Like everyone else working in media, I get a lot of publicity pitches. So many people are trying to sell something, or someone, and during cookbook preview season, it’s often both. One pitch I’ve been getting throughout the first three months of 2025 is for Mostly French, a cookbook written by Makenna Held, a “visionary” business owner and “culinary trailblazer” (to quote the publicity parlance), who runs the Courageous Cooking School out of La Pitchoune, Julia Child’s former vacation home in the South of France.
Held bills Courageous as “the world’s first recipe-free cooking school,” where for $11,000 ($14,000 if you want your own room), students spend a week learning how to “think more like a chef” in their own kitchens. Among other things, this entails learning classic French techniques and “how to turn them on their heads so you can create an infinitesimal [sic] amount of dishes.” I’m not here to drag someone’s cooking school, though it is interesting to me that a) a person whose brand is built on eschewing recipes is now trying to sell a cookbook full of... very traditional recipes, and b) the introduction to said cookbook manages to shoehorn the occasion of the 2015 Paris terrorist attack into the author’s successful quest to purchase real estate.
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What I’m more interested in is Held’s theory that “the home cook never really ‘learns’ how to cook, but simply how to continue following instructions of others in the kitchen.” The implication here is that following instructions negates learning, when in fact the two things frequently coexist so closely as to be inextricable from one another. (Even in following an Ikea manual, for example, I have learned to construct something resembling furniture.) Second, Held’s theory highlights the exhausting amount of energy spent in the name of making home cooking less intimidating or simply more feasible.
The latter is, to be clear, a worthwhile goal — I’d also love to see more people at ease in their kitchens, unburdened by the fallacy that a meal has to be perfect and/or Instagram-pretty to be legitimate. But most cookbooks have this goal at their heart: It’s a rare author who seeks to estrange their reader from the kitchen. Permission to improvise is likewise implicit in many of these books, along with the desire to share knowledge. It feels safe to assert that the majority of authors include recipes in order to help their readers, well, learn. Held’s theory of the cook forever stymied by “the instructions of others” feels both condescending and out of touch with the purpose recipes serve for many people.
A more charitable interpretation of this statement is that there’s a difference between learning to cook and simply following recipes, and yes, there absolutely is. And I agree with Held’s assertion that “so much of cooking happens outside the columns of a recipe.” But telling the average home cook that they’ve actually never really learned how to cook because of their adherence to what happens inside of those columns does not feel helpful. Perhaps it’s best to seek inspiration from La Pitchoune’s former resident, Child herself, by working both inside and outside those columns, and remembering that embracing the art and science of cooking is not an either-or-proposition.
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