Amateur hour - amateur cooks - Column

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by Digby Anderson

I SMELLED trouble immediately upon smelling the joss sticks. An the sight of Louise Robinson in sari and with red splodge applied to forehead confirms that we are in to the worst. I dimly remember snatches of the early conversation. "An India dinner ... done everything ourselves ... Richard and I ... such fun ... won derful new book ... makes everything so straightforward." Then much later "I thought the chicken came out rather better than the- fish. I am sure it shouldn't have crumbled like that but anyway it tasted good. There's rather a lot of chappaties left."

The chappaties are discussed again after the evening is over, for dinner parties are always followed by post-mortems. Louise and Richard are on the whole very happy with the evening, still wonder why the chappaties did not work, and decide that next time they will use another recipe. Phil and Ann in their taxi home are rather more caustic. Ann thinks Louise was silly to have attempted her own chappaties without a proper Indian oven. And they both agree "Indian" was much too complicated a dinner to undertake. They decide that when the Robinsons come back to them on the 23rd, they will do an Italian dinner: Ann has a new book which ...

What did go wrong with the chappaties? The same thing that went wrong with the fish. The same thing that will go wrong with Ann's risotto. It has nothing to do with mistakes in recipe books or not having the right equipment. The reason why so many dinner parties serve up awful food and why dishes such as chappaties or risotto are particularly horrid is--lack of practice. Let's give it straight: You want to serve homemade bread? You want to make risotto? Find two or three recipes and try each one out, say, ten times. Make your bread with flour from this store and that, try the rice from this store and that. Then when you have made chappaties thirty or forty times when you know about consistencies proving times, required temperatures the effects of keeping the dough for different times and in different temperatures, when you know all these thing from experience, you will be in a position to invite your chums to dinner. To do so before is not only bad cooking but damn bad manners.

There is no shortcut, no miracle boo or TV chef, no tip, no expensive corner cutting ingredient: you must practice. And practice in cooking, like practice. in music or anything else worth while, has to be done at frequent intervals. You can't learn to make good rice by cooking it once a month. The best advice is every day. If you are serious about learning Indian, Cantonese, or any other cuisine, then do this: go out and get the ingredients for a siege. You are going to cook and eat nothing but Bengali or Cantonese for three months. Do that and you will acquire skills and knowledge you will never forget. During the early stages of the three months you will make mistakes. Devote extra time and ingredients so you can have two or three goes a day. You will waste ingredients and have to throw failures away. So what? It's better than inflicting your incompetence on your friends.

The Robinsons' problem is that they are part of a new type of cook, the very opposite of the practiced cook, the "Special Occasionist." This person hardly cooks from one week to the next--too busy making money, going to the theater, or watching television. Then suddenly, he decides to spend a whole day cooking and give a dinner party. He treats cooking like some instantly acquirable trick: buy the right book, spend enough on equipment and ingredients, and the knowledge of centuries and civilizations is yours in time to greet Phil and Ann on Saturday at 8 P.M. And 101 cookbook writers, food columnists, and TV chefs collude in this evil lie. "Go on," they shout. "Give it a try, anyone can do it. It's easy, just follow the recipe, try it this weekend, cook without trouble and effort, fool-proof and quick too. And fun. Cooking's fun."

Oh! No, it isn't. Your contempt for wisdom and effort will catch you out. Your paella will be hard or sticky. Your risotto will burn on the bottom. Your chappaties will be heavy and the fish will indeed fall to bits. But worse, the truth applies to other less exotic cuisines. Your boiled eggs will never be perfect. Your omelettes never light. Your oven pasta dishes never as they should be. Your dinners never quite what you hoped for. And it will serve you right.