During the long siege of Corona, I’ve done a lot of cooking. Experimenting with new recipes has been a good diversion. The food and fluff sections of several newspapers are my primary sources these days. If a recipe looks interesting, I save it. But only for two weeks- that’s the rule. With time on my hands, if I can’t find time to make it in two weeks, maybe it’s not as interesting as I thought.
Some established cooking rules I habitually break. It’s culinary dogma that one should follow a recipe precisely, at least the first time. My specialty is going “off road” from the get go. And the notion that guests (remember them?) are not guinea pigs seems overly timid. How bad can it be? And if it is truly awful, at least you’ll have a good story.
But back to rules I like. The simpler the better.
The celebrity chef Sother Teague says, “A chef can do a lot of things with rosemary. He can’t do a damn thing without salt.” Salt. Simple and essential. A beautiful little roast chicken or a crusty artisan bread depends on just four ingredients. Salt is outweighed by the others, but it still has a starring role. That’s what happens when you keep things simple. All of the parts matter and they all have their say.
As a counterpoint to simple, consider Cocido Madreileño, Spain’s “Mother Stew”. I saved this recipe from February 21, 2021 with no intention of ever making it. This “ideal winter-weekend project” elicited skepticism bordering on disdain. It might “be the backbone of Spanish cold-weather cooking, but because of medieval optics and a laundry list of ingredients, it never caught on abroad.” I’ll say. Preparation taking six hours and requiring seventeen ingredients, including a lot of iffy pig parts… I had the salt, but I came up short on the trotters!
Might Cocido Madrileño be more than just a recipe? Yes. I saved a recipe I was never going to make because it seemed like a proxy for hard things. Hard can start out innocently as hogwild, and end painfully as glutton-for-punishment. Sometimes chaotic and complicated are unavoidable. But often they are not. Don’t sabotage yourself. You don’t have to make everything so hard. Simple should be made but not taken with a grain of salt.
Now this crazy recipe is going in the trash. But I sure enjoyed not making it.