Sustainability: The planet is under pressure, the soil aches. Often myopic “innovations” have often led to walking backwards in the name of progress- inevitably. There's more than enough food being made to feed us all, and the way that we make so much of it ricochets into mainstream spirals of disconnectivity. *Terrifying facts about soil biome collapse and industrial food production & processing’s downstream impacts*- you can look them up. Then there's your, mine, our societal physical health. In many places the earth we’re told is sick and so are we, and vitality and happiness are interlinked. Happiness and sustainability are intertwined, both nourished, one begets the other and vice versa. It's a losing race to suffer for short term gains.

Cost - I wish, near most especially in this case, money didn't matter. Better ingredients make for better food, and in all such cases, the freshest, ripest, plumpest most prestigious of components will make for better dishes, however, the higher flavor output based on input cost inevitably exhibits diminishing returns and, sadly, money does matter; A) in terms of making sure one doesn't get ripped off, given that prices can be just that “prices”- not a guarantee of correlating quality, and B) that we all need money to survive & prosper in this game of life, and so making a saving and having a little left over is a reluctant imperative. So by all means, if possible buy only the best of the best of things, strictly shop at the most artisan delicatessens and premier purveyors and mongers, bring a grocery cart to the farmer's market & go whole hog, or, if you cannot, don't, & fear not, for you and your guests have so much to enjoy, & done correctly, in your home, no one will know the difference.

Locality: Inextricably interwoven with sustainability (which is intersected with cost). The intrigue that comes with knowing what's around when, the blooms & the harvests, the birdsongs of the moment telltale to the season, & when which flowers start to appear and dot what roadsides, and parks, & when what commons start to yield which mushrooms on a good day, to look up and see chestnuts gestating right above you. Knowing the genius loci of your setting is exquisite. And all besides, the closer the thing, the fresher it will be. And if things have been known to be in a place for a long time, odds are, culture & cultivation expertise hail from experience.

Time: The obligation of obligation. I know you’re busy, I know I’m busy; there’s a lot to do and even more to think about, and so I know cooking, even if you love it, can be a chore- especially when you find out too late you’re just short of what you need- or “missed a step.” So we’ll take every measure, pro-actively prevent failure, endeavor, and hey, maybe even slack off to recoup, because cooking- as much as it’s a deep part of all our lives, happens around our lives, and it takes time. P.S. Even though “good cooking takes time” is axiomatic, we can compress and extend and pause our vital cooking time with some tricks and a little know-how, most importantly we’ll plan accordingly.

Precision: “WEIGH” EVERYTHING OUR FIRST FOR EACH RECIPE. I’ll only say this once here, but it’s always true for all recipes. A teaspoon is about 5g, and a tablespoon is about 15g of most things, and “general tiny spoon” you own vs “general normal size spoon” you own are acceptable as respective measuring tools. Yes, you can eyeball & guestimate - I’ve sometimes detailed weights for items in recipes within a range e.g. “7-8g salt.” I’ve decided a clove of garlic is anywhere between ~3-7g, a medium size carrot ~50ish grams, etc [in part just to quantify + calculate usage across the model], and in these cases I am nodding toward a “more-or-less” mindset. As mentioned prior, animals and vegetables come in different weights, so I’ve often explicitly indicated described amounts e.g. “half an onion” most of the time. The point is still; everything should be apportioned (sometimes together whenever possible) before the real show of cooking begins. This is your mise en place.

Intuition: A la minute, on the fly, spontaneous cooking could and should happen, and can be improvised, like good jazz, weaving between grooves of flavour & pockets of tempo in the kitchen, and is undeniably where often so much of the magic & innovation of cooking can happen; it’s the style of the most well seasoned and talented cooks, having usually put as long or longer hours into their labor, in their own same kitchen, using their own same tools, then near all living professional chefs have with respect to whatever kitchen they may be presently commanding; it also happens at dinner parties (more on that later), but in my experience it tends to be messy, and the odds of striking gold, without forgetting any incremental improvement, are slim; it’s best left for the right moments and at all times to your grandmother.

