goodcook.ing

Ten principles

Good cooking

Dieter Rams wrote ten principles of good design in the late 1970s, to answer his own question: is my design good design? They turn out to survive translation to a kitchen almost unchanged.

  1. Good cooking is innovative

    Technique keeps moving — new equipment, new ingredients, ideas borrowed from other people's kitchens. But novelty is not the point. A new method earns its place when it makes the dish better, not when it makes the cook look clever.

  2. Good cooking makes a dish useful

    Food is for eating. It should nourish, satisfy, and suit the evening it is made on. A dish that photographs beautifully and eats badly has failed at the only thing it was actually asked to do.

  3. Good cooking is aesthetic

    We taste with our eyes first, and a plate that looks considered genuinely tastes better. But the arrangement serves the food. The moment it starts serving the cook, dinner is getting cold.

  4. Good cooking is understandable

    You should be able to taste what is in it. A good dish explains itself in the first mouthful — this is lamb, this is lemon, this needs salt — and a good recipe explains itself before you pick up a knife.

  5. Good cooking is unobtrusive

    Most food is not a performance. It is Tuesday. The cook who leaves a good ingredient alone is usually right, and restraint is much harder to practise than addition.

  6. Good cooking is honest

    It does not promise more than it delivers. It does not hide a tired ingredient under a sauce, or call forty minutes of work a twenty-minute supper. Where a recipe came from is worth saying out loud.

  7. Good cooking is long-lasting

    The dishes worth keeping are the ones you come back to for years, not the ones that were briefly everywhere. A recipe earns its place in the book by being made a second time.

  8. Good cooking is thorough down to the last detail

    Salt the water. Let the pan get properly hot. Rest the meat. Taste at every stage, and again at the end. Nothing in a good dish is arbitrary, and it is the small steps that separate one cook's version from another's.

  9. Good cooking is environmentally friendly

    Buy what is in season, use the whole vegetable, keep the bones for stock. Waste is a failure of planning rather than bad luck, and food that travelled less almost always tastes of more.

  10. Good cooking is as little cooking as possible

    Back to the essential. A tomato in August wants salt, good oil and nothing else at all. Less, but better — the shortest route to the best version of the thing, and then stop.