How to Write a Recipe, or a Novel

They have more in common than you might expect.

Mar 24, 2023

This is not the kitchen of which I speak! Wouldn’t that be nice, though? This is Monet’s kitchen at Giverny. I’ve always liked those copper pots.

One of the pillars of my life in New York is the Tuesday Lunch Program at St. James, the church I attend on the Upper East Side. I started volunteering in the kitchen early in the pandemic, and my shift on Tuesday mornings has quickly become one of the most sacrosanct parts of my week. Any Tuesday when I’m in town, that’s where you’ll find me.

The program has been running for forty-odd years, so I’m a relative newcomer. I’ve played a variety of roles in the program. I started off by helping to serve the meal to our guests (on a typical Tuesday we serve over 100 people, some of whom are unhoused, some of whom are on fixed incomes, almost all of whom become friendly regular faces). Then I spent several months on the coffee and tea cart, then I started to focus more on the cooking. These days I spend the bulk of my time in the kitchen. As a co-chair of the program, one of my responsibilities is to help brainstorm and plan our weekly menus, which means scouring my usual sources for ideas (Smitten Kitchen, the New York Times, Half Baked Harvest, Dinner: A Love Story) and then adjusting and scaling those recipes up to feed 100 people.

You know the satisfaction that comes from trying a new recipe and having it turn out? Imagine that satisfaction multiplied by literally 100. It’s the best feeling when something new works. The best! Because a successful recipe isn’t just success for that one meal—it’s success with longterm dividends. You’ve created a recipe that you can return to over and over again. We spent a lot of time last summer and fall coming up with a new batch of recipes, like a lot of time (there had been some turnover in the program, and we were building up a library of new ideas), but these days, with various kitchen-tested recipes in our pocket, it’s a relatively easy process to map out the next month of meals.

When you’re cooking for 100 people, you start to look at recipes through a very specific lens. There are certain limitations. Are the ingredients accessible and relatively affordable? Can we get them from our wholesale supplier? Does it require any special equipment? How will it scale? Is it feasible to get everything chopped and measured and cooked and portioned in less than 2.5 hours? Will everything fit in the oven, or on the stove, in one go? Is it suited to the season and the weather? Ideally it contains meat, but does it also lend itself to a vegetarian alternative?

There aren’t a ton of recipes that will perfectly translate to 100 people while also fulfilling these criteria. These days I can look at recipe and tell, pretty much immediately, whether or not it will suit our needs. But I can also tell how a recipe might be adapted and adjusted so that it does suit our needs. Like everything in life, I’ve gotten better at this with repetition.

This past Tuesday was a new recipe, one that I’d been wanting to try for a long time. I arrived at the kitchen feeling both nervous and excited. (I always get nervous on new recipe days!) The meal came together slowly and steadily—it helped that we had a crack team of volunteers that day, a cadre of longtimers—but, still. You don’t really know until you know. Until you taste it and see if it’s any good; until you portion it out and see if it yielded enough food; until you serve it to the guests and see if they like it.

The moment of truth came: they liked it! BLESS. The trick, I’m finding, is to push yourself a little, to elevate the game bit by bit, but to keep yourself on track by knowing what you realistically can and cannot accomplish in the time allotted. (If you’re interested, on Tuesday we made a version of HBH’s Pesto Tortellini Zuppa Toscana, with adjustments to render it a bit less step-y. Still 10 out of 10! It is absolutely going into our arsenal of repeats.)

When it comes to writing a recipe, I always bear those above-mentioned limitations in mind. I have to! Because if I don’t, guess what, things tend to get stressful and I’m among those who pay the price. So we make adjustments and compromises with the original recipe, but there are certain expectations we never compromise on. It has to be filling and substantial, it has to taste delicious, it has to be something we are proud to serve. If I wouldn’t serve this food in my own home, I wouldn’t serve it to our guests.

So you have, on the one hand, our limitations; and on other hand, our expectations. These might seem like they are in opposition, but are they? Or are they just two different names for the same thing? Both limitation and expectation help me to imagine something from the outside. I may not know precisely what our next recipe will be, I may not know the specific flavors and textures, but I can imagine the general shape of the thing.

What does this have to do with writing a novel? At this point, several books into my career, I have an increasingly clear sense of what kind of novel I want to write. Theoretically I could do anything. I could try my hand at sci-fi, or I could spend years laboring on an epic saga of historical fiction, or I could write erotica under a pseudonym. I am facing down a blank Word document, and it could take me in any direction. There is both liberating and terrifying.

But if I’m being honest, even before I have written a single word, my blank space isn’t totally blank. Because I want to write a certain kind of book, and I want to do it in a certain kind of way. I want the story to be page-turning, but not at the expense of intelligence or emotion. I want there to be conflict, and I want the conflict to matter; I want there to be clear stakes. I want there to be some movement across time and space. I want the characters to exist against a specific context, a visible backdrop. I want the book to be less than 400 pages, because I don’t want to spend more than two years writing it, because I don’t think (at least right now) I have the stamina to sustain a story for longer than that. I want the story to require some research, because I like the texture yielded by research, but not too much, because I am a writer, not a researcher. I want the story to challenge me, to expand my capabilities, to push my creativity, but I don’t want the labor of this novel to require me to wholesale abandon the other things (see: volunteering, see: family and friends), things which fill my life with such meaning, for months or years at a time.

Right now, I also want to write about spies! I want to write about female spies specifically. I want to write about the intersection of money and power and loyalty and persuasion. I want to write about Russia-versus-America, about the Cold War of yesterday and today.

Also, and most crucially, I want to have fun while doing this. I want to feel like myself while writing it. Every writer should try to write the book that only she can write. I have a very specific set of interests. I have experienced a very specific set of experiences. I am the only version of me out there, at least until ChatGPT figures out how to clone me (terrifying!).

I’m currently working on my next novel, the one that will follow The Helsinki Affair, and while I don’t know what the final flavors and textures of the story will be, I do have a pretty firm sense of my own limitations and expectations. What I am trying to do, at this stage in my career, is give myself a clear sandbox in which I can play. I want to bring my best self to the work, to take risks and experience maximum imaginative freedom, but I’m only capable of doing this if I also feel safe within my sandbox; if I can trust myself to follow tangents, disappear down rabbit holes, try new things, because I know, at the end of the day, that I have pointed myself toward the kind of novel that suits my desires.

Alright, friends: who else is watching Daisy Jones and the Six right now? It feels weird to say this about a TV show with both Amazon and Reese Witherspoon behind it, a TV show based on one of the absolute blockbuster novels of recent years, but I feel like Daisy Jones isn’t getting enough attention right now. This show, you guys. It is SO GOOD. I am totally addicted, and already devastated at the thought of it ending. The vibe is so fun (1970s rock and roll in Los Angeles), the acting is fantastic (Riley Keough, hot damn!), the music is excellent (written by Phoebe Bridgers and Marcus Mumford, among others), the costumes are to die for. I want to travel back in time and wear those kaftans while lounging by the Chateau Marmont pool. I will confess it took me until the second episode to get really hooked (the first episode struck me as a touch cheesy), but then I was hooked. And it just gets better and better. Thank you, queen TJR, for making this thing exist in my life. So that’s my letter of recommendation for you. Watch it!