Foundations

Coming Soon

Last week my friend sent me a quote from The Bell Jar, a novel by Sylvia Plath, in which the character Esther Greenwood describes a vision of her life, static, unmoving and paralysed by indecision. I like the metaphor of a fig tree because although tree branches representing life paths is not groundbreaking, it is effective (and I like figs, especially green ones).

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

It immediately made me think of this newsletter, which has been hindered by indecision from day one. What should it be called? Should it be recipe-led? Should there be photos, or gifs, or videos? Should it include travel writing or restaurant reviews, and if it does, then do I need to change the name? What about the copious half-written drafts, how do they fit in, when will I finish them, what order should they be sent out? How often should I post, when should I post?

I don’t have answers to all of those questions, but I’ve decided I can no longer wait around until I do. Surely the best way to figure out how to shape and structure any kind of writing is to start? To continue with the useful fig tree metaphor, you have to plant a seed and water it before you can worry about how many branches you have and what kind of fruit they’re growing. So today I’m planting a seed in the shape of a project I’ve been working on called Foundations.

The idea behind Foundations is simple; I want to teach you what I know about cooking. The fundamentals, the building blocks, the kind of stuff that, once you understand it, will allow you to be the kind of cook who can open a cupboard or fridge and make something delicious without using a recipe. We’ll cover roasting, frying, making sauces, making stock, then using that stock as the base for things like soup and risotto. I’ll talk about my kitchen kit, knives, utensils, my favourite pots and pans and why non-stick is (so often) a waste of time. We’ll look at things like poaching and browning and braising and what words like that even mean.

Although the idea here is to free you from relying on recipes, each concept will be demonstrated through a recipe, but with the focus much more on the how and why than the what. For example, once you understand what braising means and how to do it, then you’ll see what links Lancashire Hotpot, Coq au Vin, Boeuf Bourguignon and artichokes alla Romana, but also why Phở Tái Bò, despite being beef cooked in broth, is not a braise. Even better, you’ll know which cuts of meat or veggies are good to braise, which aren’t, and how to do them.

I want you to be able to think of a recipe in reverse. Instead of looking up boeuf bourguignon and being told you need beef cheeks, I want you to see beef cheeks in the butcher and know that you can’t pan fry them but you can brown them off, then cook them slowly in a mix of wine and stock with a few veggies and aromatics and end up with something delicious. This same mentality applies to everything we’ll cover. Once you understand the basic method behind a pan sauce, it doesn't matter if you’ve cooked a steak, a pork chop or a lamb medallion in it, you’ll know how to deglaze that pan, add a little shallot, reduce some stock and stir in a few cubes of cold butter to make something quick and beautiful.

I’m going to send out one info-packed newsletter a week (and an accompanying short video on instagram) on a particular topic, for example ‘poaching’ or ‘broth’ or ‘risotto’. In risotto, we’ll talk about what it is, where it comes from and all of the steps to making one well - cooking the soffritto, frying the rice and what that does, why the stock is added bit by bit, etc. By the end, regardless of if you have tomatoes or mushrooms or pumpkins, you can make them into a risotto.

A last point before I go - these are the foundations of my cooking, which is rooted in the food I grew up with, the way I was trained as a chef and the restaurants I worked in. My experience draws quite firmly from classic French and Italian technique because that’s what I learnt, and that’s what I’m sharing with you here. I want to point this out because, whilst these are good foundations for cooking, they are not the foundations for all good cooking.

When you learn to make stock the French way, you are taught never to boil it. When you make stock for tonkotsu ramen, it must be hard boiled. What would be considered too much spice in Provence would be considered tasteless in Sichuan. The way rice is cooked for arroz de marisco is not the way it is cooked for a biryani. What I’m getting at is that these aren’t the universal rules of good cookery and there are many, many things that I cannot teach you because I don’t know them myself. Despite the fact that I love eating Bún bò Huế and kung pao chicken and sushi and curry goat and jollof rice and empanadas, I’m not the right person to teach you how to make those things because I don’t understand the cultures they come from enough to do them justice, and that’s ok because there are plenty of people out there who can.

So we’re starting this weekend with roast chicken, because it felt like a good place to start. We’ll cover chicken prep, seasoning, roasting and a very easy way to make a delicious lemony sauce, all in the same pan. See you there!