Hi-tech, lo-tech – it’s all wok and rolls to me

Jul 23 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

HAVING finally consigned the spaghetti measurer and a parrot-shaped pastry brush (unused) to the charity shop box, I have been given another kitchen gadget.

This one promises to be more useful than previous culinary gifts, although I mean no offence to the generous bestowers of the egg poaching hook, the mandolin slicer and the yellow piece of plastic that marks a sunrise on a piece of toast.

I am talking about the Nintendo DS Cooking Guide, the revolutionary new tool that helps you choose a recipe according to the number of people you are preparing the meal for, how much time you have, and what food you have in the cupboard.

No more frantically leafing through Nigella and wondering where you can get hold of cardamom pods at a moment’s notice when your guests are due to arrive in 20 minutes and you’ve forgotten to heat up the oven.

You simply tap the “substitute ingredients” button, and the console refreshes the instructions according to your needs.

For pedantic chefs, this is the perfect invention. No longer will they find themselves mopping the nervous sweat from their brows with the ovengloves while worrying just how fine the finely in “finely chop” is, because there’s a “more details” button for that, too.

Awkward guests, or family members, who simply can’t possibly stomach staple food stuffs are also catered for – tap on the “excluded ingredients” tab, and Bob’s your very happy uncle who will no longer have to pick all the mushrooms out of the mixed vegetable risotto. Genius.

Except . . . it’s left me with the sneaky feeling that cooking shouldn’t be this easy. Well, it shouldn’t, should it?

Cooking is one of those Great British Pastimes, like fell walking and ice-skating, that appeals to the national sense of masochism – the feeling deep within us that, if something doesn’t take a substantial amount of time to achieve, involve at least a vaguely potential loss of limb (or possibly a finger or two) and maybe even a tea break, then it isn’t character building.

And if it isn’t character building, then it isn’t worth doing.

In Japan, where even the pets seem to be gadget-mad (you can actually buy a digital camera for your dog), the DS Cooking Guide has gone down really well.

But it’s tricky to imagine the Brits passively accepting the demise of the recipe book and sweeping shelves full of Jamie, Gordon and Delia into the recycle bin.

So what if we would never use them again? We rarely use them today – even the most well-seasoned amateur chef must surely refer to only a tiny fraction of the recipes in his collection.

No need for a bookmark to locate the best loved pages, they can be easily identified by the splatters of raw Victoria sponge mixture, scarlet tomato stains and dustings of self-raising flour.

But nobody buys cookbooks to actually cook from, do they? Certainly not those exotic ones with instructions on dismantling blowfish or baking firefly souffle.

Instead, we spend hours gazing at the pictures of dishes resembling temporary art installations and muse on what we might possibly create next time, that is if we can just work out whether a guaje is a type of vegetable or a kitchen utensil and how to get hold of a xoconostle.

Cookbooks are a gentler alternative to those terrifying travel books called things like “27 Views You Have to See Before You Die” or “If You Haven’t Been to These Places by the Time You’re 70, You’ve Wasted Your Entire Life”.

We may never climb to the top of Everest but we could, one day, with a bit of practice and possibly with the help of the “substitute ingredients” button, conquer the recipe for the perfect profiterole.

Every recipe is a potential new experience and whether they will ever be realised only time and the availability of Japanese pickled burdock will tell.

So, even if I find myself taking my Nintendo into the kitchen, my cookbooks will never end up at the back of the drawer containing the musical cake slice, rotary cheese grater and, because in the end I couldn’t bear to thrown it away, the parrot-shaped pastry brush.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk