KEY POINTS:
When I was first ever asked to teach a cooking class I refused, saying I didn't have the patience.
If I had to teach teenagers, those bastions of ingratitude, indifference and tragic dress sense (only hormonal imbalance could explain pants worn halfway down the legs), there would be bodies blocking up the drains.
Adults, I found, at least pretend they want to learn and this gave me more patience. After 12 years I am getting to enjoy it.
As a teacher, I was whisked into shape by the likes of Catherine Bell and Ruth Pretty, who run the best cooking schools in New Zealand.
At first I thought their attention to detail was ridiculous but I came to realise that students feel safe with minutiae. I would say, "take an onion and chop it". How much clearer can you get? Hello. You can't say an onion - you have to say the colour, the size and the weight. You can't say chop - you have to say finely or coarsely.
God only knows what might happen if you got that wrong. If you look in a medieval cookbook, you wonder how these people didn't starve to death with the lack of instruction. Apparently our medieval cousins knew instinctively where the middle of the oven was, what a handful meant and why lemon and yoghurt don't go together in the same sentence.
In 2007 we are not capable of understanding a recipe unless it is over-explained, reduced to cold measurements and all possibility of creativity removed.
Our cooking confidence has been stripped from us by a detachment from primary produce, an over-dependence on too much recipe detail and outrageously perfect photos of dishes we cannot possibly reproduce. Why are we like this? Here's my take on it - cooking is one of the few things we can control in our lives. The kids say, "you can't be my mother - I must have been adopted", the husband says, "when I married you, you were a sexually voracious style goddess", and the housekeeper says, "I don't do windows, dishes or anything above my armpit'. Instead of telling them all to get stuffed, which is the only morally correct reaction, you invent this perfect world where the souffle rises, the meringue is crunchy outside and gooey inside and the steak is bloody yet not bloody. This is how you control your universe. If the souffle rises then you don't have to strangle your significant other.
What is the point of this story? It's an anti-recipe story. I invited a guest chef to teach a class at my cooking school in the south of France recently. This was his method: arrive two hours late, speed around like a maniac teaching six dishes simultaneously having done zero prep, no written recipes, dance, sing and throw half the world's known supply of cream into every sauce. I stood by with a face like a cat's ass and thought, I want a recipe NOW!
- Detours, HoS
