"I need a recipe"

If you think you need a recipe, cooking is the event, because a recipe is the event's script. It has ingredients you don't have, in amounts you'd have to measure, in an order you'd have to follow with the phone propped against the kettle. A recipe turns dinner into a task with instructions, and a task with instructions is a thing you can fail at.

The plain plate has no recipe. It has a shape, and the shape is the same every time. Something starchy, which is the pasta, the rice, the potatoes, the bread. Something with protein in it, which is the eggs, the tin of beans, the cheese, the bit of chicken or fish if you've got it. A vegetable, which is whatever's in the fridge or the freezer. And one thing that makes it taste of something, which is the onion and garlic, or the jar of pesto, or the tin of tomatoes with salt, or soy sauce, or a squeeze of lemon and some butter. Put a starch, a protein, a vegetable and a flavour in a pan in an order that makes sense and you have a dinner, and the order that makes sense is the order that things take to cook, which you'll learn by the third time.

That's how most people who cook every night actually cook. They don't follow recipes on a Tuesday. They make the thing they make, and they make it a bit differently depending on what's in, and it's never quite the same and never quite wrong. Recipes are for Saturday, if you like Saturday cooking. They're also, I think, part of what built the event. Cooking on television and in books is recipe cooking, so recipe cooking looks like what cooking is, and the pasta with the tin of tomatoes looks like not really cooking. It's the other way round. The pasta with the tin of tomatoes is what cooking is. The recipe is the exception.

So the plain plate needs you to know the shape and to have the shelf. It doesn't need you to know anything else. Chapter 20 will ask you to write down six of them, and you'll notice you didn't need to look any of them up.