Thursday 22 January 2009

What counts as "cheating"?

Tim cooked a lovely stir-fry tonight (not from a recipe book, so not blogged), and noticed while assembling the ingredients that the bottle of soy sauce in our cupboard proudly proclaims itself to be "A Delia Cheat Ingredient!".

We were both a little puzzled by this, as we couldn't really think what soy sauce could be a cheat for. Are non-cheating cooks expected to ferment their own soya beans? (We did concede that she might use it in a "cheating" way in a recipe, although we couldn't think what that might be - perhaps someone with the book can enlighten us? It doesn't appear to be googlable. All we could think of was things like enhancing the flavour of sauces, which didn't seem particularly like "cheating".)

Although googling didn't produce an answer to the soy sauce question, it did turn up the full list of "cheat ingredients" on Delia's website, which strikes me as rather bizarre. Some of the items on the list are real "cheats"; frozen pastry, ready-cooked lentils, even the infamous frozen mashed potato that caused the press to suggest that Delia had lost it when How to Cheat at Cooking was released. None of these things are terribly difficult to make from scratch, but they do require greater or lesser amounts of time and skill, and I've resorted to plenty of them in my time and I'm sure I will again. But a lot of the others are like the soy sauce; balsamic vinegar, for instance. Green & Black's 85% cocoa solids chocolate. Vanilla extract. Maldon sea salt. These aren't "cheats", they're ingredients. I'm not quite sure what the point of this is. Is she just trying to persuade a reluctant nation to start cooking their own meals rather than buying takeaways by convincing them that they aren't really cooking? Does she think that proper cooks process their own cocoa beans and extract salt from the North Sea while on family beach holidays in Cromer? Has she just gone a bit mad?

2 comments:

  1. I actually think she's lost it a bit. There seemed to be to be very little virtue in How to Cheat and I couldn't understand why someone who professes to be all about good food would want to encourage people to use ingredients that weren't fresh. JMHO, mind.

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  2. I haven't read the book, but I always have a tin of chopped so-called friedonion that proclaims itself a Delia cheat - it's ideal for marinating rabbit.
    You can't eat it as fried onion, of course - much too soggy

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