Most of a recipe pretends to know your kitchen. Your oven runs true, your lemons are ordinary lemons, your onion is the size of the writer’s onion, and twenty minutes means the same twenty minutes in both houses. Then, near the end, it says season to taste, and the pretending stops. It is the one instruction that admits the writer can’t finish the dish from where they are sitting, so they hand you the spoon. It is also the one line in any cookbook I could never follow, which may be why it reads to me as the most honest sentence on the page.