Laurie Colwin wrote: ‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.’ It is one of my favourite quotes about cooking, mainly because it feels true: everything you cook is informed by other dishes, those that you’ve cooked, those that you’ve tasted or read about, the successes and the failures.

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