Unfortunately I have to reveal news of yet another
conspiracy. Those behind it are so brazen they make no attempt at
camouflage – the signs of their plotting
are clearly visible on almost every food-related
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, 500g (2 cups) flour, 45ml (3 tbsp) vinegar, et cetera. The method section that follows is equally
arcane – “Place 12.53ml of olive oil in a pan that has been preheated to 194 degrees C. Add 17 grains of sugar and
allow to caramelize. 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, are recipes. If they didn’t invent new
recipes, they would starve.
The problem is, recipes are a non-renewable, 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 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, they 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, Da 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
protein, too, of course. Any amount you like. Chef’s tip: for a stew, add
water; for soup, add more water.
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