I am no chef, and I can barely make a cup of tea (well, I can when the wind is in the right direction, the stars in proper alignment and Jupiter is in the house of Mercury), but that doesn't mean I can't criticise.
This is true of most things. I have no clue how the country should be run - but that doesn't stop me from telling our Prime Minister at periodic intervals how he should do his job, or the Finance Minister where he has gone wrong.
Of course, often I am at the receiving end too. People who wouldn't know an adverb if it turned around and bit them on their ankles tell me that I need to work on my adverbs carefully. Or those who haven't written anything longer than a laundry list (and that too with mistakes) suggest I try my hand at another profession altogether - perhaps creating recipes. All par for the course, really. One man's meat is another man's au gratin, as we often say.
So when I read in a recipe book that "freshly ground blocked people" must be used for the seasoning, I didn't react initially. Perhaps, I figured, that is how they make fried rice these days, even if the technique was guaranteed to shock my mother.
And when did they start putting people into food rather than the other way around? Intrigued, I wrote to the publishers only to be told rather archly that it was a typo, and what they meant to say was "freshly ground black pepper". That set me thinking. How much of our cooking is based on typographical errors? When they say "use six teaspoons of sugar", do they really mean "pour six glasses of white vinegar"? For a non-cook it is all very confusing.
A couple of years ago, a well-known food writer suggested poisonous leaves as ingredients while another thought an Italian salad uses macaroni, raw minced onion and carrot and tinned pears. If you have worked out which is the odd one out, you know which word has been distorted. Yes, that should have been peas, not pears.
Typos are different from genuinely bizarre ideas on how to make the perfect omelette or the unsurpassable pudding or whatever. And when the two combine, fireworks are guaranteed. Meanwhile, I am off to make myself an omelette (as suggested in a recent book and involving throwing crisp potato chips all over it).
