It’s a scene played out countless times everyday - two comparative strangers meet and find they share a common interest in food or cooking. Before too long, the conversation turns to food sources, recipes, the merits of different cuisines and one’s ability to cook and with that comes a subversive tone, as each tries to outdo the other.
It’s food snobbery and brinkmanship rolled into one.
The etiquette is excruciating – is there a hierarchy of cooking abilities? Will my grounding in good honest home-style food trump your ability to reheat a microwave meal? Will we both be bested by the person who took a cordon bleu course and has a great signature dish and then brags about it constantly?
And then there’s the food. Does the fresh food in a supermarket get usurped by food bought in a Growers Market regardless of what it is? Does organic anything trump locally grown produce? Does locally grown produce not count if it is outside the 160 km limit so beloved of food-mile advocates?
Even growing your own vegies is fraught with difficulty. For every person struggling to grow basil and tomatoes in a pot on a balcony, there will be another who has raised no-dig garden beds with organic composting material, 20 varieties of vegies, plus chooks, a bee hive and several varieties of fruit trees who worries about the coriander that has bolted to seed and the heirloom tomatoes that have been worried by mildew in the wet weather. And here you are thinking that it’s so nice to have fresh basil to hand.
Don’t even get me started on recipes. For everyone who uses their grandmother’s tried and tested scone recipe, there are countless others who look for fresh inspiration off food blogs and recipe websites and then boast that they always try for a different meal every evening. Somewhere in the middle are those who annotate recipes and have butter and lemon juice stains all across The Cooks Companion. For those wondering, that would be me.
It’s an exhausting business being a foodie, but there’s a hidden set of rules that you can use if you want to avoid food snobbery – they are the rules that no chef will ever tell you. I suggest you write them down and annotate them at your leisure. Butter stains optional.
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1. We all shop at Aldi, even if we won’t admit it. Oh come now, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, you just ate a beautiful dessert made with generic branded organic butter, free-range eggs and single-origin honey – tell me you can taste the price difference.
2. No matter how much you try to convince us, there is nothing new under the sun – Those of us who have been around long enough know: food fads come and go, but there is a reason the classics will always be classics. Will I bequeath to my heirs a secret recipe using molecular gastronomy? I doubt it.
3. Nothing succeeds like outstanding flavour combinations. Please, for the love of God, learn what flavours work well together, then play it simply. No, we do not like truffle oil with everything. Kim chi goes with nothing.
4. The best training you can ever have as a chef is to grow up poor. Ask any Italian peasant. Be proud that you tasted the slow-cooked cheap cuts of meat, offal, home-baked bread and pulses when you were growing up. Knowing what to do with leftovers is inspired creativity, not cheap and nasty.
5. The missing ingredient is Love. Enough said.