Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes

seems to have changed his mind, snootily referring to “a style that was a curious hybrid of the enthusiastic schoolmistress and the dowager duchess.” Sir Terence—whose Habitat stores E.D. referred to as “Tattycat”—is not a persuasive authority: the prose of his own four-paragraph tribute is both slovenly and egotistical, as studded with “I” as a ham with cloves. E.D. wrote as she cooked: with simplicity, purity, colour, self-effacing authority, and a respect for tradition.
    Her instructions are laconic, even impressionistic; they imply a reader-cook skilled in the basics and prepared to vary and improvise according to time and market supply. Most people aren't like this, of course. Many of us cook with a kind of anxious pedantry, convinced that if the exact wording, and the exact spirit behind that wording, isn't followed, then our guests will throw up first their hands and then their stomachs. E.D. herself was not unaware of failure: “In cooking, the possibility of muffing a dish is always with us. Nobody can eliminate that.” But some food writers know better how to predict (often literal) sticking points, and how to mitigate the guilt and self-loathing of failure.
    And it's not just the full muff one fears. When you succeed with a dish described by other writers, you feel you have made that dish; when you succeed with E.D., you feel—and this is doubtless an unfair, chippy response to her Olympian standing— that you have made “an E.D. dish,” one, moreover, that she herself would have made just a little bit better. Half-competent amateurs quickly learn not to cook from volumes with full-page gastroporn pix, because their own culinary productions can never attain such lustre. Fortunately, Elizabeth David's books were illustrated with mere black-and-white drawings; but her prose nevertheless predicts a similar gap between her fragrant concoction and your burnt offering.
    It is the touch of unthinking imprecision which is so unnerving. The other week, for instance, I had a go at something which looks pretty unmuffable. Page 47, Minestra di Pomidoro, from her Italian Food (chosen by Waugh as his Book of the Year in 1954). The recipe consists of three sentences of instruction, followed by three of commentary. Its underlying premise is that you must cook the soup for no longer than ten minutes to ensure that all the initial freshness of the tomatoes is retained. With a confidence verging on the fullish I assembled the necessaries, including homemade chicken stock and fresh basil from the greenhouse.
    E.D.'s first sentence reads like this: “Melt 1½ lbs (675g) of chopped and skinned tomatoes in olive oil; add a clove of garlic and some fresh parsley or basil or marjoram.” Simple? Listen: nothing is simple to the Anxious Pedant. The restaurateur Prue Leith once watched a wretched cookery-school pupil (male, of course) deconstruct the following first line of a recipe: “Separate the eggs.” For a thoughtful while he pondered the two eggs placed in front of him, before carefully moving one a few inches to his left and the other a few inches to his right. Satisfied, he went on to the second line of instruction. I feel for this bonehead. And if he is reading this I'm sure he will sympathize with the glossological fever that the first line of Minestra di Pomidoro provoked. The initial problem areas were: (i) “Chopped”: no indication of size of desired dice. (2) “Skinned”: does this naturally imply “deseeded” or did the recipe date from pre-deseeding days? (3) “Olive oil”: how much exactly; or even approximately? (4) “A clove of garlic”: three possible interpretations: (a) popped in whole (unlikely); (b) crushed juicily with the garlic crusher (but would she approve of such an instrument—lots of them don't, do they?); * (c) finely chopped. (5) “Parsley or basil or marjoram”: well, which is best, and what difference does it make? She can't be expecting us to exercise our free will,