A pie and a pedant

     It's a bit late to be talking about festive food but I couldn't not mention this wonderful use of leftovers: a raised pie made by Mr. C. (who's excelled himself in the kitchen over the last couple of weeks). Made with a hot water crust, jellied stock, generous chunks of turkey and superb ham from this local farm, it was a triumph, and although the chef consulted a book or two, he more or less just devised it himself.

Requests for the recipe are bound to make his head swell, and it might be at best sketchy - imprecise enough, anyway, not to find favour with novelist Julian Barnes whose excellent The Pedant in the Kitchen I read on Boxing Day.

     "Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel?" Barnes asks; "One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental." He admits that pedantry and non-pedantry can cut both ways, but while originality and inventiveness are one thing, precision is another, and he likes to know exactly what he should be doing.

    "Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss". To lessen the fuss he suggests placing a notice in the kitchen which the cook should read in moments of tension: remembering that "This is not a restaurant" might take some of the heat out of the situation!

     I like Barnes's comments on food writers, too, for example he describes advice of Edouard de Pomiane's as "[Elizabeth] Davidism with a human face and a smile of complicity" - so much for Mrs. D. He's a lot keener on Jane Grigson of whom he says, "... her presence suffuses her writing like some familiar and warming herb in a stew. You are certainly aware of it, the stew couldn't have been made without it, yet you don't keep having to pick it out from between your teeth."

Comments

[Peg]

I think I might have to make up two little signs for my kitchen - for me, not for the DH who seems to love my meals.
One would be to remember I am not cooking for a restaurant and the other about 'cooking is the transformation ....'
The pie does look delicious! Good for you Mr. C.

[Peter the flautist]

There are few more pedantic "cooks" than myself. In fact I'm not a cook, just a technician who can choose a good recipe.

Dark Puss

[Barbara]

Golly, an angel, not a man! I made a raised pie once, in my far off keen days. I used the recipe from Jane Grigson's English Food and it was successful.