On stealing (recipes, that is)


Squishy morality? Situational ethics? Commandments with asterisks? Welcome to foodservice.

I was thinking about ethics and Moses and restaurants recently, and wound up at baseball. George Will should serve as a warning, I suppose—for every classical education, sports metaphors await like an open grave. For instance: commandments are written in stone. One of them (number eight, if you recall) abjures theft. Yet in baseball, thieves are widely admired and the techniques of theft are openly taught. And the only thing considered contemptible in the act of stealing is getting caught.

Here, then, we have a context in which stealing is written into the rules. Is it still stealing, or does putting it in print remove it from the purview of the commandments? And if some rules are unwritten, but widely accepted, does their acceptance qualify for the same exemption?

We’re entering the realm of squishy morality and situational ethics now, where some may think that general agreement can trump a divinely received edict. Or perhaps “trump” is too strong a word and we’re simply entering the land of footnotes, where every commandment has an asterisk. Welcome to the foodservice industry.

Give me a moment before you get huffy. I am not claiming that we’re a bunch of cynics who twist every situation and every statement to suit our purposes; if we were, our incomes would be a lot higher. Sadly, we are limited by the material world: we sell food, not pot-sticker futures or carrot default swaps. I just stumbled into this ethical spaghetti-pile when I realized that I could write a résumé—hell, an autobiography—around a single, stolen recipe.

I was still in my first decade as a cook when I worked at Narsai’s of sainted memory, an imposing culinary fiefdom near Berkeley. The walls were wood, the food was French, the Bordeaux were first-growth, and the amount of prep was astounding. Between three and five, you needed to clean a couple dozen lamb racks, make staff dinner for 35, search frantically for your eagle-beak knife for your turned potatoes, finish a carrot puree, turn and blanch artichoke hearts, etcetera, etcetera.

Among the etceteras was a pair of soups each night. We had one that we served nearly all the time; a mushroom-and-clam concoction that was made in huge amounts and had to be watched like a toddler in a gun store. My friend and trainer told me she had scorched 15 gallons of it once while she was up to her ears in prep—this was to console me after I’d burned 40 pounds of roux that was destined for the same recipe. Great soup, but I wonder if anybody ever did an ROI study.

The other soup needed to be quick, and one that we favored was Narsai’s Lentil and Spinach. It only had a few ingredients—onions, stock, lentils, spinach, lemon, pepper—and it could be made start to finish in about 40 minutes, and most of that time was just boiling the lentils. It was also a brothy soup rather than a legume paste, so you didn’t have to stir every 30 seconds; you just let it boil merrily away. At the end, you’d finish with the lemon and the pepper, taste it and dump it in the steam table, relieved that one thing had gone right so far.

Since it was simple, mildly exotic (spinach! lemon! lentils!) and consistently good, I unabashedly stole it and have taken it with me to almost every restaurant I’ve worked at since. And I’ve discovered a couple of ironies about theft in the culinary world.

First, if you don’t know what you’re doing, what you steal doesn’t matter much. I didn’t take a written recipe with me (I’m sure there was one, but I don’t think I ever saw it), just knowledge of the ingredients. My own personal notebook is like this—lists of ingredients, no amounts or procedures. If, say, you are unaware that onions need to be sautéed before they boil, you’ll wind up with a very different soup.

The second was that I was stealing from the world-soul, or for you legal types, from the public domain. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a cook from the Mediterranean—north or south, Morocco or Greece—who didn’t say, “Oh, we make that soup at home. Except you’re doing it wrong. It should have—” (and you can insert ingredients here). Red wine vinegar instead of lemon juice. Carrots. Cumin. Roasted garlic.

I have to admit that I find this oddly comforting, even if it reflects poorly on my application to the Thieves’ Guild. There is something about making a soup that has been made by thousands of cooks over thousands of years across thousands of miles and still emerges each time as uniquely your own. And though these recipes aren’t written in stone, they may prove almost as durable as the irrepressible human spirit’s quest for the perfect sports metaphor.