“The alchemy of books”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

• It’s time to go left field rather than safety-first
• “Fashion or for keeps?”
• “New year and new possibilities”
• “What is in a name?”
• “The art of shopping”

Speaking as someone who only feels really comfortable in a small office with 2,500 cookbooks lining the walls, there is something very reassuring about recipe books. Look up even the simplest dish and you’ll find a variety of different methods and sometimes a variety of ingredients. In the alchemy of food you can take nothing for granted, and all too often the whole ends up much more impressive than the sum of its parts makes it sound

At one point it looked as if the internet would wipe out the cookery book. What could be easier than setting a search engine the task of finding the perfect fondant potato recipe and then scrolling through the responses to pick one?

The problem comes when you have sifted your way through dozens of recipes and they all seem pretty much the same. Why does so-and-so add more of this-or-that? With real recipe books the process is the other way round. You choose a book you trust, take it down and see what it says. Rather than choosing the recipe you choose the source. Good home cooks usually have a short list of books that they cherish, and the flickering screen of a tablet just isn’t the same. In the 1990s, a computer called Deep Blue wacked Gary Kasparov who at that time was the best chess player in the world. IBM were doubtless thinking back to those glory days when they hatched their latest wheeze.

Earlier this year, a supercomputer called Watson (surely you’d want the one called Holmes?) was asked to produce recipes featuring food combinations that would taste good on a molecular level (whatever that means). The criteria for choosing these flavour combinations was that they hadn’t been tried before. Surely that cannot be right? Is novelty the only thing that matters at the dinner table or when you’re out doing the big shop? Like a host of other celebrity cooks, Watson the computer has a recipe book out: Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education. Inside you’ll find 65 recipes – for example, for a Spanish Almond Crescent, a butter-less and sugar-free pastry flavoured with pepper, saffron and coconut milk. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing to make customers hammer down the door.

Words like butter-less and sugar-free strike fear into the bravest cook’s heart. Making decent pastry is difficult enough, but things will get very tricky very quickly when you rule out sugar and butter. When Heston Blumenthal coaxes his diners into trying some new combinations of taste and texture, or an ever-spookier new cooking technique, it is usually because there is some intellectual trail that he is following. A specific sense of place, or maybe a particular season. On the other hand, Cyber Chef Watson is searching for links purely on the basis that they have never been made before. Perhaps there’s a reason that we have never put pepper, saffron and coconut milk onto the same ingredients list? It is certainly unproven, and on the face of it doesn’t sound impossible (although the pepper and saffron will be playground bullies, intense and strident).

Our favourite cookery books are a step nearer reality; you can tell the ones that get most use because their pages will be stuck together with blobs of sauce from bygone days. A good cookbook is one that you trust. Computers have their uses, but you never see one tasting a sauce so they’ll never get the seasoning right.