Recipes, Property, & a Mill

How do you feel about sharing or not sharing personal recipes? This little project of mine illustrates a bit of my position, and anyone who heard me pummel my way through my philosophy thesis knows something further on the subject. Generally speaking, intellectual property is private until--through personal choice or accident--it becomes subject to the information commons and is maintained by those interested in a particular field, in this case, cooking and baking especially. I may make a recipe, but that doesn't mean that even given the opportunity anyone else is going to make it. (I wonder, has anyone dabbled with any of recipes I have posted here? Laura P. made a remark that she was planning on it, but I do not know if that was followed through.)

Maintaining one's recipes privately is tough work. I may have a notebook to record and annotate recipes of my own (which I do), but a notebook is easily lost, damaged, stolen, or destroyed. A recipe made available to many people--via correspondence or publishing or a weblog--has the benefit of many different copies and is unlikely to vanish so completely. Many recipes are carried down family lines like oral histories and mythologies, a tradition that can maintain and disperse knowledge a little differently. Such a method preserves the knowledge within a specific group (a family) and can denote important events (like marriages or adoptions/births that invite new members into the group); it suggests unity and coherency to those groups in intellectual and social ways; it encourages pride and respect for and amidst the group, a reality which has fallen away in the economic North.

I choose (and generally support) an open method of recipe maintenance. Sharing recipes means enlivening them, encouraging innovation and creativity in others, and is part of maintaining the practice and skill of baking amongst others. Baking is almost necessarily experimental, as it depends on innumerable variables like ingredient specificities, humidity and pressure, temperature, equipment age and reliability, and so on. The practice of baking means learning about food (ingredients), a place (climate and weather), and tools (ovens, mostly), and therefore encourages a sort of rootedness to surroundings which I have appreciated and continued to discover, which I wish to witness and learn from in others.

Openness ought to have mechanisms that cite sources, the way one does when one writes an essay. I would hope that someone would not claim a recipe of mine as their own, though it makes absolute sense that the loaf of bread, cookies, scones, bars, brownies, or whatever is that person's, rooted as it is in the ingredients, equipment, place, and handiwork of that one person. Presently, I am learning more and more about baking sweets, which I have not generally done before. In so doing, I am using the knowledge and insights of others more skilled than myself. "Why yes, I made those brownies. I started out with a recipe from Oprah's website." I made the recipe a bit more of my own and have further work to do--particularly when I learn to use a different oven or have different ingredients--but the recipe is heavily inspired by this one. I don't just start from scratch when I begin a recipe, I have the work of innumerable other bakers on whom I can rely and from whom I can learn. If I can be like that for others, then I am thrilled to do so.

I am also looking for a grain mill, both a kitchen one and probably a smaller commercial one.

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Spicy Brownies

Preheat oven to 350 F and line a 9x9 brownie pan, preferably with butter. Blend together dry ingredients in a medium bowl:

3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 & 1/2 Tbsp cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp cayenne pepper
2 Tbsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp dried ground ginger

Notes: For a sweeter and smoother brownie, go with all or partially white flour instead of whole wheat flour, which is what I like to use for its substance and texture. Also, you can go with more cayenne and ginger for spicier brownies, but these are also expensive ingredients so I will likely limit their use for the present.

3/4 cups butter
6 oz bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks (60-80% cacoa content, Adrienne suggests Black and Gold's)
1 cup brown sugar

In a large pan, melt butter over medium heat, then turn to low and add chocolate. Stir chocolate regularly to prevent burning and scrape bottom to loosen any pieces there. (This can be done with a double boiler, but I don't have one and didn't want to juryrig one, so I was careful with low heat.) When chocolate is melted and mixed, remove from heat before gradually stirring in the brown sugar. Then allow to cool at least ten minutes.

2 or 3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Note: If using hearty eggs (firm orange yolks, usually from local, cage-free sources), cut down to two. These are rich brownies and three "regular" eggs (of which I don't approve) was a little too much. Also, from here on out, be careful of overmixing. Blend ingredients just enough and no further to achieve the right consistency.

In the pan, stir in eggs and vanilla just enough to blend. Fold in dry ingredients and stop once they are incorporated. Pour out into greased pan and bake fro 24-30 minutes, checking with a toothpick (if it comes out with dry crumbs or clean, it is done).

1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp powdered sugar

Blend cinnamon and sugar. Once they brownies are cooled, sprinkle the mixture on top. Do not cut the brownies until they have completely cooled. Also, the spiciness picks up gradually over time, so they are not very hot when they are fresh, but are pleasantly so after eight or twelve hours. Enjoy!

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Oh, and Adrienne, sorry for the delays in posting.