Women, who still do the lion's share of the work at home, want kitchen shortcuts – but men who write cookbooks love onerous tasks
It was Michael Pollan who gave us the unbeatable 21st-century maxim: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Over the years, the American author and food intellectual has devoted himself to worrying about such things as agribusiness, obesity and what he calls "nutritionism", and his thoughts on such matters have always been sensible, not to say inspiring. Rather than obsess over cholesterol, for instance, he holds that we should eat only foods that our grandmothers would have recognised, a principle with which I broadly agree (though sticking with this idea can be tricky if your granny came, as mine did, from Sunderland).
In his new book, Cooked, Pollan has noticed that the less time we spend cooking, the more we devote to watching and reading about cooking, a contradiction he calls the Cooking Paradox. Why, though? His hunch is that, on some very deep level, we miss cooking, an activity that is part of what makes us human. Cooked, then, is his attempt to reconnect us with the kitchen, the better to make us happier (and healthier).
His "journey" is divided into four elemental sections. In "Fire", he learns barbecue from a Southern master; "Water" is devoted to braising; "Air" is about the rising of bread; and "Earth" is dedicated to fermentation. But combine Pollan's conviction that "proper" cooking takes an inordinately long time with his verbosity even on such basic matters as the softening of onions, and what you have is another paradox: a book that reinforces the bad habits it longs to change. No one who struggles through the 80 pages Pollan gives over to the business of braising is going to think: Ah, I must make osso buco tonight. After I finished reading them, I felt so weary, I rang for a takeaway.
This tendency for food writers to be so, well, convoluted ("I made my own cheese! I smoked my own fish! I butchered my own venison and made a handy lamp base from the antlers!") is off-putting, and I can't help but notice that the worst offenders seem mostly to be men; women, who still do the lion's share of the work at home, want kitchen shortcuts, not more onerous tasks.
It's also wrong. Contrary to what Pollan seems to believe – according to his book, he spends most of every Sunday adding star anise to his braises – there are lots of slow-cooked dishes that require no attention at all. Put a seasoned shoulder of lamb in the oven on a low heat with some garlic, parsley, and white wine, and two hours later you've got supper. Even risotto, which requires the cook to stand by the pan, takes only a little over half an hour: 15 minutes for frying an onion, and 20 for cooking the rice (homemade stock is best, but a stock cube will do perfectly well in most cases). Given that an egg on toast is both nicer and healthier than most ready meals, and just as quick to prepare, it would be more helpful if people in the west were taught how best to fry one rather than how to prepare authentic dashi (Pollan is nuts for dashi, a stock made from cured bonito).
More baffling still is his grudging attitude to chopping onions. How to survive it? Can a Zen state ever be reached when it comes to the matter of alliums and a sharp knife? Does enlightenment lie beneath that shiny brown skin? Pollan sincerely doubts it. Mostly, he says, one must simply grit one's teeth, content in the knowledge that one is engaged in a task which, ultimately, is for the greater good.
I don't like chopping onions, either. But since most recipes require the cook to attack only one or two at a time, you're looking at five minutes, tops, before the agony is over. Time this to coincide with The Archers, or listen to some music as you hack away, and the whole thing is no more or less boring than sitting in a chair with a cup of tea.
Guys, don't make it seem worse than it is! Of course, I realise that the mere chopping of onions does not involve the all-important element of drama and performance. But then, I'm a girl. I tend not to make a fuss about drudge work. I require neither an audience, nor a round of applause. I just rush on, thinking of dinner.