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However when it comes to cookery books and particularly cooking features in newspapers and magazines, my respect for minimalism evaporates and instead I revel in over-the-top descriptions of Nigel Slater’s lifetime love affair with cheese and garlic. I also mentally gorge on the modern artistry that is culinary photography, tumbling around in wild imaginings about preparing, presenting and devouring such feasts of crisp fish with garlic, chilli and basil. And that’s what it is most of the time: wild imaginings. I’m a bit of an armchair cook, loving to read the books by night but rarely transforming the mental adulation into a plate of steaming food.
And so, Maureen Evan’s Eat Tweet cookbook, containing 1,000 of her favourite recipes from her Twitter stream, didn’t endear itself to me immediately. Written in Twitterese and bereft of any such photographic artistry, it seemed as about as inviting as a dictionary. I was also marginally concerned that this book might function only for the seasoned cook, taking technique for granted and not for somebody who mightn’t know how to make a béarnaise sauce by heart.
However, the language element of actually condensing a recipe into 140 characters did intrigue as did Evan’s invention of a culinary language which would enable her ‘followers’ (remember eat tweet started out as real tweets) to cook as she did.
Evans started her Twitter stream when she was living in San Francisco (she now lives in Belfast) and was a freelance writer and poet. To keep herself from going “stir crazy” from the lack of human communication, she used to visit the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. Drawn to imagining what each person’s grocery bag contained and what they were hoping to cook later that day, she began to tweet so she could chat with other amateur cooks about the success or failures of recent meals. She could engage in, via social networking, the conversations she dreamed of having at the farmer’s market.
“I loved the sense of community that the market provided and tried to recreate this desire to peer into people’s bags and ask what they were hurrying home to cook,” she writes in her foreword to the book.
She also could see the communicative value of Twitter but didn’t want to just publish banal opinions, instead choosing to tweet about her passion: cooking. More than aware of people’s time constraints, she thought that by reducing recipes to 140 characters, she could save people a lot of time. The challenge for her was not to lose the vital mechanics of the recipe and to ensure necessary sequencing. If minimalism is built upon the concept of paring back to an object’s essential beauty, this is something like trying to tweet the contents of a chapter of fiction. In the words of Frank Bruni of the New York Times, “it’s abbreviation art”.
But does it work? Well, as Evans is an American, I decided to try her blueberry muffins (nothing to do with the relative ease of such a recipe). I have to admit that using a tweeted recipe initially does take time as I had to revert to the book’s glossary on a number of occasions to make sure I understood the symbols correctly and that I was using the correct quantities of ingredients (Evans advises if a specific measurement isn’t included, just use what seems most likely – eg, a couple of cloves of garlic when just ‘grlic’ is listed in the recipe. I’m sure however that if you were cooking from this book regularly that you’d get up to speed on the terminology in snap time. And yes, the book certainly makes cooking appear a simpler and faster affair but you have to wonder do you lose the innate beauty and leisureliness of home cooking if you just measure it in terms of grammatical efficiency.
However, my second foray into the world of ‘eat tweet’ was much less pedestrian. I decided to try out her version of Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon and was found screaming in the kitchen. It was here that I was laid bare as an unaccomplished lazy cook, as, after reading and re-reading the tweet and the glossary about 20 times, I had to admit defeat. So what did I do? I googled the original of course. If there is one recipe that shows the essence of what Evans is doing, it’s this. Check out the contrast between the original and Evan’s Twitter version beneath.
6 ounces bacon
1 tbsp olive oil or cooking oil
3 pounds lean stewing beef, cut into 2-inch cubes
1 sliced carrot
1 sliced onion
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper
2 tbsp flour
3 cups full-bodied, young red wine, such as a Chianti
2 to 3 cups brown beef stock or canned beef bouillon
1 tbsp tomato paste
2 cloves mashed garlic
½ tsp thyme Crumbled bay leaf
Blanched bacon rind
18 to 24 small white onions, brown-braised in stock
1 pound quartered fresh mushrooms, sautéed in butter
Parsley sprigs
Remove rind from bacon, and cut bacon into lardons. Simmer rind and bacon for 10 minutes in 1½ quarts of water. Drain and dry.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Sauté the bacon in the oil over moderate heat for two to three minutes to brown lightly. Remove to a side dish with a slotted spoon. Set casserole aside. Reheat until fat is almost smoking before you sauté the beef.
Dry the stewing beef in paper towels; it will not brown if it is damp. Sauté it, a few pieces at a time, in the hot oil and bacon fat until nicely browned on all sides. Add it to the bacon.
In the same fat, brown the sliced vegetables. Pour out the sautéing fat.
Return the beef and bacon to the casserole and toss with the salt and pepper. Then sprinkle on the flour and toss again to coat the beef lightly with the flour. Set casserole uncovered in middle position of preheated oven for four minutes. Toss the meat and return to oven for four minutes more. (This browns the flour and covers the meat with a light crust.) Remove casserole, and turn oven down to 325 degrees.
Stir in the wine, and enough stock or bouillon so that the meat is barely covered. Add the tomato paste, garlic, herbs, and bacon rind. Bring to simmer on top of the stove. Then cover the casserole and set in lower third of preheated oven. Regulate heat so liquid simmers very slowly for two-and-a-half to three hours. The meat is done when a fork pierces it easily.
While the beef is cooking, prepare the onions and mushrooms. Set them aside until needed.
When the meat is tender, pour the contents of the casserole into a sieve set over a saucepan. Wash out the casserole and return the beef and bacon to it. Distribute the cooked onions and mushrooms over the meat.
Skim fat off the sauce. Simmer sauce for a minute or two, skimming off additional fat as it rises. You should have about two-and-a-half cups of sauce thick enough to coat a spoon lightly. If too thin, boil it down rapidly. If too thick, mix in a few tablespoons of stock or canned bouillon. Taste carefully for seasoning. Pour the sauce over the meat and vegetables. Recipe may be completed in advance to this point.
Somehow, the very determined Evans managed to pare this recipe down to:
Brwn,remv1/2cup lardon, 2lb beef,carrot&onion. Flr,s+p.8m@450F;+2c pinot&Stock/T tomatopaste/BqtGrni, Cvr3hr@325F.
So is the book a gimmick? Not really, just more niche than mainstream. Put it this way, I won’t be substituting Evans for the latest Slater this Christmas. Geeks and diehard tweeters will be gaga about it, particularly if they like cooking already and have a steady understanding of the basics and a confidence in their own interpretation of recipes.
As an ode to minimalism, it’s a classic linguistically and physically. With 1,000 recipes, covering everything from yeast breads to cocktails it’s still of a size that would easily fit in a small handbag. Will I use it again? Certainly but that’s due to my determination to conquer the instructions. However, whether my resolve to completely decode her instructions will translate into the actual preparation of Asian pesto and Angel Food Cake, we’ll see...
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