Status Updates From The Pedant in the Kitchen

You can never go wrong with a Julian Barnes book. This one is amusing and making me think about my own cooking misadventures. 🤣
Also I was intrigued enough to research more about his first wife who was his literary agent. (He had since written books about her and his grief when she passed some years ago).

I always love a Julian Barnes book. I decided to read a book that was on my own book shelves. This one was randomly plucked…. Let’s see

'Simple French Food. Be careful: the first to those three words is booby-trapped. Towards the end of a six-page rumination on the term, [Richard] Olney comes to the conclusion that 'simplicity is a complicated thing'. The modern mantra goes, 'If food is not simple, it is not good.' Olney prefers its inversion: 'If food is not good, it is not simple.' ... We are not talking about ease of preparation.'

On Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1915 Ward Lock edition:
"I wondered how, as a child, I had missed the entry under Typical Australian Dishes for Roasted Wallaby (ingredients: '1 Wallaby, veal forcemeat No. 396, milk, butter'); or how, as a prurient adolescent, I had failed to find the wicked passage about what to look out for when examining a potential wet-nurse's breasts."

'How many cookbooks do you have?
  (a) Not enough
  (b) Just the right amount
  (c) Too many?
If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked out everything perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points you need to have answered (a) and (c) in equal measure.'

'The worst meal I've ever eaten - worst in the sense of most resented - was at a starry French restaurant where the chef had raised non-pedantry into a principle and a slogan: he advertised what he did as cuisine d'instinct. The first and only night I ate chez lui, his instinct was to bail out single-handedly the nation's entire vinegar industry.'