No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice

Reading the title of this trade paperback volume, No Recipe, you would think it’s all about free-style cooking. In a way, it is. Author Edward Espe Brown, a Zen Buddhist priest as well as an accomplished cook and cooking teacher, writes not so much to cooks but to those who would like to enrich their lives with the spiritual, particularly through the Buddhist philosophy of life. Brown’s teaching is to consider work as a spiritual practice, in particular in the kitchen, and to consider the kitchen, pots and pans, knives and kitchen tools, as sacred. If the kitchen is not a sacred space for you, stay out of it. His philosophy may be best summarized by this quote: the book is “one offering teaching for bringing alive your own source of sacredness.” The book is made up of many, many essays, some merely a half a page, loosely connected from chapter to chapter but mostly connected to food and cooking. As an example, Brown was a vegetarian for many years, and he describes his eventual transition into eating meat. The book is filled with quotes from Zen masters, some dating back to the thirteenth century. This book is for those who believe in the spiritual.