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" Always say: I never learned to cook. But in the eighties, I worked as a cook in a Creole restaurant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Eventually I got good enough that they brought me in on Sundays to make a week&amp;#039;s worth of jambalaya, mostly because they thought I had some touch. And I did. I liked the jambalaya made by my own hands far better than the house recipe, better than any jambalaya I&amp;#039;ve had since. Even better than that stuff they serve in New Orleans. Way better. I can make the hell out of some jambalaya, even now. I mean, I can cook \u2014 I never said I can&amp;#039;t. It&amp;#039;s just that I never learned to cook. No one ever taught me. Not with lessons, anyway. It wasn&amp;#039;t possible to teach me, not in conventional terms, because I cannot, for the life of me, follow a recipe.  Sure, I&amp;#039;ve tried. I own cookbooks. Over the years, people have given me recipes, often at my request. But it&amp;#039;s always the same: I stand in my kitchen, pin the recipe open on the chopping block, and set to work. I move down the page with an assumed gravity and reverence for process untangled. I respect recipes! But even if I stay right on track, nothing about the dish tastes right or balanced. Eggplant goes mushy, chiles overwhelm, or the cardamom cannot be detected. I understand food well enough to know when I miss.  More often, I&amp;#039;m recipe dyslexic \u2014 listening too much to some song, cradling a phone, ducking in and out of the process, proceeding absent some dash or pinch, having ignored entire steps. Or forgotten to heat the pan, or flour the pan, or move the pan in gentle swirls at precisely this moment. This despite my reminders, my strategic Post-its, my egg timer. My mind doesn&amp;#039;t note preparatory or prophylactic detail with much vigor. I do my best with the directions. It does no good. See, what happened with me is that I realized how to cook. It occurred to me in one moment at a screening of The Godfather for a film class in college. Clemenza gives Michael the recipe for his rag\u00F9 while they are discussing going to the mattresses: &amp;quot;You start out with a little bit of oil, and then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes and some tomato paste. You fry it. You make sure it doesn&amp;#039;t stick. You gotta get it to a boil. You shove in all of your sausage and meatballs. Eh? And a little bit of wine. And a little bit of sugar. And that&amp;#039;s my trick.&amp;quot; I sat there thinking, That&amp;#039;s it? That&amp;#039;s all there is to it? No mystery. No special technique. No breathless anticipation of any first bite. Just confidence in the ingredients, an authority earned by being willing, and one little trick. Cooking suddenly seemed to be about what you knew, not what you might learn. From then on, I picked it up by standing next to people who were cooking, asking them what they knew. That&amp;#039;s what the best recipes are about: standing in front of the stove, picking it up as you go. And substitute clam juice for chicken stock in your jambalaya. That&amp;#039;s my trick. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/how-to/a10790/never-learned-to-cook-0911/>