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CHEF once told me that cooking is like painting: you need to be able to draw your own hand before you can paint a masterpiece. He meant that there are basic rules you need to learn, those pillars that hold up the walls of any type of cooking, before you begin to experiment.

I knew what he meant, having ruined many a dish by throwing in any old thing, not letting the onions soften properly, baking at the wrong temperature and making other fundamental errors. (There was also that one time when salt went into scones instead of flour, but that was an honest juvenile mistake.)

Cooking, if you ask me, can equally be compared to the art of writing: you need to know the basic rules of grammar before constructing something memorable with words.

We grammar pedants are often derided for our insistence on using the right parts of speech and putting the punctuation marks in the right places, but spend any time in a professional kitchen and you’ll find chefs are far more picky about what goes where, when and how. And with equally good reason.

The result, for the person who eats what a good chef has prepared, is a delicious and fulfilling experience. The same goes for reading a book that a writer has laboured over, using the correct tools and following a set of established rules in order to create a text of beauty and clarity.

When following a recipe, success depends on the combination of ingredients, the amount of each ingredient and the order in which they are added to the mix.

The same goes for writing. It’s all very well knowing your parts of speech, but knowing where to put them is also helpful, as is a sense of measurement — the overuse of adjectives has ruined many an otherwise sound piece of writing, as has the overzealous use of salt in scones.

The mystery, in both cooking and grammar — against which rookies in both disciplines often rail — is who made up the rules, and why can’t they be changed?

Neither the basics of food preparation nor the fundamentals of grammar are arbitrary. Both have evolved through centuries of trial and error. They must of course sometimes be broken and changed — otherwise we’d still be eating raw meat and communicating in grunts — but they exist to guide us away from hellish food and distasteful sentences.

One of the rules of good writing is to avoid clichés, hackneyed phrases you have read so many times they have lost all meaning. “Cook up a storm” is a case in point. Some might argue that following the rules of flavour combinations in various types of cooking is simply repeating a cliché, that one should venture beyond the known in order to create something fresh and visionary.

Again, food and language are not dissimilar. Using the existing rules (I almost wrote “‘tried and tested”, but that would be a cliché) does not necessarily mean blind repetition of what others have done. You can ice a cake in imaginative colours, patterns and shapes no one has seen before, but it still has to taste like a cake when you eat it.

There is also the matter of individual preference. Some people like pineapple on pizza. Some put chilli on their cornflakes. No one has the right to declare a chef inept because he loves the taste of peanut butter on sardines, or a writer useless because of her predilection for split infinitives and dangling participles.

In cooking, as in writing, the rules are never static. But it helps to know them before you break them. Here are two tiny tips: never add oregano to a Thai curry. And try to avoid starting a sentence with “and”. LS