How much ground nutmeg can you hold between your thumb and index finger? Or, to put it another way, if I ask you to add a pinch of the stuff to a dish, how much is going in? How much is a dribble of honey? Or a glug of red wine? Or a splash of balsamic vinegar? I have big meaty hands. If I pick up a fistful of chopped flat leaf parsley, that’s quite a lot of foliage. What about you? I have become increasingly obsessed with these questions recently, because I’ve been writing my first cookbook. I regard myself as a bish-bash-bosh cook; a man whose guiding words are “a bit” and “really quite a lot”.
Mine are recipes inspired by my favourite dishes from the past 25 years of restaurant reviewing. They are not recreations. They are often exercises in reverse engineering, created by standing in a kitchen and chucking ingredients at the problem in what felt like a logical order. But out of this chaos had to emerge clarity. I had to straighten out life’s fuzzy lines. For example, there’s a crispy duck salad recipe, inspired by one served by Mark Hix at the original Ivy, when it was still good. Their version involved simmering duck legs in aromatics for hours, then breaking them up and deep frying them before turning them in a sauce with half a dozen ingredients. In short, a conscientious chef’s recipe. My version involved turning crisped pieces of duck confit in some hoi sin. But “some” really isn’t a recipe word. I had to stand there and observe myself. It turns out I use four tablespoons of hoi sin to two broken-up confit duck legs. Who knew? Not me.
I have had to become a more precise version of myself. In search of inspiration, I turned to experienced cookbook writers. I found reassurance in The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop. Of course there is detail. You can’t create bold Sichuan dishes in your own kitchen without accuracy. But she also includes instructions to fry slices of pork until they smell “delicious” and to cook out Sichuan chilli bean paste until it smells “wonderful”. I adore the shameless invitation to subjectivity.
One of my favourite cookbooks is Sam Sifton’s No Recipe Recipes from the New York Times. There are no volumes for ingredients at all. The instructions for chicken with caramelised onions and croutons merely tells you to put a “bunch” of chopped spring onions in a tray and put a “bunch” of chicken thighs on top of them. I like the sound of a bunch. It’s more than a couple, fewer than too many. It’s not just how I like to cook. It’s also how I like to eat.
But there has to be a balance between vagueness and detail. I have come to see writing recipes as akin to writing short stories. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. They need a strong narrative arc. But most importantly the reader needs to feel they are at the heart of the action. They need to feel empowered. If a recipe is too doctrinaire it’s as dull as assembling an Ikea table. There needs to be space for interpretation, room for the cook to recognise something fundamental: that it’s no longer the writer’s dish. It’s now yours. It’s your glug of wine, your splash of vinegar, your pinch of nutmeg. Taste the dish. Does it need more? Then put some in. It’s as simple as that.
Nights Out At Home by Jay Rayner (Penguin, £22) is published on 5 September. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply