People like lists. People like instructions too. An easy-to-follow guide to assembling a flat-packed wardrobe is a comfort and, let’s be honest, a rare treat. The funny thing is you used to be able to give instructions on how to find your home and your first-time visitors would follow them and arrive safe and sound. Not so any more. However much you beg and plead it seems that these days most people would rather ignore your sage advice and follow the insistent demands of Sally SatNav. Both my home and place of work have postcodes too new to have made it into most databases and consequently I am frequently to be found guiding in the lost and distressed.
This reliance on the presumed infallibility of the SatNav has led to many newsworthy pratfalls – the “turn left in 50 yards” turning out to be a railway line or a farm track. It has also led to terrible, wholly avoidable tragedies. But let us dwell on the lighter side.
It is a brave sole indeed who would slavishly follow all the directions provided by the phenomenon that is Google Maps for a journey from “USA” to “Japan”. It is not without a certain sense of humour that this extraordinary piece of software selects your starting point for you. Ask it to start you from “USA” and you will begin your journey from what one can only assume is the very centre of the continental United States as defined by some clever algorithm. This spot is somewhere between Wichita, Kansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma and is near the appropriately named town of Independence. It is just about as far as a person can get from any ocean and yet your precise starting point is a place named (perhaps without even a hint of irony) as “Coastside Vacation Retreats.”
Were you to then follow the instructions you would proceed in a generally North Westerly direction across seven States until you arrived at the wonderfully named Gas Works Park just north of the centre of downtown Seattle.
As they might say back at your point of origin, the next instruction is a doozy!
It says: “Kayak across the Pacific Ocean (2756 miles).” There follows a few “left heres” and “right theres” taking you the tiniest of distances across the gorgeous island of Honolulu and then adds insult to injury with a double-whammy: “Kayak across the Pacific Ocean, Entering Japan (3879 miles).”
This is the thing. The virtually impossible or at least highly impractical steps in the journey are presented in the same straightforward manner as those that are a doddle. If we accept a list of instructions and follow it blindly, one step after the other, without an overview as to where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, then we really shouldn’t be surprised if we end up in deep water.
In this regard cooking is no different to navigation.
It used to be that people knew how to read a map and plan a journey keeping the overall plan in their head whilst travelling and that’s really the essence of cooking. The reason that Jamie Oliver can apparently bish-bash-bosh his way to a meal that seems so much trickier when we try it at home is that for all his bish-bash-boshery his skill as a chef is the result of years and years of hard work, practice and a fundamental understanding of how cookery “works.”
We return to where we began. We can all build a wardrobe from a flat-pack kit with a set of instructions. True, a recipe is a set of instructions but where is the culinary flat-pack? Very few of us indeed would claim to be able to build a wardrobe from scratch, from wood, from a tree. So why should we expect to be able to cook like a Jamie Oliver or a Michel Roux just because we’ve got a recipe?
Are you one of those people who has been inspired by a chef on the TV or a nice cookery book and had a go at cooking and been…well…a bit rubbish? Do you think you can’t cook because you’ve had a go and it wasn’t very successful? If so then this is my challenge to you; have a think about how you would fare if I asked you to pop out and rustle up a cabinet, or paint a portrait. I bet your cooking is better than your carpentry or artistry isn’t it? You’re not rubbish, trust me.
Cookery is a skill, just like those other things and just like them cookery takes practice. But unlike them, we all somehow expect to be good at cooking right from the word go. Because we’ve got a list. Because we’ve got instructions. It must follow, surely, that if we’re not perfect first time then we’re no good at it. Right? Well, wrong, actually.
For this reason, I don’t teach recipes, I teach people how to cook. These are not the same at all. The simple truth is if you know how to cook then you can follow a recipe but just following the recipe on its own is no guarantee of success.
Consider for example a nice ragout – a meat sauce perfect for, say a spag bol or a lasagne. What is important for a ragout is the process, not really the ingredients and certainly not the quantities of each. When we make a ragout in a class I advise my students not to get hung up on how much onion we used or whether it was oregano or parsley but to think about what is happening in the pan, and why. Because whether you want to make a spag bol, a chilli-con-carné or a shepherd’s pie the only thing you need to know is how to make a ragout, the rest is just detail.
You’ve got to know where you’re headed and how you’re going to get there before you set off otherwise you could end up doing a lot of unnecessary paddling in open water.
So don’t give up before you’ve even started and if you fancy learning how to cook so you can make good use of all those beautiful books then I’d recommend some lessons. Well I would, wouldn’t I?
paul.blake@thefinefoodschool.co.uk
