone to share in the cost, the preparation, and the cleanup, someone to help you eat the leftovers. The only similarity is that single cooks and couples both need less food than a standard recipe makes. It’s important to make this distinction. It’s important to define “alone” as one person and to own it.
The article was otherwise unremarkable, but the comments were both fascinating and infuriating. For every one person who thanked the author for the article or explained why small batches worked better for their lifestyle (ingredients are expensive, storage space is limited, they don’t want the extras or don’t have people to take them), ten more rose up to disparage them and the entire small batch idea. These commenters didn’t understand why you wouldn’t just freeze the extra three dozen cookies or give the majority of what you make to neighbors or friends or organizations in need. They couldn’t fathom why you would bother baking at all just to produce so little.
It’s an example of a conversation I’ve had and heard many times. It goes something like this:
Solo cooks: Your recipes/meal plans/shopping guides don’t work for me. What I need is THIS.
Everyone else: Why can’t you just deal with it? Spend more! Freeze it all! Give it away!
Solo cooks: Because for me that’s a waste of food and money. I like to cook and bake. I like fresh, homemade meals. I just need recipes that work for me.
Everyone else: But WHY can’t you just… (see first response).
Getting others to hear and understand the needs of single cooks and our potential power as an audience feels like shouting into a void. It feels like pushing against a gale force wind that’s howling, “You don’t exist! You don’t matter! Just deal with it!” It’s exhausting. But I’ve had too many conversations and seen too many comments about this to give up now. We may be a chorus of cooks shouting into a void, but the void is getting smaller. And we’re only getting louder.
[Cookie recipe: Crunchy Chewy Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies]
