I spent the first two years of this cooking badly. I made the gray lentil patties. I bought the shrink-wrapped cheese that would not melt and cost nine dollars. I made a lasagna that my brother-in-law described, generously, as interesting.
Everything I made announced itself. You could taste the absence of the thing I had removed, and no amount of enthusiasm on my part covered it up.
What changed was not a recipe. It was working out what the removed ingredient had actually been doing in the pan. An egg in a muffin was not supplying egg; it was supplying moisture and a binder. Beef in a chili was not supplying beef; it was supplying chew, fat, and a deep savory note.
“Once you know which job the ingredient held, you can hire something else to do that job, and nobody at the table notices the difference.”
Before You Begin
That is what this book is. One hundred and twenty replacements, worked out over years of cooking, written down with the ratio, the method, the cost, and the honest odds that somebody catches you.
There are exactly five jobs an ingredient can be doing — fat, salt, umami, texture, browning. Every failure in this kind of cooking is one of them going unfilled. Chapter 1 teaches you to name which one, so you spend the rest of your life diagnosing your own dinner instead of guessing at it.
Every swap carries a Tell Score
The part of the book I am most attached to. A number from one to five saying how likely it is that somebody eating your food notices anything is different.
1Undetectable. I have served these to people who eat meat every day and nobody has ever remarked on it.
2Safe in company. Nothing to explain, nothing to apologize for.
3A careful eater paying attention might catch something — though usually not what.
Nothing rated above a 3 is in this book. If a swap could not clear that bar, I left it out, and the chapter says so where the omission is conspicuous.
