my grandma would routinely take her own cooking book, open it, read the recipe carefully and then do something entirely fucking random and say ‘if this works i hope i remember to write it down’.

This is how I cook lmao. Just look at some recipes for the general idea then do whatever I feel like instead. It generally works: cooking is easy as long as you know your ingredients and balance the flavors.

and yet at the same time she was also intransigent with some things. ‘this is the best method to peel eggs wow you didn’t listen to me time to kill myself’, for an example.

Lmao I’m also absolutely stuck on certain methodologies that I’ve found to work better than anything else, although most of those are knife safety things where if someone does it wrong I get anxious because it’s dangerous, to the point that I’ll insist on taking the knife away from them and chopping or peeling something myself if they won’t hold it right.