The Hollow Knock and Other Soundsin Recipes

WHEN WERE YOU LAST INSTRUCTED to listen to your cooking?Recipes are filled with sensory directions related to taste,

appearance, texture, and smell. “Always taste as you cook,” thecelebrity chefs proclaim. Sauté onions until translucent; bakea cake until golden on top. Rub flour and butter through yourfingers until they feel like breadcrumbs. A pie is ready whenyou can smell it. But what about the sound of food cooking?

We certainly have an ear out when we prepare meals,whether it is waiting for the pasta water to boil, a poppingtoaster (or better still, champagne cork), or heaven forbid, themicrowave beep. In her sensory memoir Aphrodite, the novel-ist Isabel Allende (1999: 110) contends that the sounds of cook-ing and eating can be incredibly aphrodisiac: the hissing ofonions browning, the syncopated rhythm of vegetable chop-ping, the crrracking of nuts, “the liquid notes” of wine beingdecanted, and so on, stirring luscious thoughts.

For the professional cook, listening to cooking sounds canbe life-saving. In Kitchen Confidential Anthony Bourdain(2001: 224) describes the daily cacophony of restaurant kitch-ens, including “the loud, yelping noise—almost a shriek—asa glowing sizzle-platter is dropped into a full pot sink, thepounding of the meat mallet on a côte du boeuf, the smack asfinished plates hit the ‘window’.” In the professional kitchen,sounds help staff to know what is going on around them, with-out having to always look up from their chopping board.

Sounds are important when serving restaurant meals frontof house too. Heston Blumenthal, who argues that hearing isthe most undervalued sense in terms of food, uses sounds toenhance the taste of his restaurant dish “Sounds of the Sea.”The dish is an edible reenactment of a sandy shore, made of,

among other ingredients, ground ice-cream cones, abalone,seaweed, and shellfish foam. The tasty beach is served withan iPod in a conch shell. As they eat, diners listen to lappingwaves and the occasional squawk of a seagull, sounds whichBlumenthal suggests enhance the enjoyment of the dish. Inthe introduction to his cookbook Heston Blumenthal at Home(Blumenthal 2011), the chef advocates for making food that ap-peals to the senses, and describes some of the ways in whichthe amateur cook can use sound to enhance the flavors oftheir lovingly prepared meal: a crackling fire to accompanyChristmassy dishes for example, or recordings of the soundsof cicadas to enhance a BBQ.

Although sounds are certainly part of the everyday and pro-fessional cooking and eating experience, they largely disappearonce all of these noisy dishes are written up in recipe books.While cookery shows on television may use sounds in order tosubstitute for olfactory, tactile, and gustatory experiences inevoking the deliciousness of their dishes (Mak 2006), very fewcookbook instructions appeal for listening in. Just as in recipes,the academic literature on sensory education focuses on learn-ing to see (e.g., Grasseni 2004), learning to do manual tasks(e.g., Sennett 2008), learning to smell (e.g., Latour 2004),learning to taste (e.g., Shapin 2012), but much less often onlearning to listen (an excellent exception being Tom Rice’s[2013] work about English medical students learning to listento heart sounds).

The research group I belonged to at Maastricht Universityaimed to address this gap by looking at how sonic skills aretaught and used in different professions and domains of prac-tice, such as by car mechanics, doctors, and scientists. Our

Abstract: Recipes are filled with sensory directions related to taste,appearance, texture, and smell, but less often to the sounds of food cook-ing. While cooking and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, arerecognized as sonic experiences, we are rarely specifically instructed to“listen in.” Some scholars argue that such skills cannot be written intorecipes, but rather must be passed on in practice. While I largely agreewith this claim, I was challenged to find exceptions in cookbooks. In this

essay, I discuss some of the few but delightful examples of sonic instruc-tion in recipes. I conclude that while sounds are rare in cookbooks, asthese examples show, listening is a skill that provides valuable informa-tion in the kitchen.

Keywords: sound, recipes, cookbooks, senses, skills

RESEARCH BRIEF | Anna Harris

GASTRONOMICA: THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES, VOL. 15, NUMBER 4, PP. 14–17, ISSN 1529-3262, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2015 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR

PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS’S RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS WEBSITE, HTTP://WWW.UCPRESSJOURNALS.COM/REPRINTINFO.ASP. DOI: 10.1525/GFC.2015.15.4.14.

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ethnographic and historical research showed that skills arepassed on in an apprenticeship-style fashion, where expertsteach novices, the novices learning through repeated practicein their occupational settings. The anthropologist Tim Ingold(2000) writes theoretically about this process when he de-scribes learning a skill as a process of guided rediscovery.

