Makenna Held

Follow the recipe! Unlike what Colette says in Ratatouille, you don’t always need one. Cook Makenna Held (she/they) teaches just that, as well as being an author, steward of La Peetch, and CEO of Okay, Perfect, RecipeKick, and The Courageous Cooking School. Talk about wearing many (chef’s) hats! But before Makenna gives us an unconventional lesson on cooking, let’s see what her culinary journey looked like, how her school was created, and where Julia Child fits into all of this.

When did you fall in love with cooking? What was your culinary journey like?
I didn’t actually grow up cooking. My mother was a very adept cook, but between her work schedule and the homework load I navigated, I definitely didn’t cook in my “free time.” (Suffice to say I had none!) As a neurodivergent kid, I loved school but actually getting the work done was never easy. One summer, as an exchange student in France, I had a host mother who was a very talented cook. She cooked two full meals a day, and I, not being in full-time school, suddenly had time to watch her.

A few years later while in university, I fell back into cooking, when a girlfriend of mine came back from a summer in Italy with a “recipe,” if you could call it that, for what she called tomato cream.  It was an emulsion of tomato, basil, and lemon juice. That did me in. The next year, I got my first CSA share in a local farm to evade dorm food and was transfixed. I didn’t have access to cookbooks, and this was just a bit before the time of food blogs so I had no choice but to figure it out. I spent a fall cooking my way through pick-your-own-no-holds-barred heirloom tomatoes in a smattering of rainbow colors, and around 15 pounds of vegetables a week, many of which I didn’t even know what they were.

Tell us about the world’s first recipe-free cooking school. How did that come to be?
When I bought La Pitchoune, I knew that I couldn’t teach the recipes of yore from American Cookbooks in a modern, French food system. This meant Julia Child’s times, and the work of Simone Beck were both out of the question. Food systems change over the years, and so many decades later it felt off to be cooking from these older works. It didn’t seem right to force my idea of what is good taste on my guests, so I figured, “Wait! Maybe there’s a way to train cooks to think more like chefs!” It took about three years of trial and error, but during the COVID lockdown my husband and I built a pedagogy that not only made sense, but made cooking “anything, anytime” easier and more effective. It gives you a framework to understand how recipes function, and how deliciousness is constructed.

Speaking of Julia Child, the school started at her historic home. What impact did she have on you as a chef?
Ironically enough, Julia didn’t impact me much as a cook. I wish I could say she did, but I’m not even sure I had opened a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking when I bought La Pitchoune. But, she did influence me as a person deeply. I watched her cooking shows just to be in awe of her massive height being well-regarded on television. I was always tall, but I’m also above six feet, and have been since I was about 12. So, watching someone with her mannerisms (delightful but a bit awkward, in all the best ways), her height, and she was a star? That opened something up within me.

We’d love to learn how to cook without a recipe! How can we do that with the ingredients we already have in our kitchen?
The key is starting with a foundation. A key ingredient—say chicken, beef, beans, fish. Whatever it is you need to get rid of in your cupboard/pantry/fridge. Then, you need to decide “What do I want this ingredient to be?” So much of this is dictated by, “How much time do you actually have?” And from there, it’s about playing with layers of flavor and ingredients. My favorite way to check an idea is to pop four ingredients into a search engine and see what comes up. Early early on in my cooking life, this was the only way I could cook off the cuff. Building up to what we do at the Courageous Cooking School takes time! You’re not going to go from rigid recipe-following to recipe-free in two seconds. But this first step is how I recommend dipping your toe in. It also hones your intuition, because when you see that there are literally hundreds of people who came before you who thought this combo worked (or something similar), then you know you’re on the right track.