How to Make a Tomato Sauce

How to Make a Cheese Sandwich. First, get two pieces of bread. Then take one piece of cheese. Now put the cheese on the bread. Put the other bread on top. Cut the sandwich. Eat it. It is good.

How to Make a Quick Onion Soup. First, cut two onions into thin pieces. Then heat some oil in a pan and add the onions. Cook them on low heat for ten minutes, because slow cooking makes the onions sweet. After that, add some water and a little salt. Cook everything for fifteen minutes. The soup is simple but it is warm and good after a cold day. You can eat it with bread.

If you only learn one soup, make it lentil soup. It is cheap, it fills you up, and it doesn't ask much of you. The first thing to know is that lentils don't need soaking — they cook quickly straight from the bag. You will need: a cup of red lentils, an onion, a clove of garlic, a small carrot, some olive oil, salt, and water. Maybe a bit of cumin if you have it. Start by chopping the onion, the garlic, and the carrot into small pieces. Heat a little oil in a pot. Add the onion first, because it takes longer to soften, and let it cook gently for five minutes. Then add the garlic and the carrot. Stir for another minute. Now wash the lentils in a sieve until the water runs clear, and tip them into the pot. Add about four cups of water — enough to cover everything well. Bring it up to a gentle bubble, then turn the heat down. Cook for about twenty-five minutes. The lentils will soften and start to fall apart, and the soup will get thicker on its own. Add salt only at the end, and taste before you decide how much. If you have lemon, a small squeeze at the end is wonderful. The next day's bowl is always better, so always make more than you need.

There is no honest case for not knowing how to make rice. It is cheap, it stores forever, it goes with almost anything, and learning to do it well takes precisely one afternoon and one bag of rice you are willing to ruin. The mystique around rice — the special pots, the rinsing rituals, the people who insist on a particular grain or a particular variety — is mostly true, and entirely beside the point if you don't yet have a working version of your own. Start with what you can buy. Long-grain white rice from any supermarket. One cup of rice to one and a half cups of water, give or take, depending on the brand and the rice's age. Rinse the rice, briefly, in a sieve until the water runs less cloudy. (Skip this if you are tired; the rice will still cook.) Bring the water to a clean boil in a small pot with a tight lid. Add a pinch of salt. Tip in the rice. Stir once, only. Then turn the heat to its lowest setting, put the lid on, and walk away for twelve minutes. The rule of rice, the only rule that matters, is do not lift the lid. The steam is the whole point. Lifting the lid is grief later. Walk away. After twelve minutes, take the pot off the heat — still without lifting the lid — and let it sit for five more. Then, finally, open it. Fork the rice through to release the steam. Eat with anything: stew, a fried egg, soy sauce and butter, leftovers from the fridge. The more often you make rice, the less you'll think about making rice, and that is the goal. Cooking confidence is built out of dozens of these small reliable things. There is, I admit, a more refined version. A heavier pot, a shorter boil, a longer rest, a different brand of rice from a particular shop. I have, on holidays and in better moods, attempted these. They are not better in any way that matters on a Wednesday. The Wednesday rice — the dependable, slightly forgiving, walk-away-and-trust-it rice — is the one you should learn first. The rest is for later.

