Simplicity is the best recipe for Nigella
OnCe, for reasons i no longer recall, i made my own tomato ketchup. i do remember that the lengthy list of ingredients included the improbably named mace.
This required a long trek to a Mexican delicatessen, looked like mouse droppings and added about two hours to the whole operation. The resulting orange gloop was not my finest culinary hour. And so i must say i have some sympathy with nigella Lawson, pictured, who this week published her latest cookery book, At My Table.
The recipes, we have been told, are simple. Hurrah! Recipes that don’t involve traversing health food shops for amaranth and wheat berries, or spending four hours boiling a wild boar for just the right kind of stock, or baking a cake that looks like a watermelon because that’s how they did it on Bake Off.
for me, when it comes to the kitchen, simple sounds heaven. Yet many have criticised Lawson’s recipes for their simplicity, with comments on her website, where she has been posting recipes ahead of the book launch, saying there should be more ingredients, or why not just go to the shops instead?
i beg to disagree. As someone who has long loved to cook – and as a youthful kitchen experimenter was prone to ludicrously complex concoctions such as the aforementioned tomato ketchup – there comes a time in one’s cooking life when it becomes painfully obvious that less is more. Life is too short to make a soufflé, or clarified butter, or your own pasta with one of those clunky machines you use once, then stuff away at the back of the cupboard. food and cooking should be a pleasure and, while so many cook books these days seem to pride themselves on ingredient lists that run across two pages, it feels refreshing that Lawson, who is always careful to describe herself as a home cook yet has 11 books under her belt, is going in the other direction. We are, for the most part, a nation of timepoor multi-taskers. Cooking feels like something which ought to be simplified, not made more complex.
AMOnG the most frustrating elements of the clean eating fad which has gripped the nation in recent years is the labour-intensive, utensil-heavy nature of the dishes. Who has the time (or, quite frankly, the inclination) to make spiralised courgette?
Who wants to be knocking out a chia seed pudding for breakfast at 11.30 the night before? And who in their right mind is making dehydrated kale chips? Compared to that sort of bland and exhausting nonsense, i’ll take Lawson’s toasted brie, Parma ham and fig sandwich, thanks.
Oftentimes it is about quality. As long as you’ve got a high standard of ingredients, and you have a reasonable idea of what you’re doing, you can make the most simple of dishes taste superb. The italians have known this for generations. i’m glad Lawson has worked it out, too.