Peasant's Choice

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

James Barber is so beguiling a cook on his TV program, The Urban
Peasant, that one watches like a couch potato, absorbing the pleasure,
not writing down the ingredients. Consequently, it is very welcome to
have the entertainment translated into cold print, though actually the
print isn’t so very cold, but conveys a good deal of Barber’s charm
and exuberance.

Barber is an enthusiast who believes that “[c]ooking ought to be fun,
it ought to be easy, and it ought to be something we can all do, and
enjoy, together.” His aim in the book is to “make cooking easy, and
quick.” In many ways he succeeds—as, for example, in the most basic
of all possible soups he describes in the introduction to his chapter on
soups. As well, he relies heavily on sautéing intriguing combinations
of ingredients in a frying pan, and this process does not take much time
or dirty many pots.

However, stocking the multicultural kitchen is not easy. Not everyone
will have Chinese preserved black beans, Greek filo pastry, coconut
milk, Mirin, fenugreek, semolina, and green cardamons readily at hand
nor find them easily accessible. And the variety of spices called for
goes way beyond “salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper,” as the skipping
rhyme succinctly puts it. The trouble with spices is that they go stale
if you don’t use them up in a reasonable time. And there is a problem
with quantities. One tablespoon of tomato paste is not uncommonly
required, but what is one to do with the rest of the tin promptly,
because it doesn’t keep at all well? The recipe for Huevos Reales
sounds tempting until you see that it will leave you with six egg yolks,
not impossible to utilize, but requiring a certain amount of thought and
promptness.

Cooking, if plain, can be quick and easy. If it is to be entertaining,
a certain amount of blood, sweat, and tears will have to go into it,
both in rounding up the best ingredients and mastering certain
techniques, such as making pastry. Barber tends to minimize the
difficulties, and maybe his infectious enthusiasm will carry his
followers past more of them.