Sarah Moss: My son is moving abroad but I couldn’t oblige his poignant parting request

One of my sons is moving abroad next month. As you’d hope, he’s excited; as you’d hope, I’m trying to treasure these weeks without being sentimental.I was moved when he asked me to write recipes for some of the food I’ve made all his life. There are recipes everywhere, I said, let me send you some links, we can take photos of my cookbooks. I know, he said, but you don’t follow recipes and I want to make what you make.I do sometimes follow recipes, more or less, at least the first time I make a dish, though often if I trust a recipe against my better judgment, I turn out to be right. My default is to reduce sugar and take any structural consequences, to halve the yeast and extend the rising time of most yeast-raised recipes (it tastes better and is more digestible). I use oil and salt according to my judgment, whatever the recipe says; restaurant chefs in particular mandate extraordinary quantities of both. I don’t measure much, because I know how much my family eats and which vegetables will be best eaten today. I cook things until they’re cooked to my liking.Anyone who cooks frequently knows that listed “preparation times” seem to assume professional knife skills and a sous-chef whisking boards and pans around for you. Baking recipes will often call for “soft butter” and “room temperature eggs”, which is all very well if you read the recipe several hours before you start cooking and no one helpfully puts away the butter and eggs you left on the counter. (I put them in the oven for a few minutes as it starts to heat up, which is also how I melt butter and chocolate as required.)READ MOREWrite down the muffins and cookies, my son asked. I’ve made American muffins and cookies most weeks for 25 years. Having grown up in a household where sugar and cake and biscuits were forbidden and longed-for, feared and desired, I wanted my kids to have an easy relationship with all food. No food was moralised. There was no guilt. We didn’t have “treats” or “healthy eating”, just food, to give you nourishment and pleasure. All of which works well enough if the food is indeed nutritious and pleasant. (And if this all sounds like insufferable parenting, at least part of the advantage for me was that I could be in the kitchen getting stuff done instead of on the floor pushing toy cars about while time dripped away; in motherhood, as the rest of life, I find it easier to be productive than patient.) [ Sarah Moss on audiobooks: I’m happy for readers and listeners to meet my writing in whatever form suitsOpens in new window ]The muffins are made with wholegrain flour, not much sugar, some olive oil, an egg, yoghurt or buttermilk or milk-on-the-turn and whatever fruit wants using up. Spices, nuts, seeds. The cookies start with half peanut butter, half butter or olive oil, add an egg or two or some chia seeds, not much sugar, enough wholegrain flour and oats to make the right texture, chopped dark chocolate, nuts, whatever else seems good. I must have had base recipes some time but they’re long-forgotten. I don’t measure anything, and the oven’s thermometer is so unreliable I ignore it.Despite making my living as a writer, I can’t write these recipes. For me, cooking is mostly a sensory process. How does it look and smell? What sounds are in the pan? What can you feel at the other end of the wooden spoon, what kind of resistance does the knife meet? Do you want consistent or contrasting textures, subtle or strong flavours?The earliest cookbook I own, Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife of 1727, thinks along these lines. Smith was one of the first recipe-writers to give consistent weights and measures and to assume that her readers had kitchen scales, but even so she also expects full sensory engagement in the kitchen. “Salt it to your taste,” she says. “Stew all these together until it is tender.” “When it is enough, turn it.” “Take almonds, blanch and beat them till they have done shining.” Most of this cooking is done with a “quick”, “slow” or “bright” fire, and suggested timings are vague and always qualified by the appearance, texture, smell or sound awaited.Maybe this kind of cooking, this way of being around food that is about bodies and feelings rather than measurements and clock time, is necessarily the work of experience rather than reading. For cooks and eaters, it seems to me one of the more important things to pass on.