What is a Recipe?

In writing recipes, I have had to learn another language. Indeed, my initial interest in writing about food was a linguistic one: how could I use language to convey a realm that lay so far beyond it? Simile and metaphor can often evoke the flavours of a dish, the textures the cook must aim for, so much more directly than the most rigorously precise description. A recipe has to take root in the reader’s imagination. I learned this long before I started writing about food, at a time when I never considered it a possibility, or even knew to consider it a possibility. When I was in my teens and obsessed with Aldous Huxley, I was struck by an account of a young man’s first taste of champagne in Time Must Have a Stop, a book I haven’t read for over forty years, in case I find my youthful fervour be replaced with irritation. It tasted, the young man thought like ‘an apple peeled with a steel knife’. This is not a scientifically accurate description, but it speaks truly to the senses. It lets you feel that sharp effervescence, taste that sherbetty tang, and conveys the wincing abruptness of that first, unexpected sip.