When you read a recipe, how do you know if you'll like the resulting food? Is critiquing a recipe an art or technique? - require intuition or experience? My mom was an avid recipe-reader. When I was a child, she'd hand me a recipe and say, "Doesn't that sound good?!" I'd read, "flour, rosemary, chuck roast, burgundy, sour cream, etc." I'd have no clue how this recipe would end up tasting. Individually, none of those ingredients sounded tasty. None-the-less, when dinner was served I usually liked it. So how does a person even decide which recipes to prepare? Or does this question really ask, "how does a beginner cook become a seasoned chef?"
I put a similar question to my good friends in the medical field, - one a cardiologist, the other an oncology nurse-practitioner. I'd been listening to them describe how they guided 6-inch steel instruments into people and wrenched out bone marrow. Imagining myself as one of those unlucky people, I asked, "So how do you go from never having done this before to not killing people?"
"Oh you learn to do it in lots of very small steps with an experienced mentor right there at your side," they replied, "That's why medical training takes so long."
And often this is true in cooking. A mentor teaches a novice how to cook in a years'-long series of small steps. As my mom did with me, I do with my kids. When they're little they get to stir something (while I hold on to the bowl). Later they get to add in measured ingredients. Still later they get to measure the ingredients themselves. Then finally, one day they get to make an entire recipe on their own with a mentor just nearby in the kitchen.
On the other hand, sometimes people are thrown into cooking all at once. After Mom died, Dad could eat salad, baked potato, and grilled meat for the rest of his life, or he could learn to cook. I remember Dad standing over me in the kitchen last summer, amazed that I was mixing up tuna salad. "How do you make that?" he eagerly asked. Dad likes tuna salad. Slightly stunned by a question regarding the obvious, I quickly recovered and named the ingredients: tuna - drained; mayonnaise; celery; salt; pepper; lemon juice, and pickle relish. Then his question came, - the question I remember so many times asking my mom, and so often being frustrated with the answer: "How much do you put in?"
"Just some," she'd vaguely reply, "until it looks right." And did I give this same answer? - You betcha', I couldn't help it, - because in truth I had no idea how much of anything I put in. As Mom would say, "It all depends on what you start out with." And that's right. Is it a big can of tuna or a little one? Do I even have celery? Are some grapes lingering in the crisper that need to be eaten?- If so, in they go. Is my husband going to be eating it? - Then he'd like a little curry powder added. I imagine that folks in the medical profession say, "It depends." a lot to their medical students.
Over time, as meals get made and eaten, gradually the beginner cook learns what each mixture is supposed to look like. Gradually, sets of flavors become memorized, e.g. garlic gets added to meats and salads, not desserts. Reliance on measuring spoons wains. And of course, the hungry novice continues to ask for recipes and advice. Last Christmas, my dad's sister who used to own a restaurant and catering business as well as teach cooking, gave Dad and my male cousins a free, introductory cooking lesson. I asked Dad what he had learned that afternoon. "We learned to chop things," he knowingly replied, well-satisfied with the experience. Ah yes, the art of the prep-cook.
But still, the question remains, how do you know from reading a recipe if the food will taste good? I venture that even people like me who have been cooking for decades still have some trouble with this skill. I'm experienced enough that I'm pretty certain about what I like and don't. I shun recipes with excessive amounts of corn syrup, Cool Whip, tarragon, vinegar, and Velveeta. True, I don't make any recipe calling for Spam, but I haven't ruled it out. My neighbor used to be the Wisconsin State Fair judge for the Spam cooking contest, and she also taught Home Ec. So maybe Spam's okay. But I'm also not adventurous.
Anyway, yesterday I came across a recipe on the recipe page of Wisconsinmade.com for Maple Baked Onions. 
And I couldn't figure out if maple baked onions would taste good or not. Maple syrup and tomato juice? A side dish of only onions? Highly questionable, but perhaps not poisonous.
I passed the recipe on to my co-workers, all of them experienced cooks. "What do you think?" I asked. "Does this sound good?" The unanimous first reaction was a scrunched nose and partial raising of the upper lip. But then each woman was kind enough to seriously consider my question. They thought about it. One responded, "Well, I add molasses when I make barbecue sauce, so I guess that's like combining maple syrup and tomato juice." And the others added: "Tomatoes and onions go together." and "When heating onions, they caramelize and become sweet, and they taste good. So baking them in maple syrup would sweeten them even a little bit more." The final word was, "I wouldn't make it, but if someone else did I'd try it."
So I'd gotten my answer. In evaluating this recipe, these experienced cooks applied several key principles.
- They recalled recipes they had made and liked with similar ingredients.
- They referred to their conceptualized food sets in which foods belonging to the same set taste good together.
- They considered how the foods change in taste as they are heated.
So, intuition or experience? Well, any novice with a memory can certainly figure out step #1. Step #2 is achieved by anyone who looks closely at what's on their plate and decides if they like it or not. Only step #3 requires previous work in the kitchen. A penchant for chemistry can help. (Some of the best cooks I've known were trained in chemistry.) But most importantly, all three steps demand time spent savoring delicious food. So the key to becoming a recipe sight-reader? - Eat Great Food Often!
Will the beginner cook make mistakes? Never! Nothing tried is irrelevant. When I sauteed ham, onions, tomatoes, clams, lemon juice and cream together in bacon grease, served it over pasta, then ran off to my hair cut appointment before I could hear my family's condemning verdict, 
I honed my sense of which foods go well together and which do not. My hair dresser, a terrific cook, explained that I had combined two incongruent food sets together. So did I make a mistake or an experiment? Since I didn't eat it, I consider it the latter.
So maple baked onions is today's challenge recipe,- is maple syrup, onions, butter, and tomato cocktail, baked together delicious? I couldn't believe it would taste horrible. After all, one of the artisans we work with on the website gave us the recipe. I imagine that someone, at some time, made maple baked onions and liked it. We need a picture of the prepared recipe for the website. So, today I made maple baked onions and brought it to work.
Here's what we thought of it:
Katie, "It tastes like onions."
Nina, "Smells good!..Gotta' like onions to like it, but who doesn't like onions?...I would caramelize the onions in a skillet first to make them crispier."
Vicki, "They look slimy. I have trouble with slime. It's a texture thing." But how do they taste, Vicki? "Slimy. But if they were on a hamburger I'd like them."
Linda, "I like it. They're kinda' sweet. Very mild; not a strong taste at all. I like them because they're nice and tender."
Cristie (me), "I like them. They'd be great with cheese burgers, steak, pork tenderloin, or brats."
And now you know our honest opinions. A further plus for this recipe is the ease of making it. So here you go Dad, exercise those new chopping skills, and cook up some maple baked onions with that grilled meat, salad, and baked potato.
Next question: What foods would taste best served with maple baked onions? Here are some suggestions:
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Nueske's Smoked Sausage Sampler
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Bacon-wrapped Tenderloin Filets
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Tailgate All-beef Grilling Package
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Just be sure that when you make the onions, you use high-quality maple syrup.
Northern Wisconsin Maid Maple Syrup
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Receive $5.00 off the purchase price of any order from Wisconsinmade.com by entering this offer code with your order: FBLOG908. Offer expires Oct. 1, 2008.
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