RECIPES FOR DISASTER
No, I will not follow your unnecessarily complicated 22-ingredient, 52-stage instructions to the letter By Christopher Hirst
About a decade ago, an editor asked me to make the Black Forest gateau from Heston Blumenthal’s book In Search of Perfection. The maestro’s reconfiguration of this dessert-trolley stalwart was making quite a stir at the time, so I agreed — despite reservations prompted by Hestonian enthusiasm: “A Black Forest gateau is composed of six delicious layers. Lots of layers mean lots of different cooking techniques.” It was a big mistake. After accumulating the 22 ingredients plus a specialised batterie de cuisine including paint sprayer (“Dunno if it will work with chocolate,” said a baffled sales assistant), thermal probe, pressurised cream whipper, vacuum cleaner and atomiser (for spraying kirsch to “magically bring a little of the Black Forest to the dinner table”), I spent two days on the 52 stages of this confection. The result was three tiny cakes at a total cost (excluding labour) of £250 (close to 14,000 baht).
Admittedly this was an extreme case, but too often I’ve been lured by a tempting recipe only to find myself bogged down in a seemingly endless series of finicky complications. After procuring the often perplexing ingredients (what the hell is amaranth?), the kitchen fills with an army of little spice jars while the sink accumulates a teetering tower of grungy pans. My wife’s helpful tips (“I always wash up as I go along”) do little to deflate my soaring blood pressure.
I now carefully study any recipe prior to embarkation, no matter how seductive the accompanying photograph, and bear in mind the view of the restaurateur Russell Norman: “I honestly think that there should never be more than four ingredients on a plate. Even better if it’s three.”
Unwarranted complexity in recipes is most frequently found in cookbooks by restaurant chefs, who tend to ignore the gulf between the professional and amateur kitchen. While they have a platoon of souschefs to undertake tasks such as the minuscule chopping required for gremolata, the poor old punter has to do every single chop him or herself. A useful sign that a recipe may send you bonkers can be found in the quantities it will feed. If a recipe says “feeds eight to 12”, avoid like the plague.
I also have an allergy to imperatives in cookbooks. Though an excellent manual, Master It by Rory O’Connell goes against my anarchic spirit: “This is not a ‘chuck it in and see how it goes’ book … Use the best ingredients you can find, get organised and follow the recipe.”
I admit mine is a personal quirk. Lots of people love culinary imperatives. Indeed, Julian Barnes wrote an entertaining polemic entitled The Pedant in the Kitchen about a lack of precision in recipes: “The Pedant approaches a new recipe, however straightforward, with old anxieties: words flash at him like stop signs … How big is a ‘lump’, when does ‘drizzle’ become rain?”
Since I am cooking primarily — well, entirely, to be honest — for my own pleasure, I’d sooner be happy in the kitchen than bust a gut in search of perfection. As the slogan of Johnny’s Po-Boys (a New Orleans baguette-sandwich restaurant) puts it, “Even our failures are edible.”
For those more anarchist than acolyte, can I thrust you in the direction of David Tanis? A former chef at the legendary Californian restaurant Chez Panisse who is now a food columnist for The New York Times, he concluded his most recent book, One Good Dish, with the request, “I hope you don’t follow the recipes slavishly, since improvisation and ad-libbing are always part of a good cook’s process — they make life in the kitchen much more interesting.”
He goes further than any other food writer in querying his previous books, devoted to three-course meals: “Examining my own eating habits, I realised that while I do enjoy these rustic seasonal multicourse meals, that’s not the way I cook and eat day to day. Instead it’s often one good dish and a green salad.”
Maybe Tanis’ one good dish — fried lamb with cumin, crisp potato galette, rareseared tuna — is insufficiently fancy-pants for some, though I can think of little better for supper.
Like Tanis, I’ve found myself shifting towards simplicity. In general, I prefer raw to cooked, cold to hot, surf to turf and home to restaurant (faster, more reliable and a bit cheaper). Some of the things I find most exciting in restaurants — piles of oysters, plates of charcuterie, seared squid — I can do just as well at home.
So have I stopped using cookbooks? Not at all. Many of my recent favourites have steered in the same direction. Good guys include Sam and Sam Clark, whose Morito cookbook has become a favourite for tapas such as a Spanish tortilla containing potato crisps.
Ahead of the wave in this return to simplicity was Fergus Henderson, the mastermind of St John in London. Published in 1999, his Nose to Tail Eating features such enduring pleasures as soft roes on toast (a glass of port is the suggested accompaniment), devilled lamb kidneys (a Black Velvet beer cocktail) and Welsh rarebit (back to port). All glorious, but the last is the food of heaven. You might not want to serve Welsh rarebit as the main course at a dinner party (though I once did) but it makes the perfect supper with a green salad. A bit old hat? Not at all. A recent visit to Paris revealed the city has gone nuts about the tartine (an open grilled sandwich), though Saint-Germaindes-Pres has the advantage of sourdough from the Poilane boulangerie.
Of the numerous recipes in Favourite Savoury Tartines by the late Lionel Poilane, I adore one that is topped by a bubbling slurry of 100g grated Parmesan, 150g chopped onion and 3 tbsp mayonnaise. Grill one side of the bread, spread the mixture on the other side and grill for one minute. Quick — where’s that grater?