For Sisters and Friends

I had a crisis of confidence a week ago about posting recipes and writing about food. I am not a professional food person, or a foodie, or even a good photographer, and so many of the food sites I see make mine seem rough hewn. I am a mere home cook with a second hand camera and a tiny kitchen, and though I love to cook I wondered how much new or original I had to say.

But a week's reflection has reminded me that most cookery writers are not inventors of recipes , but collectors. Unless a recipe is relentlessly new and outrageous- say an anchovy and blueberry tart- it has come into the Cooking Commons from a hundred places and times. I found a recipe for Pork Loin braised in Milk in Claudia Roden's " The Food of Italy". This does not mean it is her recipe. It is Italy's recipe that she collected, and even before she wrote it down it was a classic dish from the Veneto. Roden has her version. Marcella Hazan has another.

Recycling recipes is what people do.

Several weeks ago I posted a recipe for Shepherd's Pie. Within a day I called my sister , and found that she was in the kitchen following my directions. I called later, and she told me that the pie was all gone-finished off by her son and a friend who both declared it the best Shepherd's pie ever. Probably not, but since both boys knew school cafeteria food, they knew mine was the better version.

My sister is a time-starved woman with a Big Job. She does not spend her days reading cookbooks. If I find recipes that she and my friends-also time-starved- decide to try I will have done good service, even if I am irredeemably minor. Good recipes are passed along, whether in a spiral notebook, on an index card, or on the World Wide Web. Thank God a week's deliberation freed me from the tyranny of trying to be original!