‘Ecraser l’infâme!’ Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia’s Smith’s new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it’s the public who gets cheated.
Madame Smith’s sassy title is meant to suggest you can get away with using frozen or canned ingredients and still make good food; the sassiness is a piece of nonsense. All cooks use store-prepared ingredients of one sort or another — pasta, ground coffee and ice-cream, to name just a few. It’s a question of which prepared ingredients you use and how you use them.
Madame Smith’s way is to employ packaged food for all the basics, and fresh ingredients for garnish or to add a bit of taste. Her use of packaged ingredients is cunning rather than cheating; she tells the reader which brands to use for each.
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