We Vegetarians / Every day

The five dishes worth knowing by heart

Not recipes. Patterns you can vary.

Cooking improves markedly when a few dishes become patterns rather than recipes: a lentil dish, a vegetable and grain bowl, a soup, a pasta with a vegetable sauce, and something with eggs where the diet includes them. Each has a structure that accepts substitution.

Knowing a pattern means being able to cook it from whatever is in the house, which is the actual skill weeknight cooking requires. A person who can only cook from recipes needs the right ingredients; a person who knows five patterns can produce dinner from what exists.

The way patterns form is repetition with variation. Cooking the same lentil dish six times with different aromatics and different finishing acids teaches the structure in a way six different recipes cannot.

It also makes shopping simpler, because the staples that support the patterns are a short and stable list, and the fresh components can be whatever was good or cheap.

There is a further argument for patterns over recipes, which is that they survive an empty fridge. The evening on which cooking most needs to be easy is the evening when the planned ingredient is missing, and a pattern accommodates substitution where a recipe produces a trip to the shop or a takeaway.