Ingold’s (2010) work is highly relevant for these musings onsound and food, for he also talks about listening while cookingto show how skills can only be passed on through practice. Heuses the example of cracking an egg, no easy task he states, forit is difficult to obtain that clean crack, of sufficient extent toenable you to split the shell into two halves, and thus releasethe contents neatly in the bowl. The force cannot be toolight or too great; either will mean an eggy mess. What addsdifficulty is that no two eggs are alike. How do you knowthe thickness of an egg’s shell, to know how hard to hit it?There is a trick Ingold (2010) tells us during a lecture inLondon, that we often use without being aware: “First tapthe egg lightly against the edge of the bowl. Listen for thesound. This will tell you how hard to strike next time, so asto achieve a clean crack. Bum bum. Thin shells andthick shells sound differently when they are tapped.” Ingoldargues that such skills cannot be learned from cookbooks,but rather through learning by doing, through guided instru-ction by experts, with sensory awareness of one’s materialenvironment.

While I largely agree with Ingold’s theorization of enskill-ment, as my historian colleague and I have argued elsewhere(Harris and van Drie, forthcoming), novices can also learnhow to listen by using books. Upon hearing Ingold’s eggexample, I felt challenged to find instances where the skill oflistening may be evident in recipes. After some research I found

a few delightful exceptions to the otherwise sensory dominanceof taste, sight, touch, and smell in cookbook instructions.

Let’s start with a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, in any one of herIndian cookbooks. Before you know it you are waiting for apop! as mustard seeds are heated in oil. Until they pop, mus-tard seeds give away nothing but bitterness, the pop releasingall their nutty goodness into the oil, just as a corn kernel is onlya broken tooth waiting to happen until it pops into flower.

Sichuan and Cantonese cooking also rely on the chef at-tending to sounds connecting hot oil and fresh ingredients, thistime with a sizzle. Sizzles infuse Fuchsia Dunlop’s (2013: 159)Every Grain of Rice, as hot oil is poured over dishes of blanchedchoy sum or chopped ginger and chili. She advises to ladle onlya few drops at first: once you hear that the sizzle is “vigorous”the rest of the oil can be poured over.

In The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whitting-stall (2004: 330-331) dedicates a few paragraphs to the differencebetween the “merry sizzle” and the “gentle sizzle,” sounds thatcan be used not only to test the temperature of a pan but alsoto determine how long a steak has been cooking. In the samecarnivorous volume, Fearnley-Whittingstall (2004: 246) sharestechniques for roasting duck, one of which involves (followingStephen Bull) turning the duck breast-side down on a boardand pressing “hard on the middle of the backbone until youhear a crack.” Cracks and crackles can be heard in various rec-ipes, although perhaps the crackliest of all, crackling, does notrely on the cook actually testing its sound qualities but ratherlooking to see if the pig fat is roasted adequately to cause somefurther dental destruction.

Similarly, recipes that instruct to cook vegetables so thatthey remain crunchy rely on a visual assessment of the sound,rather than the cook actually putting a boiling hot carrot intotheir mouth and listening in. Words such as “sizzle” and“crunch” are interesting to think about, for they defy easy cat-egorization as sounds, also including elements of touch andsight in their informative nature. This observation is congruentwith the arguments of phenomenologists such as philosopherMaurice Merleau-Ponty (2008 [1945]) who posit that all sen-sory experience is intertwined. Rather than consider eyes orears as “separate keyboards for the registration of sensation”(Ingold 2000: 268), they regard them as organs of the body asa whole. Phenomenologists argue that the lived body does nothave senses but rather is sensible.

Making bread is a good example of the multisensorality andsensibility required in cooking and baking. Starting fromscratch involves skills in smelling yeast mixtures, kneadingdough, watching for rise, and of course, the sound of a well-baked loaf: the hollow knock. Knocking on a loaf of bread tosee if it is ready is another one of those rare times the novice

FIGURE 1: Cookbooks with sonic recipes.PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS FULLER © 2015

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cook is explicitly instructed to listen to their cooking. Such amysterious sound, this hollow knock! And one which dividesthe cookbook writers.

