Size counts

Julian Barnes on the inexact science of measuring ingredients

The Guardian, Saturday March 15 2003

The neighbour of the mother of a friend of mine (yes I know, but it happens to be true) decided to make some jam. She had never made jam before. My friend's mother advised blackberry and apple. The next day, the neighbour came round with the grim result: an inch or two of black, solidified matter, which might possibly yield to a dentist's drill, squatting at the bottom of a pot. Something had gone wrong, she thought.

Under cross-examination from the recipe police, she admitted she had looked up a book in which it said: "One pound fruit to one pound sugar." For some reason (like being a bear of small brain) she convinced herself that the best way to measure the ingredients was to use an empty jam-jar that had once contained a pound of commercial jam. She filled it once with fruit for the pound of fruit, and once with sugar for the pound of sugar.

I think we're allowed more than a laugh at this; indeed, a full, swaggering smirk. We've done some dumb-ass things in our time, but never anything as dumb-ass as that. At such times, you have to feel sorry for cookbook-writers. They write their best recipes, they get friends to road-test them, the publisher's editors add their tablespoonful, and then - something like this happens. It must be the stuff of after-dinner speeches at culinary conferences; it might even be a TV series, after the world's worst drivers and neighbours from hell. If only they'd done what we said...

The Pedant in the Kitchen is not concerned with whether cooking is a Science or an Art; he will settle for it being a craft, like woodwork or home welding. Nor is he a competitive cook. It surprised him to discover that gardening, for all its air of prelapsarian serenity, is furiously competitive, frequently indulged in by the envious, the deceitful, the quietly criminal. Doubtless there are competitive cooks but the Pedant is not one of them. He just wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he just wants not to poison his friends; he just wants slowly to expand his repertoire.

Ah, the pathos of those "justs". With these craftsman's ambitions, he is never going to invent his own dishes. He might occasionally, with a spurt of audacity, increase the quantity of an ingredient he particular likes; but he is in essence a recipe-bound drudge, a careful follower of the words of others. Thus is the Pedant ever bound to the rock of his Pedantry: not where he eats liver, but where his liver is eaten.

The Pedant approaches a new recipe, however straightforward, with old anxieties: words flash at him like stop-signs. Is this recipe framed in this imprecise way because there is a happy latitude - or rather, a scary freedom - for interpretation; or because the writer isn't capable of expressing him- or herself more accurately?

It starts with simple words. How big is a lump, how voluminous is a slug or gout, when does a drizzle become rain? Is a cup a rough-and-ready generic term, or a precise American measure? Why tell us to add a wineglass of something, when wineglasses come in so many sizes? Or - to return briefly to jam - how about this instruction from Richard Olney: "Throw in as many strawberries as you can hold piled up in joined hands." I mean, really. Are we meant to write to the late Mr Olney's executors and ask how big his hands were? What if children made this jam, or circus giants?

Let's take the problem of the onion. I shan't enter the absorbing debate - a recent long-runner among correspondents to the Guardian - over how to peel one without blubbing, except to warn you that if, as I once did, you try wearing a pair of strimmer's goggles, the plastic lens will quickly steam up and there will be much blood on the chopping board. No, the problems are these.

1) For recipe writers, onions come in only three sizes, small, medium and large, whereas onions in your shopping bag vary from the size of a shallot to that of a curling stone. So an instruction such as "Take two medium onions" sets off a lot of pedantic scrabbling in the onion basket for a bulb that is self-evidently medium (obviously, since medium is a comparative term, you have to compare across the whole spectrum of onions you possess).

2) The applicable verbs are generally slice and chop, which I pedantically assume always to indicate different actions: slice meaning cut across a halved onion, resulting in a clutter of semi-circles; chop involving preliminary lengthwise incisions from tip to root in the halved bulb, resulting in a mound of smaller bits. Slice may be qualified by finely; chop by both finely and roughly. So that comes to five methods to decide among and delay the knife.

Of course, if you ask yourself the sensible reverse question - have you ever served or been served a dish in which you judged that the onions could or should have been cut differently? - the answer is, of course, never. But the Pedant will conclude from this, not that dismembering onions is a no-fail activity, but that so far everything has worked out OK because everyone has been diligently following instructions.

This all explains why I never attend to the estimated preparation times that some recipes helpfully include. Even if generously based on a multiple of what a professional cook might take, they are always over-optimistic. Cookbook writers, it seems to me, fail to imagine the time a punter takes holding up a trembling tablespoon and wondering if its piled contents are best described as rounded or heaped; or glossing the word surplus in an instruction like trim off the surplus fat.

I recently found myself contemplating the line soak the beans overnight or while you work and seriously wondering which option might be better: could the writer be hinting that the nocturnal, undisturbed pulse might fatten up better than one exposed to the light and noise of the day?

Much more useful than notional and guilt-inducing preparation times are holding points, ie the stage at which you can stop cooking, and shove the whole thing in the fridge, and take a break. Despite empirical evidence that there are many dishes that are unharmed by reheating, this is a prejudice difficult to shift. It was Marcella Hazan, in her Classic Italian Cookbooks, who for me first spoke the liberating words: "You may complete the dish up to step 6 several hours in advance." And then, even better, "The dish can be cooked entirely in advance several days ahead."

What we need liberating from, more broadly, is what might be called the restaurant fallacy. We go out to eat, have three courses that arrive more or less as the stomach craves them, and the whole conspiracy of the place invites us to conclude that the food has been prepared from scratch, especially for you, in the mere time since you gave your order: a helping of beans put on to boil, a few roast potatoes shoved in the oven, a little bearnaise whisked up, and so on. And the same for everyone else in the restaurant. We know this is utterly foolish, yet part of us continues to believe it, and the effect when we first start to cook for others is maleficent. We imagine that everything must be done in one culinary swoop, culminating just before it is served.

Kitchen shops sell a lot of useful gadgets and time-saving equipment. One of the most useful and most liberating would be a sign that the domestic cook could place to catch the eye in moments of tension: "This is not a restaurant."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/15/julianbarnes.houseandgarden

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