The Pedant in the Kitchen

Pick it up: If you’re a budding cook, armed with ambition and a growing collection of cookbooks, if you’re an experienced cook - you just might see something of yourself in these pages, if you’re not interested in cooking at all, but would enjoy a charming collection of essays.

Julian Barnes likes to cook. He's a competent cook with a simple ambition. To cook tasty, nutritious food, and to, over time, expand his culinary repertoire. But with him, it's all about the recipes and the instructions. He can and will follow them faithfully, but he needs them to be precise. He gets irked when a recipe is missing an instruction, or if he's told to cook something for 8-10 minutes. What is it? Eight minutes or ten minutes?

He doesn't want to be told to add a pinch of something, a drizzle of something, and a handful of something else. How much is a pinch? What’s a drizzle? And whose handful are we talking about? He doesn't like to go off-book and do something because he feels inspired. He has his cookbooks, he has his recipes, and he will follow them.

In this collection of essays, Barnes brings his pedantic but charming outlook to life in the kitchen. He writes about his favourite cookbooks, cookery writers that he loves, the stress of cooking for guests and the occasional triumphs, attempts to cull his cookbooks and give away the ones he doesn’t use, the constant temptation to buy specialized kitchen equipment, and that dreaded drawer full of things that he never uses, but keeps anyway, because they might be needed someday.

Barnes writes about himself in the kitchen with an engaging and self-deprecating humour that is utterly charming. This a warm, friendly, chatty, book that makes you feel like you’re engaged in a conversation with a friend. It’s a delight from start to finish.