THE SUNDAY COOK From recipe robot to creative cook

*** Have you become a slave to your cookbooks? explains how to gain the confidence to be more imaginative in the kitchen TESTING YOUR WAY TO TARTNESS STEPHEN HARRIS: HOW I BECAME A CHEF MY TIPS FOR HOME COOKS

I’m appraising the contents of my fridge. There’s beef that I meant to braise with carrots and Guinness (only I forgot to buy the Guinness). There’s half a jar of anchovies I ought to finish, a huge bunch of parsley, and a tub of cottage cheese threatening to go off.

How could these all fit together? I don’t usually think about dumplings – I wasn’t brought up eating them – but I learnt how to make cottage cheese versions last year and the parsley would be lovely in them (I wonder if I’ve got any horseradish? That would work too). Or I could braise the beef with celery and anchovies – the latter will melt, making a deeply umami sauce (anchovy haters never know they’re there). Maybe a gremolata (chopped parsley, lemon zest, garlic) to throw over the beef with anchovies, or dumplings with gremolata flecked through them.

Supper has gone from what I was intending to make, to quite an Eastern European dish, to quite an Italian one, to something that comes from my head. But it’s basically the braised beef I learnt to make when I was 15. I have blueprints for certain dishes, then adapt them to what ingredients I have or what I feel like. This doesn’t make me a chef but a good home cook, and there are millions like me.

So how does this happen? How do we become more creative cooks?

In a year of books rich in “thinking” about food as well as telling people how to make it, several writers have tackled this question. Niki Segnit’s Lateral Cooking (Bloomsbury, £35), isn’t structured the way most “how to” cookbooks are (with sections on braising, pastry making and roasting), but groups together recipes and techniques that form what she calls “continuums” that move you from one basic recipe – a loaf of white bread, for instance – on to ever more complicated dishes. From that loaf you can make soft milky bread rolls and, eventually, panettone and rum baba. But the starting point of flour, yeast and water is the same for all. Off-shoots spread like winding lanes from each continuum. From dough you learn how to make Arabic flatbread and crackers. The dishes do get progressively more difficult (I can confirm that panettone is far harder to pull off than basic white bread), but you don’t have to go in a straight line. You can amble down the smaller paths, acquiring knowledge as you go.

Segnit got into cooking in her 20s but found it difficult to adapt recipes. A “recipe robot” is how she describes it. “I would have consulted a book to make vinaigrette,” she says. Lateral Cooking was a book she needed, comprising the basics with developments of, and variations on, a theme. “I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I had to do it for myself,” she admits.

Telegraph food writer Xanthe Clay wrote a less complex version of this approach in Recipes to Know by Heart (Mitchell Beazley) 10 years ago, sharing core recipes that could be adapted to different seasons and flavours. “The aim was to give people the confidence to cook without a book,” she says. “Chilli con carne, ragu bolognese and Indian keema are all cooked following the same principles: sautéing the base vegetables, browning the meat, the addition of liquid and flavourings, slow cooking to a savoury mass. So if you can knock up a spag bol, you can do all the others. Recipes are a language: if you can learn the culinary grammar, you can cook whatever you want.”

This is the way, she explains, that you can cook every day by just buying what you like the look of. “You might spot some mushrooms, velvety fresh, the kind that make you excited about cooking. It’s no good buying some, going home and scouring cookery books – you might not have the other ingredients, or have the time or energy for browsing. But if you know how to make risotto, you can buy your mushrooms, saunter home and make supper. Knowledge is power. You buy, you cook, you conquer.”

When I interviewed Nigella Lawson recently, she talked about how easy it was to replicate recipes without ever learning to cook. She described a dinner party she attended many years ago, where a friend produced course after course of complex food. Eventually, silence fell as the diners heard a noise coming from the kitchen. It was the poor ambitious host, crying into her cookbook.

Lawson’s classic first book, How to Eat, has just been reissued ( Vintage Classics, £14.99), 20 years after it was first published. In the title lies the key. The book is not called “How to Cook” because, as Lawson writes in the introduction, learning to eat – wanting to eat – is where it all starts.

“Cooking [...] is about a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple

‘I have blueprints for making certain dishes, then I adapt them to what ingredients I have’

Taste with your brain: I learnt this from chef and cookery teacher Barny Haughton. Think hard: how will it taste with a little more salt or a pinch of sugar? Add it, taste again. How does it, in fact, taste? Heat is a really important ingredient, and so is time. When you are browning meat or vegetables, allow them to get a really good, deep colour. Cream, lemon juice and salt are your friends: if food tastes dull, one of these will generally sort it. You don’t always have to cook something new: if you cooked something delicious last time your friends came over, they’ll be delighted to eat it again.

Sunday 28 October 2018