Don't Sweat the Aubergine

Barnes, as well as being the author of excellent novels, has written an entertaining book called
The Pedant in the Kitchen
. His approach is the opposite of mine. He worries away at recipes, questioning how precisely to apply the instructions. I am far less diligent. I look at a recipe and think, I can’t be bothered to do that. Or, that wouldn’t work if I tried it. Like Barnes, though, I am curious about why writers recommend certain methods. They don’t often tell you. They can be inconsistent. A writer may instruct you to simmer stock for three to four hours. You buy the writer’s next book, and the stock recipe specifies a simmering time of just one hour. Why the change? I’d quite like to know.
    I have come to my own conclusions about how long to simmer stock; as well as about how to make a simple stew, about whether you need to treat aubergines with salt before cooking them, and about many other techniques that are the subject of unexplained, inconsistent or baffling assertions in conventional cookbooks. This book explains why I have come to those conclusions. It includes a little science, borrowed from better-informed writers; sometimes the recommendations are a matter of personal taste, with which you might disagree.
    It’s also about gaining confidence in your own taste. Nigel Slater tells a story about a woman who asked him about the tablespoon of parsley he had specified in one recipe: was it, she needed to know, a heaped tablespoon or a level one? To which the polite answer is, how much do you like parsley? Or, perhaps, would you prefer tarragon? Of course, you’d be ill-advised to mess around too much with a cake recipe. But many of the choices you make in cooking are a matter of how much you like certain flavours, whether you prefer sauces to be thick or thin, and so on. I put more chilli in the pasta sauces I cook for myself than you would like, probably, or than an Italian chef would approve of, certainly. But I like chilli, so there.
    What follows, then, is advice on cooking methods, as well as a collection of templates – for soups, stews, sauces and more. I have to admit, though, that I have been unable to write a book about cooking without including what you might call recipes. My advice about stock is a recipe of sorts, even though I do not give precise instructions about the quantities of meat, vegetables and water to use. I cannot describe the making of a béchamel without telling you that the proportion of 28g of butter and one tablespoon of flour (about 28g again) will make a roux of the correct consistency, and that it will thicken about 280ml of milk; once you know that, though, I hope you’ll make this sauce by taking a knob of butter , adding flour and cooking the mixture until the roux feels like loose, wet sand, and then adding milk gradually until you have the consistency you want. There’s no avoiding recipes when it comes to puddings, either, unless you’re going to have fruit salad at the end of every meal. Maybe that’s why I’m not much of a pudding maker. But I do give a few of my favourite pudding recipes here.
    I’m not knocking recipes, or recipe writers. Delia Smith is, deservedly, a national treasure, and she gives instructions that produce the results she promises. All cooks need collections of recipes such as hers. Recipes give us new ideas, help us to expand our repertoires.
    However, there is a telling survey suggesting that, on average, people cook no more than two dishes from each cookbook they buy. We read the recipes and think, that looks a bit tricky. Or, where am I supposed to get hold of bream? And we return to our old standbys. This book is about broadening the range of those standbys .





 
Temperatures

    AN OVEN THERMOMETER won’t cost you very much. If the reading it gives you from the central shelf of your oven corresponds with the reading on your oven dial, you have a rare cooker. A publisher friend, wanting her colleagues to try out recipes in one of the company’s books, got them to test their ovens first: there was a 50°C variation between ovens at the same setting. My own oven is hotter than the dial tells me it should be.
    If a recipe tells you to cook a soufflé, say, at gas mark 5/190°C, you need to be cautious if your oven will generate a heat of 220°C at that setting.
    Different sources give different gas mark/celsius conversions. Some say that gas mark 4 is not 180°C, as I have asserted, but 175°C; some, that gas mark 7