The virtues of precision

Julian Barnes begins a new series on reading, and using, cookery books

The Guardian, Saturday March 1 2003

In my early 30s, when the kitchen was slowly mutating from a place of resented necessity to one of tense pleasure, I had my first attempt at Vichy carrots. Naturally, I looked up a recipe in a book - one written, as it happened, by a friend of my wife's. Carrots, water, salt, sugar, butter, pepper, parsley: nothing too challenging about these ingredients. I approached their assembly with something close to real confidence. I even had time to wonder whether it was Vichy as in Pétain (the ingredients seen as collaborators), or Vichy as in health and spa (though what about all the butter, and sugar, and salt), or merely Vichy as in a long-established recipe from those parts.

Even to one preternaturally alert to potential hazards, the recipe looked a breeze. Basically: peel, slice, boil, season, worry a bit about sticking and burning. I was about to hurl myself into it when I noticed something wrong with the text. It was laid out in three sections, but the sections themselves were numbered 1, 2 and 4. I showed it to my wife, hoping she would spot the missing segue. She was equally baffled and suggested ringing up the cook; it was, after all, her book.

I didn't think I could do that. Doctors dread that moment when a gregarious meal is spoilt by their neighbour starting to roll up his trouser leg with a murmur of, "I wonder if you'd mind taking a look at this..." Novelists dread the moment when a friendly face suddenly turns out to have written a short story - not too long, only 130 pages - about which their opinion would be truly valued. Similarly, cookbook writers must dread the phone call - always just as they're at work on their own dinner - referring them to some obscure problem in a volume now well out of print; or asking if, since there don't seem to be any powdered porcupine quills in the larder, it would matter if...

Still, with guests on the way, I nerved myself and made the call. I outlined the problem. "Read me the recipe," said the cook. I did so. "That sounds all right," she replied. "No, the point is," I replied pedantically, "the point is whether there's a stage 3 which has been missed out by the publishers, in which case what is it, or whether the 4 is a misprint for 3."

"Read it again,"she said (no doubt whisking up a sea-urchin soufflé while shoulder-propping the phone). I did so. "That sounds all right," she repeated, clearly rather baffled by my call.

It was at this moment that I grasped the serious divide between Them and Us.

If the rich are different because (as Hemingway glossed Fitzgerald) they have more money, so cooks whose recipes we follow are different because they no longer need the advice we so anxiously require. Being a great cook is one thing; being a decent cookery writer is quite another, and is based - like novel-writing - on imaginative sympathy and precise descriptive powers. Contrary to sentimental belief, most people don't have a novel inside them; nor do most chefs have a cook-book.

"Artists should have their tongues cut out," Matisse once said, and the same - if even more metaphorically - applies to chefs. They should be chained to their stoves and merely allowed to pass food through the hatch as we require it.

I once stayed two nights at the Hôtel du Midi in Lamastre, famously praised by Elizabeth David, and which continues to serve the finest ancienne cuisine. As I was checking out, I noticed a poster of the Ardèche's top 20 chefs. They were pictured standing cheerily on the steps of a chateau, all primped and toqued. I asked Madame which one was her husband. "Surely you recognise him?" she asked. No: in two days I hadn't set eyes on him. "Ah, that's because he's always in the kitchen." Only later did I reflect how rare - and wise - this was.

Of course we want recipes, and we have every right to them. In the old days the transmission would have been oral and matrilinear. Then it became written and increasingly patriarchal. Nowadays we can be taught by either sex, and the method may be oral (the TV chef), written, or both at the same time (the TV tie-in book). I remain a text-based cook and am broadly suspicious of those persuaded to inflate their personalities in front of camera. Even in the early days, TV cooks were hardly instruments of Reithian high purpose: look at Fanny and Johnny Craddock. Today, it is even more chummy and collusive: hey, look, any mutt can fling one of these together, don't think you have to be anyone special or posh or clever.

No, of course you don't. But learning and teaching, however much we turn them into face-painted fun, are still learning and teaching. When I was a schoolboy, we used to jeer, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." To which my father, an ironical man who was also a schoolmaster, used to add the rider, "And those who can't teach, teach teachers." The jeer, I notice, has now been craftily reappropriated by the profession, which advertises with the slogan: "Those who can, teach."

Those who can, cook; those who can't, wash up. This series is about reading cookbooks, and using them, and getting very cross with them, and making mistakes, and being pedantic. This is one area where pedantry is both understandable and important: and the self-taught, anxious, page-scowling domestic cook is about as pedantic as you can get.

Still, why should a cookbook be less precise than a manual of surgery? (Always assuming, as one nervously does, that manuals of surgery are indeed precise. Perhaps some of them sound just like cookbooks: "Sling a gout of anaesthetic down the tube, hack a chunk off the patient, watch the blood drizzle, have a beer with your mates, sew up the cavity...") Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel? One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental.

Twenty years on, I still cook Vichy carrots from the same recipe, and have more or less decided that stage 3, whether it exists or not, is probably irrelevant. And at some point I found out why they are called Vichy carrots: because they were originally cooked in spa water. The accepted substitute - before bottled water became as ubiquitous as it is - used to be a pinch of bicarb in tap water. However, as the infinitely wise Jane Grigson notes: "I should be surprised if you would know the difference between glazed carrots cooked with Vichy water, or tap water plus bicarb, or tap water on its own." Now that's the sort of sentence I like.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/01/houseandgarden.julianbarnes

Home

Back

Firstpaper