To recreate delicious meals, don’t treat recipes simply as algorithms

Recreating the delicious meals of my youth involves balancing the algorithms of online recipes against my recollection of watching my father cook, says Annalee Newitz

By Annalee Newitz

IT’S the time of year when my circadian clock starts yelling at me to make cookies and latkes. Unfortunately, I don’t know any recipes for them. I blame my father, an incredible cook who bought every new kitchen gadget he could: fancy mixers, strange attachments for his food processor, ice cream makers, pasta squishers and even an espresso machine that he plumbed himself so that it would automatically refill with water. The problem is that growing up with a parent like that means delicious meals appear by magic every night. You have very little incentive to learn cooking. …