by I grew up absorbing recipes by watching, no measurements, no written steps. Today’s class needed something I had never actually had to build before: an explicit, teachable method.
Taught my very first ever paid cooking class today, a small group of eight genuinely enthusiastic students eager to learn some fundamental South Asian cooking techniques, and discovered, within the first twenty minutes, that I had genuinely, significantly underestimated how differently most people actually learn to cook compared to how I learned myself, growing up simply watching my mother and grandmother cook without measurements, written instructions, or any explicit, structured teaching method whatsoever.
My own cooking knowledge, I realized fairly quickly once actually standing in front of eight students expecting clear, structured instruction, exists almost entirely as embodied, intuitive knowledge rather than anything I have ever had to articulate explicitly in words before. I know, instinctively, exactly when a specific spice mixture has toasted long enough by its particular smell and color, exactly the right consistency a dough should reach by how it feels under my hands, knowledge I have simply never had to translate into precise verbal instructions because I absorbed it entirely through years of direct observation and repeated practice rather than through any written recipe or explicit teaching.
Today’s students, by sharp contrast, needed and genuinely deserved considerably more explicit, structured guidance than my own instinctive, embodied knowledge was initially prepared to offer them, specific temperatures rather than “medium-high heat until it smells right,” specific timing rather than “until it looks properly done,” a level of precision I found myself scrambling to actually articulate in real time, having genuinely never needed to translate my own intuitive cooking knowledge into this kind of explicit, teachable language before today.
I think this specific gap, between how I actually learned to cook and how most of today’s students needed to be taught, reflects something genuinely important about the different ways culinary knowledge gets transmitted across different contexts, the informal, observation-based apprenticeship model common in many home kitchens and immigrant family traditions, versus the more formal, explicit, measurement-based instruction that dominates most professional cooking education and most published recipes aimed at a general audience.
I improvised considerably today, translating my own intuitive knowledge into rough, approximate measurements and specific visual and sensory cues I hoped would actually help students without me, awkwardly, standing over each person’s shoulder repeating “just until it smells right” for an entire three-hour class. It worked reasonably well, based on the dishes students actually produced by the end of class and their own genuinely positive feedback, though I could tell, watching several of them work, that my translated instructions were still considerably rougher and less precise than what a more experienced cooking instructor, one who had actually learned to cook through this same explicit, structured tradition themselves, would likely have offered them.
I am going to spend real time, before my next class, actually working out more precise measurements and timing for several of today’s dishes, testing them properly in my own kitchen specifically to translate my own instinctive knowledge into something considerably more useful and considerably more teachable than today’s somewhat improvised, in-the-moment translations managed. I think there is real, valuable work in this specific translation process, converting embodied, intuitive family knowledge into something a genuine beginner without my own years of direct observation can actually follow reliably.
Several students asked, at the end of today’s class, whether I planned to eventually write an actual cookbook, a question that landed with particular resonance given a piece of genuinely good news I received earlier this same week about exactly that kind of project. I think today’s class taught me something genuinely useful for that larger project too, a real, practical lesson about exactly how much translation work stands between how I actually know these recipes and how I will eventually need to write them down for readers who did not grow up, the way I did, simply watching and absorbing rather than measuring and following explicit written steps.
I told the class about the cookbook, genuinely excited to share the news for the first time with anyone outside my own immediate circle, and several of them immediately offered to be informal recipe testers once I actually have draft measurements ready to try, an offer I am genuinely planning to take them up on, since today made unmistakably clear that testing my translated instructions against actual beginners, rather than simply trusting my own instinctive sense that a given measurement feels roughly right, is exactly the kind of real-world verification this entire project genuinely needs.
I am leaving today’s class with considerably more respect than I walked in with for the specific, distinct skill of teaching cooking clearly, a skill I now understand is genuinely separate from simply knowing how to cook well myself, however many years of accumulated, instinctive family knowledge I actually bring to the kitchen. Today was humbling in exactly the productive way I think this entire cookbook project is going to keep demanding of me, again and again, as I work to properly translate a lifetime of watching and absorbing into something a total stranger can actually follow successfully from the printed page alone.
I am already looking forward to next month’s class, considerably more prepared this time, and genuinely grateful to this first small group of eight for teaching me, as much as I taught them, exactly how much careful, deliberate translation work this next chapter of my cooking life is actually going to require.
More from this author at Stephanie Curry, prat.uk.
