CHEF’S ONE-POT PLOT
Unfortunately I have to reveal news of yet another conspiracy this morning. One that, sadly, is being perpetuated by, among others, the very food supplement you are now reading.
Those behind it are so brazen they make no attempt at camouflage — the signs of their plotting are clearly visible on almost every page. Turn to a recipe. Any recipe. What’s the first thing you notice? Exactly. A list of incomprehensible figures and mysterious abbreviations.
It usually goes something like this: 15ml (1 tbsp) olive oil, 240g (2 cups) flour, 45ml (3 tbsp) vinegar, et cetera. The method section that follows is equally arcane — “Place 12.53ml of olive oil into a pan that has been preheated to 194°C. Add 17 grains of sugar and allow to caramelise. Then add seven strands of saffron, each 2.6mm long, at three-second intervals.”
And so it goes on, to the last carefully measured 34 flakes of medium-coarse Maldon salt. Now you might scratch your head and wonder: “Why 17 grains of sugar? Why not, say, 15? And why seven strands of saffron? Wouldn’t five work just as well?”
The answer in a word: copyright. See, chefs are just like you and me, they are constantly thinking up ways of making inordinate amounts of money with the least possible effort. And their stock in trade, so to speak, is recipes. If they didn’t invent new recipes, they would starve.
The problem is, recipes are a nonrenewable, finite resource — how many exciting new ways are there to boil an egg? — and chefs are rapidly reaching what has become known as “peak cooking oil”. It’s like pumping crude oil out of the ground to fuel our cars — sooner or later there will be none left, and we will have to walk everywhere.
Most chefs hate walking. So what they do is take a well-established recipe, and . . . change the amount of sugar. When the outraged inventor of the original recipe takes the Johnny-come-lately to court, the plagiarist says smugly: “Of course it’s not your recipe! Your recipe calls for one teaspoon of sugar. Mine calls for 1.5 teaspoons. Completely different.” Case dismissed.
It’s all very well for chefs to behave like this, but it leaves the reader in a bit of a pickle. When a recipe says 2 tbsp olive oil, what size tablespoon does it mean? Can I use the huge 18th-century spoon that my granny passed on to me, or should I go for the minimalist Scandinavian one from Ikea? I usually give up in despair at this point, convinced that my nascent coq au vin is condemned to failure.
Therein lies the cunning of the cooks’ conspiracy — they have fooled us all into believing that the random ingredient amounts that they have sucked from their thumbs actually matter, that making an omelette requires the same degree of precision as landing a man on the moon.
So to help others in my predicament, I have written an all-new cookbook, Deciphering the Chefs’ Code: Toppling the Tyranny of the Tablespoon, in which I demonstrate that all the recipes in the world can be reduced to just three — one for salads, one for desserts, and one for everything else. It’s quite a slim volume, which helps to keep it affordable.
I won’t go into the salad recipe here, because it involves lots of raw, uncooked stuff that might put you off. The dessert recipe is basically just honey and chocolate, although you can substitute sugar. That leaves the recipe for everything else, which goes like this: heat a generous dash of olive oil in a pan; fry some onion and garlic, finely chopped, or sliced, or neither, it doesn’t really matter; add several lumps of meat, fish, or chicken, whatever; cook a bit longer to get rid of the blood — if you don’t like blood — and to kill the germs; add herbs and spices; stir; don’t forget the salt; er, that’s it.
Oh, and you can chuck in vegetables with the lumps of animal, too, of course. Any amount you like. Chef’s tip: for a stew, add water; for soup, add more water.