In 2006, I did my first start-up howcookingworks.com where the idea was a site to learn how to cook. The first part of the site described the techniques of cooking, and the other was where cooks could connect to participants to learn from them.
At the time, I went to a lot of start-up mixers in Los Angeles, and most people said they loved the idea. But the site never got much traction.
During that time, I also did cooking demos at companies like Google and Boeing, but it didn’t really draw much attention to the site either (though maybe things might have been different if the site had launched during the pandemic).
The site and start-up failed, and to this day I still haven’t answered the question of how people should learn to cook. However, that failure was still one of the best things I’ve done in my career, as it helped me think more clearly about product-market fit.
Cooking is deceptively one of the most complex tasks you can do in the world. It involves shopping, food preferences, ingredients, recipes, heat, techniques, etc. It is harder than you think and our older family members have spent decades in the craft.
We were in Denver recently, and did one of these self-guided audio guide walks on the phone. As we walked around state capital building, it had us stop by a used and rare book store, Capital Hill Books. Upon entering you would see lots of books you wouldn’t easily be able to get online. I saw a hard cover copy of the Hardy Boys books, which I remember reading as a kid.
Meandering around a bit, I found myself at the cookbook section, and one book caught my eye, “The Chinese Vegetarian Cookbook.” Everything about the book was odd. It had the format of a Garfield book where it was half the size of a book, and I noticed it had no ISBN number. The book was written in 1972, almost 54 years ago.
The book starts off with:
“Cooking, especially the Chinese way, is just impossible to define in such a way, as it requires a lot of good sense, judgment, and experience. In preparing the same dish a hundred times, he is a genius if he can manage eighty percent of them to be the same quality.
This is the main reason I have written this book. It was not written just to give you recipes from the second page to the last as many cookbooks do. I do not pretend that cooking is as easy as ABC as may claim. This book is written to help you understand how to cook. Unless you are willing to read and practice carefully, I don’t think you will find anything useful in this book-maybe a can-opener will do a better job.”
The first half of the book contained detailed descriptions of ingredients, and some recipes were written in paragraph form. It is quite different from cookbooks today, which present recipes in very precise formats but don’t really challenge you to think about them. This excerpt comes from the “How to Make Soy Bean Milk” section:
“… Normally overnight soaking is enough, but the actual surrounding temperature makes the difference. The cooler the temperature the longer the time that will be needed. However, by the next day you pick out one of the beans and break it apart with your thumb and first finger. When the bean is separated into two halves, see if the central part shows a tiny dent (Normally they are smooth). If the dent has appeared the beans are well soaked and it is time to start making the milk.”
Compare this to a recipe from Serious Eats on making soy milk, where that entire paragraph is reduced to this bullet point:
https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-soy-milk-recipe
- Rinse, drain, and soak beans in about 6 cups of water for 8 to 10 hours. Rinse and drain again
Reflecting on the book more, I think truly learning how to cook requires a certain amount of friction. What I mean is that blindly following a recipe doesn’t lead to much growth. It’s more the struggle of iteration, along with learning from others or from rare books like this, that helps us improve.