They aren't called patterns, they are called techniques.
There's tons of books about all the techniques you can use. When you understand some of the basic techniques, it's apparent what techniques are being used when you read a cook book. The problem is, even if you only got as technical as saying "make a velouté sauce" in half the cookbooks you see, then people would freak out if you didn't tell them how.
When you learn the fundamental techniques, you can easily extrapolate them and realize half the recipes you read in your cookbooks are (necessarily) overcomplicated and can be reduced (no pun intended) to a few techniques.
Jacque Pépin is an good resource for beginners and intermediate cooks to learn french techniques. You can find techniques online and in his book New Complete Techniques. The CIA book is good, but a big gripe with the CIA book and the FCI/ICC book (Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cooking) is that the portions are pretty huge because they are for professional chefs and caterers. That aside, they are still a good resource for learning that. IIRC the James Peterson "Cooking" book is pretty good at basic techniques.
The Joy of Cooking is still one of my favorites, because the recipes are basic (but delicious), and because it's a compendium of recipes, it builds on itself more than nearly every cookbook you can find. So the recipes include in the ingredients do say "2 cups béchamel (Page 400)", and you can backtrack to that recipe and learn.
One problem with these books people don't usually like is the basic recipe isn't often fancy enough to be novel. It's kind of up to the cook to understand "Oh Coca-Cola would be a good substitute for the acid and sugar here" or "maple syrup would be better than brown sugar here" or whatever.
For that, it's nice to have McGee's "On Food and Cooking", as it goes into details about ingredients you've never really thought about.
> They aren't called patterns, they are called techniques.
I totally agree. That's weird to see the n+1-th geek discovering something people have been doing since the dawn of humanity.
Damn, we're just talking about basic cooking. I understand many of us didn't learn the basics, but nonetheless, it's basic.
Imagine somebody saying he discovered "patterns to ride a bicycle" and explaining how to go from A to B with a regular bike in the most obvious fashion...
I think it's great that someone is trying to make cooking more approachable by using 'geek jargon'. Who cares that it's slapping a different label on an old thing?
Confusion when you meet a chef and try to learn something or at least commiserate about cooking and what he calls a béchamel you try to provide ... a functional programing lambda statement based on map and reduce statements applied to lecithin proteins using heat as an anonymous lambda function. Sorta.
Fooling around as a mental exercise is fun. Hey look at this, a floating point multiplier in BF! The problem is mis categorizing or mis titleing it as "learning floating point math". Describe Ops activity as a "insights from looking at cooking thru a programming lens" would sell a lot smoother than learn to cook using c++ design patterns.
There is a minor area of danger in that there are many ways to hurt yourself cooking but working slowly with common sense should prevent serious accidents (I hope?) Perhaps a good analogy to "don't write your own crypto" would be "don't invent your own canning recipes" or "don't invent your own deep fat frying procedures (unless you like burn wards)"
There's tons of books about all the techniques you can use. When you understand some of the basic techniques, it's apparent what techniques are being used when you read a cook book. The problem is, even if you only got as technical as saying "make a velouté sauce" in half the cookbooks you see, then people would freak out if you didn't tell them how.
When you learn the fundamental techniques, you can easily extrapolate them and realize half the recipes you read in your cookbooks are (necessarily) overcomplicated and can be reduced (no pun intended) to a few techniques.
Jacque Pépin is an good resource for beginners and intermediate cooks to learn french techniques. You can find techniques online and in his book New Complete Techniques. The CIA book is good, but a big gripe with the CIA book and the FCI/ICC book (Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cooking) is that the portions are pretty huge because they are for professional chefs and caterers. That aside, they are still a good resource for learning that. IIRC the James Peterson "Cooking" book is pretty good at basic techniques.
The Joy of Cooking is still one of my favorites, because the recipes are basic (but delicious), and because it's a compendium of recipes, it builds on itself more than nearly every cookbook you can find. So the recipes include in the ingredients do say "2 cups béchamel (Page 400)", and you can backtrack to that recipe and learn.
One problem with these books people don't usually like is the basic recipe isn't often fancy enough to be novel. It's kind of up to the cook to understand "Oh Coca-Cola would be a good substitute for the acid and sugar here" or "maple syrup would be better than brown sugar here" or whatever.
For that, it's nice to have McGee's "On Food and Cooking", as it goes into details about ingredients you've never really thought about.