Elizabeth David’s (2010 [1977]) instructions for her basic loafin English Bread and Yeast Cookery suggest to tap the sides andbottom crust with one’s knuckles, to test for a resonant soundwhich shows it is sufficiently baked. Nigella Lawson loves theknock too, and recommends that budding domestic gods andgoddesses check for the hollow noise. Others, however, find thisinstruction completely illogical. In Bread Matters, AndrewWhitely (2009: 102) bemoans the technique: “far too sub-jective,” he writes, “most loaves when tapped on the bottomsound ‘hollow’; other signs are more helpful.” Later he goes on(Whitely 2009: 122): “There is hardly a recipe book that doesn’tsuggest tapping a loaf on its bottom to check whether it is prop-erly baked. The hollow sound is supposed to be the clue. Thereis nothing wrong with this, and indeed I find myself doing itinstinctively: after all, a gentle pat on the bottom is a satisfyinggesture of intimacy and approval. The problem is determiningwhat ‘hollow’ really sounds like.”

Indeed, this is a problem that has vexed many an onlinefood forum discussant, with one motivated baker even tryingto record some knocking sounds to help those completely un-aware (Freshly Baked 2012). Unlike meat thermometers orkitchen scales, there is no easy way to quantify sound on ascale of “hollowness.” This is a dilemma of sharing soundmore generally. Many have attempted to address this conun-drum not only by making recordings of sounds for pedagogi-cal purposes, but also through visualizing sound in graphs orpictures or trying to mimic or gesture sounds (Harris and vanDrie, forthcoming). It is difficult to be told, and to tell, what

you are going to hear. The doctors I studied found it difficultto recognize lung sounds without listening to many exam-ples, on CDs, online, in patients, as well as their own. Likedoctors who learn by repeated practice, bakers learn whathollow bread sounds like by knocking other hollow thingsand caressing many bread bottoms. The written instructionsneed to be tied into past and ongoing practical experience.

I remember my first hollow knock on bread. The ovenalarm had shattered my afternoon doze. Stepping throughthe kitchen filled with soft smells, I peered through the splat-tered oven door. The loaf I had been caring for all day, myfirst ever, had risen to a majestic yeasty height. I was proud ofmy efforts so far. I had managed to keep my starter alive,kneaded and folded the dough according to the illustrationsin the recipe, and now had a nice-looking loaf glowing in theoven. Was it ready though?

I had read in my cookbook about the knock, and tried it.It was a disappointment. Besides a set of scorched knuckles Iwas none the wiser, and had trouble deciphering any differ-ence each time the loaf was brought out of the oven. But Ihad begun to learn the gesture, and when learning to cookthat is an important starting point. Learning to listen is notjust about the sounds, but the techniques too.

From my sonic exploration of cookbooks, I can concludethat while there are some wonderful examples, instructions forlistening are scarce. Perhaps sounds are considered “too sub-jective,” as Whitely states, to provide information, comparedto other sensory inputs. The hollow knock represents a partic-ularly well-discussed case of the difficulties and controversiesof listening to sounds of food, although other examples, such asthe sizzle, crack, or even tapping to hear for a dead oyster, may

FIGURE 3: Skating butter.PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS FULLER © 2015

FIGURE 2: The hollow knock.PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS FULLER © 2015

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be less fraught. Perhaps we don’t have the same vocabulary forsounds in cooking to describe what we hear, as for other sensoryexperiences. Or as Ingold claims, such skills cannot be written incookbooks but need to be passed on in person.

Does the rarity, the debatable nature, and the difficulty ofusing sound in recipes to instruct the cook mean that weshould abandon our ears altogether? Of course not! Cookingis filled with a chorus of little ditties waiting to be listened to:the satisfying springtime snap of asparagus spears; the skatingfizz of butter in a pan; each glop glop of plopping porridge.Ingredients like sugar snap peas and parsnips, chitterlings andsquabs are practically creating their own jaunty tunes on thepage. As the instances of popping, cracking, and sizzling inthis piece have shown, sounds can reveal a lot to the cook. Sogo on, next time you are in the kitchen, have a closer listen.As the old radio jingle for a particularly sonorific rice break-fast cereal suggests, “if you’ve never heard food talking, nowis your chance.”

Acknowledgments

The first draft of this article was written while I was employed atMaastricht University, the Netherlands, on the “Sonic Skills:Sound and Listening in the Development of Science, Technol-ogy, Medicine (1920–Now)” project funded by NWO, from aVici Grant awarded to Karin Bijsterveld. I am grateful to theGastronomica team for their help in putting this article togetherand to the anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments.My thanks also to all of my foodie friends in Melbourne fortheir sonic anecdotes and especially to Thomas Fuller for every-thing he taught me about baking bread, for helping me readthrough bread baking books, and for the photographs.

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———. “To Learn Is to Improvise a Movement Along a Way of Life.”Lecture delivered at the LSE Department of Anthropology onApril 27, 2010. Accessed August 10, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDaaPaK-N5o.

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