Ratio
"Cooking with ratios will unchain you from recipes and set you free. With thirty-three ratios and suggestions for enticing variations, "Ratio" is the truth of cooking: basic preparations that teach us how the fundamental ingredients of the kitchen -- water, flour, butter and oils, milk and cream, and eggs -- work. Change the ratio and bread dough becomes pasta dough, cakes become muffins become popovers become crepes."--Jacket.
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2009–2026years
86% recommend14% neutral
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- Ruhlsman's "Ratio" is also quite good at distilling the mechanics of food into an algorithm of sorts.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman...
- I'm not an art educator, but I am a fairly recent graduate from art school, and am familiar with the curricula of other art programs-- and that's the perspective that I'm speaking from. YMMV of course. Reasoning about objects symbolically is very different than reasoning about the way real world space and forms present themselves in 2d. The "copy the portrait upside down" type of exercises are great for casual self-paced learners: they help break naive habits, get people excited because they see the composition and intent that other people created coming out in their work, there's built-in guard rails to make sure they don't stray too far, and the references are commonly available and therefore easy to get crit on online, or just evaluate it yourself... but I think they take up a lot of time for what you get out of them, and it's really easy for people to plateau taking that approach.
I also went to culinary school some time ago and worked as a chef-- there's a similar split in culinary art. If someone told me they were sick of making boring weeknight dinners, then sure, finding and following fun recipes and maybe doing some creative experimentation is a good place to start, and surely some people that start that way end up really learning how to cook eventually. Exposure to variety is also helpful in developing aesthetic sophistication. But without deliberate guidance towards theory-focused information, most hit a hard plateau with that approach, and there's a good chance they'll stay there. If they'd read a beginner-friendly technique-focused book like Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" instead of trawling recipe sites for aspirational dinners, they might have seen less improvement in the quality of their dinners for a week, but in a few weeks they'd be miles beyond the first cargo-culting cook because rather than knowing a handful of recipes that work, they'd know how they worked.
If someone said they were looking to get into art, generally, then there's no way I'd recommend even touching still life for a while. If they're like "I want to learn oil painting on canvas" then I absolutely would.
P.S.
> Now this may be because I am, at best, an intermediate artist
So you're probably a pretty competent artist. ;-) Genuinely mediocre artists talk about their capability like they're Van Eyck.
- For sure! If anyone is looking to expand on this, the book Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is a must.
- In fact I would go further and say that this stuff is more fundamental. Online recipes make cooking look mysterious and complicated when they're actually "cook each ingredient in the obvious way, measure with your heart, combine the things that go together, and assemble the final dish." It's not "easy just re-derive the formula when you need it" like you see in maths, it's that most dishes you don't need a recipe at all.
Baking is the only thing that requires some science know-how but it has its own building blocks [1] that demystify overly complicated recipes.
There aren't that many "shapes" of dishes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/...
- Ratio by Michael Ruhlman as well.
- You might enjoy The Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman [1]. It focuses on the ratios of ingredients.
It is centered on baking, although. Still you might enjoy it.
[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ratio/Michael-Ruhlman...
