“Begin at the beginning.”
Lewis Carroll
Before We Begin, We Must Start
Have you felt inspired to cook, bake or create something of your own? Perhaps you made a promise to a loved one during lockdown. Perhaps the cost of living has made the price of takeaways increasingly difficult to justify. Or perhaps you simply want to eat better but are unsure where to start, or rather, where to begin.
That may sound like an odd distinction, or at best a cliché, but beginning is the cornerstone of your culinary future.
I learnt to cook many years ago and wanted to share the experience, but for a long time it all seemed like too much work: devise a recipe, write it down, establish the quantities, test it, revise it, write an article, share it with anyone interested, and then do it all again.
One day, however, I began to ask myself how I had arrived here and what was stopping somebody else from making the same journey. The answer, it turns out, is very little. You need some knowledge and experience, certainly, but acquiring both is where much of the fun is to be found.
So, welcome to Larder & Ladle. One part of the site contains recipes, including printable versions, while this Blog contains articles intended to accompany you on your journey. We shall begin the series with spices: what they are, how to use them, what to consider when buying them and which dependable favourites deserve a place in your larder.
What to Expect
We shall cover many subjects, while the recipe collection will draw upon ideas and traditions from around the world. I’ll wager that you do not have an enormous kitchen or an outrageously expensive oven. What you do have is the desire to learn, and that is why you are here.
We are going to explore how flavours are made and how ingredients work together. I do not mean pairing them in an intimidating or needlessly grand manner. I mean learning to pay attention: what can you taste, what might you change, and what would you add or remove from the dish in front of you?
With experience, it becomes possible to taste something and begin to deconstruct it: to recognise what went into it and, more importantly, roughly how much of each ingredient was used. That ability is not reserved for restaurant chefs, nor is excellent food guaranteed by an expensive bill. Money alone does not provide good food; care, curiosity and enthusiasm can take its place remarkably often.
We have never had more access to cookery programmes, books, websites and advice. Yet much of it can still feel inaccessible, costly or unnecessarily complicated. I am not here to sell you a chef’s dream or another subscription. If these articles help you become more confident, thoughtful and adventurous in your own kitchen, I gain something far more worthwhile: pride in the cook you are now and the cook you are becoming.
Put your mind to it. Commit to learning. Taste as you go, make notes, forgive the occasional failure and try again.
If you have read this far, then, before you even realised it, you have already made a start on your beginning.
