Habit & Taste

I like how these opening words draw an analogy between cooking and writing and how that analogy is cemented by the recourse to habit.

Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next. It's about developing an understanding of food, a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple desire to make yourself something to eat. And in cooking, as in writing, you must please your self to please others. Strangely it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palate, follow your own instincts. Without habit, which is itself is just trial and error, this can be harder than following the most elaborate of recipes. But it's what works, what's important.

Nigella Lawson, preface to How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food.

And so for day 2135
17.10.2012