When I got married 50 years ago, my wife and I had somehow acquired a little cookery book called Cooking in Ten Minutes. We never quite managed to cook anything in so short a time, mainly, I think, because the book was a bit of a cheat: it seemed to expect you to have a saucepan full of boiling water and a whole lot of washed and prepared vegetables ready before the ten minutes began. We lost the book long ago, but 40 years afterwards I read a volume of essays by Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen, in which he devoted an entire chapter to French Cooking in Ten Minutes and to its author, Edouard de Pomiane, who, he informed me, had been a food scientist and dietician much admired by Elizabeth David.
Since Pomiane, however, I am not aware of any cookery book claiming that you can cook any dish in ten minutes.
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