Mmmmm. Sounds like it might be worth a read.
Some comments from a review in the Observer from 2003:
When Julian Barnes's articles on the trials of the home cook began to appear in the Guardian Review, I was envious. Under the heading, 'The Pedant in the Kitchen', each week Barnes explored territory familiar to anyone who has attempted so much as boiling an egg at home - the doubt, the fear, the chasm between vision and reality, those panic-inducing situations when recipes suddenly abandon the apprehensive cook in mid-dish, leaving you to wonder when you should add this ingredient or that, and the thousand other terrors that the ego of the home cook is heir to. And he did it with a wit, grace, learning and intelligence that showed just how anodyne, or even downright clodhopping, most contemporary food writing is. Now those articles have been published under the same title as the column.
Of course, the title is misleading. Barnes is not a pedant. He wears his learning too lightly for that. Pedants do not share his self-deprecation, nor his modesty. A pedant puts formal accuracy above all else. What Barnes calls for is more precise cooking instructions, not so that he may be seen to be right, but so that he may be spared the terror of doubt and the indignity of failure. Beneath all the drollery and wisecracks, Barnes obviously takes his cooking very seriously indeed. He seems to believe, to adapt an aphorism of Oscar Wilde's, that cooking is far too important to be taken seriously. In that sense it is a very British approach to the subject.
Two points emerge:
1. Barnes is not a pedant - and nor am I. I just happen to be somewhat punctilious. OK?
2. Who reads the Guardian Review FFS?
