Julian Barnes’s The Pedant in the Kitchenwas written just for me, an enthusiastic but tabula rasa cook. On making risotto:
As any domestic cook who’s ever made one knows, it’s virtually impossible to do anything during the final twenty minutes or so except stir, add liquid, worry; stir, add liquid, worry, and so on. At best you might have time to leave the hob just long enough to shake an ice-cube into a de-stressing drink; normal sociability is quite out of the question.’
Precisely!