Can a recipe teach you to cook? Ryle, written instructions and knowing how

Every new cook who joins my kitchen arrives with a phone full of recipes. Every one of them, in their first week, ruins something by following a recipe exactly.

This is not because the recipes are bad. Some of them are mine. It is because the most important words in any recipe are the ones that cannot be followed: "season to taste", "cook until golden", "add enough stock to loosen". Each of these phrases quietly assumes that the reader can already do the thing the recipe is supposed to teach. I have spent fifteen years watching cooks cross the gap between reading a recipe and cooking a dish, and I have come to think it is one of the clearest windows onto an old argument in philosophy.

Ryle's two kinds of knowing

In 1945 the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave a paper called "Knowing How and Knowing That", and he developed the idea in The Concept of Mind (1949). His target was what he called the "intellectualist legend": the idea that every intelligent action is the result of first consulting some piece of knowledge-that, a rule or a fact, and then applying it.

Ryle's objection was a regress. If doing something intelligently always required first considering a rule, then considering the rule intelligently would require another rule about how to consider rules, and so on forever. No one would ever do anything. So at some point intelligence must show itself directly in the doing. Knowing how to ride a bicycle, tell a joke or cook rice is not a matter of having stored the right propositions. It is a capacity, displayed in performance.

Every chef has met Ryle's regress in the flesh. Tell a new cook "season to taste" and he asks how much salt. Tell him "half a teaspoon" and he follows it, and the dish is still wrong, because today's tomatoes are sweeter than yesterday's. Give him a rule for adjusting to the tomatoes and he will need a rule for judging the tomatoes. At some point the instructions run out and he has to taste and decide. That is the moment he starts to cook.

The other side

Not everyone agrees with Ryle. In 2001 Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson published a paper arguing that knowing how is in fact a species of knowing that. To know how to make a hollandaise, on their account, is to know, of some way of making it, that it is a way you could make it. What makes this knowledge practical is not that it is a different kind of knowledge, but that you grasp the fact in a practical way, roughly as something you could do.

I resisted this at first, as a cook. Then I thought about the best recipes I know. Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) is full of exact propositions: proportions, temperatures, orders of work. A cook who knows them knows more than one who doesn't, and the knowledge is clearly knowledge-that. The intellectualists have a point. Much of what makes a good cook is facts, and facts can be written down.

What Stanley and Williamson's view seems to me to need, though, is that strange qualification: grasping the fact in a practical way. In my kitchen that qualification is the whole job. The fact "the butter should be added slowly enough that the emulsion holds" is easy to state. Grasping it practically means having a wrist that knows what "slowly enough" feels like when the sauce starts to tighten. You can state the fact to a beginner. You cannot hand him the grasp.

What the kitchen adds

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi had a phrase for this: we can know more than we can tell. He called it tacit knowledge, and his examples were exactly the kind of thing kitchens run on: recognising a face, riding a bicycle, a doctor's feel for a diagnosis. I would add the smell of onions just before they catch.

But I think the kitchen also shows something Ryle and Polanyi sometimes underplay. Tacit knowledge is not private or mysterious. It is taught every day, just not by writing. A senior cook stands next to a junior one and says "now", "not yet", "smell that". Aristotle said we become builders by building, and he was right, but no one becomes a builder alone. Hicham's thread on apprentices copying his mistakes describes the same thing from the workshop. Know-how is passed on through a kind of shared attention, where the master points and the apprentice learns what to notice.

That is why I don't think a recipe is useless. It is a reminder written by someone who already knows how, for someone who is learning. It fixes the facts so the learner's attention can go where it matters. A good recipe is like a map drawn by a local: it marks the roads, and leaves the walking to you.

So, can a recipe teach you to cook?

My answer, after fifteen years, is: a recipe can teach you what to cook, and some of how. It cannot teach you when. "When" is the word that every recipe hides inside "until golden" and "to taste", and "when" is learned only by doing the thing beside someone who knows. The card on theories of knowledge treats knowledge mostly as justified belief about facts. My kitchen is a reminder that there is another kind, and that it smells better.

On Friday night I will put a new cook on the sauce station. He has the recipe on his phone. By ten o'clock I hope he won't need it.