All of cooking is just working out what to do with leftovers
A few nights ago I made a supper of chickpeas, spicy sausage, pepper and tomatoes and I served it with rice. I purchased the sausages when I spotted them on offer in Aldi, the tinned tomatoes and chickpeas I had in the cupboard, and the pepper was a remnant from an Oddbox of a few weeks ago.
Yesterday I made a soup for lunch using a red onion, some garlic, a tin of sweetcorn, some yoghurt on the turn and the scrappings from a little jar of chipotle paste. The onion and garlic were from the veg drawer, the garlic was about to sprout, the tin of sweetcorn was in the cupboard, the yoghurt was, as mentioned, fast souring and the chipotle paste had been loitering behind other condiments in the fridge for a good while, likely leftover from some long-ago recipe development.
Today for lunch I had another delicious soup. I combined the remnants of the chickpea, pepper and tomato stew (minus the last few chunks of sausage - I’ve been visiting the fridge sporadically over the last few days to snaffle those,) and the remaining sweetcorn soup, made them one with the addition of some extra water and a whizz about with my stick blender.
This is how I cook, day in, day out. Things end up in the fridge from all corners, and at some point, the accumulation of this or that lends itself to cooking a particular thing, suggesting a recognisable pattern of ingredients which leads to a dish.
I was on a panel during the week for a Countertalk event on cookbook writing. I run a small imprint called Saturday Boy Books, and I have written/worked on quite a few cookbooks as a cook and author, so I shared what little wisdom I have gleaned in the past 14 years. During the Q&A the inevitable question of authenticity was raised, i.e. should one be concerned about the authenticity of the dishes one wrote about or publishes, or is it OK to put forward your version of a thing? I’m not here to unpick that argument, but it made me think.
Cookbooks have been a registered thing for a good long time, I’m aware of that, but much of the codification of cuisine happened during a 100-year period between 1850-1950. Mrs Beeton was publishing her Book of Household Management in 1861, Escoffier was simplifying Careme’s L'Art de la Cuisine Française (1833) when he published his Guide Culinaire in 1903, and Mussolini codified much of Italian food as we know it, and certainly the idea of rigorously and claustrophobically defining how a dish should be and how it should be cooked, between the World Wars. The great recipeification of each and every cuisine continues apace, of course, with Phaidon fast capturing country after country with their weighty tomes, and with recipes writers and cooks securing deal after deal for books of ever more specific strata of national cuisines. And quite right too. It makes for good reading, and great inspiration, and more than that, these books are a crucial tool of education, of dissemination, to kitchens near and far, and from the kitchen through the body to the wider world.
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