The Fine Art of Culinary Substitution
I’ve written before about my experiences cooking and my unwitting (at times) attempts to emulate my mom’s cooking style. Mom had a knack for making it work. A child of the Great Depression years, she learned how to substitute this for that, and tweak the end result until it was at least edible, and most often tasty. I’m not sure I inherited the ability to recognize what ingredient could make it all work, but I at least got the willingness to experiment and see what happens, and laugh at myself if it doesn’t work.
There are three main reasons for making substitutions in a recipe. None of them are really some arrogant desire to prove that I can improve any given recipe. I’m just genetically preprogrammed to not being able to stop myself!
Sometimes I substitute (or add) things to recipes out of curiosity: “I wonder what it would taste like if I added….” I once adapted a simple muffin recipe to include a combination of chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and dried cranberries, in a mixture of whole wheat flour and oat bran, with bananas added for sweetness and to replace some oil. The end result, the Everything Muffin, had the tartness of the cranberry, the creaminess of the butterscotch, and, well, chocolate. And since it had the whole grains, it made a healthy (enough) muffin!
Sometimes I substitute out of necessity: “Oh, no, I don’t have that ingredient!” Sometimes the necessity is borne out of a need to adapt for a specific reason, like the years I avoided milk products and found substitutes that worked well enough. I discovered that soft tofu could be adapted to work for ricotta cheese in lasagna, and used soy cheese for the mozzarella. It wasn’t quite as good as the real thing, but it was plenty good enough to work for a recipe I otherwise had given up.
And sometimes I substitute out of negligence: “Oops. I thought I was adding….”
Any of these reasons can lead to tasty concoctions worthy of repeating—or at least eating till they are done. They can also lead to the things that make for good stories. “Remember when Mom tried substituting….”
There was the time that I decided to make some oatmeal chocolate cookies for an upcoming meeting of our local astronomy club, the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers. And after I got into it I discovered I didn’t have oatmeal. No problem! The oatmeal you add to these cookies is uncooked, so I figured I’d just substitute another uncooked cereal in its place. I still occasionally get comments from club members about “those cookies” I made—and substituted grits for oatmeal…. They tasted good enough but were, well, gritty.
And then there was the time that Merrilee and her best friend decided to have a bake sale to raise money for camp. One of the items they promised a customer was a pecan pie. Never mind they’d never made one before, and started it while I was napping. I woke up and came into the kitchen. They asked for “corn syrup”—and in my post-nap stupor, thought they were working on an apple pie rather than a pecan pie. My apple pie recipe calls for corn STARCH. Corn starch is a poor substitute for corn syrup…. [There’s actually more to the pie story, to the point that mentioning “pecan pie” to my daughter triggers a reaction similar to the old Three Stooges “Niagara Falls” gag. In the interest of family harmony, I’ll save that for another day!]
My most recent substitution negligence happened last night. We’ve been subscribing to Sunbasket for about a year and a half. It’s one of those meal kit delivery services so popular these days. Most of the meals have been good, and we’ve enjoyed cooking them together. The one last night was a “crisp tofu” concoction that suggested adding some white wine (if we had some and wanted it) to the rice mixture. I generally keep some white cooking wine, and figured I’d add some of that. And then reached for the bottle that I read “white wine” on, and missed the last word—vinegar. White wine vinegar does not substitute well for white cooking wine!
Live and learn—and that’s as true for cooking as it is for anything else. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And the inedible mistakes have been few and far between. That’s good, because I’m not likely to stop substituting in my cooking any time soon!
“Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors—it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.” – Wolfgang Puck
©Melissa Clark Vickers 2022
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