This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
They say to never read the comments. Or at least they do to those of us who put words on the internet for a living and want to preserve our sanity. I generally abide by this maxim, save for one major exception: Recipes. On recipe sites with robust comment sections, you’ve just got to wade in there. For me, it is mandatory. The recipe you are endeavoring to cook is, in fact, incomplete until you have read and digested the comments.
The obvious value of this is in avoiding recipes that are bad, of course. If everyone down there is saying, “Hey you, beware, this does not work,” you can save yourself a lot of heartache by heeding them. (It’s sobering to see how many sites do not respond to such outcries in any way whatsoever.) So that’s one function of the comments on recipes. But I’m talking about something more: Discerning the perfected, or at least heartily improved, version of the recipe by sifting through the collective wisdom of the persnickety crowd. Here, we are considering recipes that home cooks generally like, but in which they see some minor flaw or opportunity for improvement—say, a swap of one ingredient for another, an adjustment on the oven time or temperature, etc.
How do you know which suggestions are worthwhile? I admit this technique requires a certain amount of cooking sense around things like substitutions and measurements. Obviously we can’t be trusting everything a stranger on the internet tells us to do. But the beauty of the comments is that you’re usually looking for edits that multiple people have suggested; indeed, the best is when you see that someone has tried someone else’s tweak and reported back approvingly.
My habit is to print out the “prime” recipe, and then scan the comments for these moments of consensus, which I filter, condense, and handwrite onto the page. So in this recipe for Potatoes au Gratin (by the famously spare Mark Bittman), I note that blandness is a shared concern, that everyone is adding a good deal more salt and placing some sort of allium situation—like onion, garlic, or leeks— between the potato layers. There is disagreement about cheese, but that seems a matter of taste, so I will follow my own. We do want the fattiness of cream over the listed half-and-half, it seems, but we are noticing that there is maybe too much liquid, or that the cooking time is off.
This is where you want to pay attention for the occasional diamond in the rough, the glittering comment that is not necessarily repeated, but is clearly cutting to the heart of things. “Susieqday” writes: “I like to heat the cream up on stove and add lots of fresh garlic, thyme, and a pinch of nutmeg. Pour the infused cream over potatoes before baking.” Aha! Susie has banished the blandness by infusing the dairy ahead, and she has also reduced it somewhat before the potatoes are even involved, likely bringing the baking time more into line. So, in Susie’s footsteps I will follow.
I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you about a few of the unsavory types you’ll surely run into on your cooking-comment expeditions. The dark alchemists who want to transform the dish at hand into something else entirely; the usurpers who will attempt to direct you over to Martha Stewart (always!); the health zealots who abhor all human sensuality. Be brave, ignore them. And take as your reward the fully operatic drama that can sometimes erupt over, like, one or two anchovies. Well, take that and a fabulous recipe! For this excellent outcome, there is only the smallest of fees: The comments have brightened your kitchen—now you must comment in kind.