There is a particular dal that my mother used to make on Sunday evenings, and which I now make on Tuesday evenings when I cannot face anything more elaborate. It is the simplest version of a thing that has many more elaborate versions, and in the long argument over which is the 'authentic' dal, this one would not even be allowed in the room. I make no claim for its authenticity. I make a claim only for its usefulness. You will need: a cup of red lentils, a small onion, two cloves of garlic, a small piece of ginger, a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon of turmeric, a small spoon of butter or ghee at the end, salt, and water. That is everything. The technique is small and forgiving. Wash the lentils until the water runs less cloudy. Chop the onion finely, the garlic and ginger more finely still. Heat a small spoon of oil in a heavy pot. Sweat the onion gently for five minutes — gently is the operative word, and a tired cook can be forgiven for nudging the heat upward, but not by much. Add the garlic and ginger, stir, then the cumin and turmeric. Stir for another thirty seconds, until the spices smell warm rather than dusty. Add the lentils and about three cups of water. Bring it up to a gentle simmer. Lower the heat. Walk away for twenty-five minutes. Stir from time to time. The lentils will fall apart on their own; the dal will thicken; the colour will turn from a sharp yellow to something more golden. At the end, salt to taste, and stir in the small spoon of butter off the heat. Eat with rice, or with bread, or by itself with a spoon when there is no one else to feed. There is, I should say, a great deal that this recipe leaves out. There are versions that use four kinds of dal blended together, that build a complex tarka of mustard seed and curry leaves and dried chilli, that are watched over for an hour by someone who knows what each stage should sound like. Those versions exist; they are wonderful; and on a tired Tuesday they have nothing useful to say to me. The version I have given you is the one I learned not from a recipe but from being in a kitchen on a wet evening, watching someone who could have been doing anything else with that hour. Their hands moved without consultation. They were thinking about something other than the dal. The dal was simply happening. That is the kind of cooking I think most people are actually trying to learn, and that no recipe — including this one — can quite teach. What a recipe like this can do is put you in front of the pot. It can give you the right ingredients in the right order, and a rough time. The rest is what your hands learn over the next twenty pots, and what your nose decides to remember. I know my mother's dal not because she ever wrote it down, but because I made it badly, alone, in a small flat in another country, until one day it tasted right. That, in the end, is the only recipe she ever gave me — the permission to fail at it for as long as it took.

The dish I learned earliest, and have made most often, is a kind of greens-and-rice that does not have a name in the kitchen I learned it in. It was simply what was made when there was nothing else, and what was made when there was something else but everyone was too tired to honour it. I have been making it now for fifteen years, in three countries, in increasingly small kitchens, and each time the dish has the slightly unsettling property of tasting more like itself than the time before. To make a portion for two: take a small bunch of any leafy green you can afford — spinach, chard, kale, the tougher dark-green leaves of any cabbage, the unloved stems and outer leaves you would otherwise throw away. Wash them well; a great deal of grit hides in greens. Chop them roughly, stems and all, the stems separated. Heat a generous spoon of oil in a heavy pan. Add a finely chopped clove of garlic, and, if you have it, a small dried chilli broken in half. Stir for thirty seconds — the garlic should not brown. Add the chopped stems first, with a pinch of salt, and cook for two minutes until they begin to soften. Then add the leaves, in large handfuls, stirring them down as they wilt. They will lose volume dramatically; do not panic. Cook for another three minutes, until the greens are bright and tender. Season with salt and a small squeeze of lemon if you have it, or a splash of vinegar if you do not. Serve over rice — any kind, plain — and eat with a spoon. There is no reason to make this dish elaborate, and many reasons not to. I have come, over the years, to think of it as the meal I make when I would like to feel like myself again. There is a small unwelcome category of writing in which a person describes their grandmother's recipe with a kind of reverent tremble, and the reader is invited to feel that the writer's grandmother was somehow more authentic than other people's grandmothers, who, presumably, did not. I would like to avoid this. The grandmother who taught me this dish was — let us say — not in all respects a kind woman. She had her favourites and I was not among them. The cooking, however, was given without favouritism. The pan she fried garlic in was the same pan she would have fried garlic in for anyone, and the chopping motion she used had a kind of professional unsentimentality that I have only recently come to admire. She was teaching me a technique, not bestowing a gift. I think now this was actually the most generous form the lesson could take. What I would say, against the romantic version of inherited cooking, is that the inheritance is not the love. The love is sometimes there and sometimes isn't, and the cooking is more durable than either. A great many people in this world have been fed reliably by relatives they have complicated feelings about, and their plates were not for that reason less full. The dish I make now is the one I learned then, more or less; my version is slightly different, the way a copy of a copy of a copy is slightly different, and I am suspicious of any account that says my version is wrong. The version I make is the version that lives in my hands. It will go on living there long after both my opinions about it and the original cook are gone. There is, I think, a particular kind of dignity in cooking food that has not been improved upon, that does not invite admiration, that simply works. The pretentious recipe wants to be remembered. This one wants only to be eaten. On a Tuesday evening, when the kitchen is small and the day has been long, that is precisely the right ambition for a dish to have, and the longer I cook the more grateful I am that someone, once, taught me a meal whose only quiet promise was to be there. The recipes I keep are the ones that ask nothing of me except that I make them again.