When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimisation. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a ‘hack’ to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger.
None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook. But looking back through my older cookery books, it’s a theme that neither really arrived nor fell out of fashion: we’ve always had one eye on how we can speed up the lead-up to dinner.
I, however, am often in the opposing camp. Some things can’t be rushed – and that’s part of their appeal. Knitting a cardigan, sewing a quilt, making a croissant from scratch. Here, the time and the attention paid are the point. But also, like most people, I have to get supper on the table seven days a week. Some of those nights I’m happy to stand over a risotto for up to an hour, or to conjure up a multi-element feast that sees me pottering about the kitchen prepping and tending. There are other nights when I’m tired and busy, contending with work, bedtimes and extra-curricular activities. I need to stay up-to-date with The Pitt or my library books are due back and I haven’t finished them.
