The Pedant in the Kitchen

by Julian Barnes

And as with sex, politics, and religion, so with cooking; by the time I began finding out about it for myself, it was too late to ask my parents.

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 bulbs that fit the description (obviously, since medium is a comparative term, you have to compare across the whole spectrum of onions you possess). (2)

Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.