Deliciousness: This is the most complex of all categories. Deliciousness is subjective, and circumstantial. It’s defined by context and experience, and achieved as a synecdoche of every intention and action leading up to the moment of eating food or even more broadly just experiencing a thing. Truly delicious things should be both mentally and physically supreme, as the history and environment of the food you’re cooking when described & intellectualized, and how it’s beautifully (or not) presented, and the emotion of the room, will impact the impression of each bite. Deliciousness relies on harmony, and on contrast, and on depth, and delightfulness. Deliciousness is a gestalt.

A LAST VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: I’ve restrained my inclination to write “try a bit ;)” at the end of every recipe, and “to taste” in every other line, but only because I’m telling you now; it is a joyful imperative to taste, and to smell whatever it is you’re doing, every time you change it in any way, and especially when you’re done. Don’t neglect the opportunity to taste raw ingredients either. Eat a little flour. And if you “mess up”, well you probably didn’t really mess up- circling back to: “taste it” -it’ll probably still be delicious and you can always hide behind a smile.

At the end of the day you want to go down to a restaurant supply store to get most of your restaurant supplies. You want the professional stuff. And it’s generally cheaper too. To me in NYC, restaurant supply stores meant the various stalwart places on Bowery, and in Britain, or at least in London, insofar as I’ve been able to ascertain, the answer is Nisbits. For the core items, buying from brands with a history for the type of product you’re looking for has in my experience almost always been worth it over knockoffs when it comes down to durability and capability- it really is worth the extra money. But for a silicone spatula that’s inevitability going to get burned or stained on something? Generic.

When I grew up, before I started working in kitchens, I was lucky to be in a home with a wide array of excellent pots and pans of all shapes and sizes, wooden spoons aplenty, but reflectively, after working professionally, lacking in certain insider tools and tidbits, and awash with random bits that may’ve come from a set at some such time; all in all I think a good example of what’s common & natural in most households - and especially better in comparison to when you’re just starting out and don’t know what to get- which is to say this list is everything one would need, assuming they don’t have anything else, but there’s no intention for you to replace your perfectly good pots and pants and ladle and colander and anything else you already have.

Finding out what it would/could/does cost to “cook dinner at home every night" (manageably - genuinely enjoyably, even occasionally celebratorily) takes a few steps. The first order of business is kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing. You need to know where has the best ingredients at the best prices to make what you’re making, but then you also need to know what you’re making to know where to look for the places that have the best ingredients at the best prices. And then once you solve for that, you need to figure out how much to make of everything so that you don’t waste anything, and then you need to know the amount of everything you’re making vs what you’re buying so you know how much things cost…

The month’s “menu” - more cooking plan really, is rooted in dishes I’ve had and loved, and mean something to me, and more importantly am good at cooking, and most importantly dishes designed to make sense to do in concert and sequence, dinners and more, that are accomplishable, possible, and accessible while still being exciting and approachably ambitious; aimed at achieving epicurean epidemy, for reducing stress and hazard and discontinuity, ergo to maximize our pleasure and joy. The point is not to lower culinary ambition to fit domestic life; it is to reorganise culinary labour so that the ambition becomes possible.

Emergent from the menu design, and as a necessary pillar to the pursuit of cost, time, and skill efficiency, we rely heavily on preservation, reuse, and transformation. With careful planning there’s no need to waste those often gargantuan, inexplicable portions of ingredients provided by grocery stores, typically purchased half-blind, myopic beneath the store floodlights. We also don’t need to trap ourselves in a mundane and enclosed cycle of making, freezing, pulling from the freezer- the freezer, frozen meals, or of eating the same thing over and over (another consequence of grocery portions meets online recipe ridiculousness).

Following through “The Month” will give you everything you need to fully follow the System of Cookery, letting you know where to go, what to get, and what and when to do what you need to when you have what you need, and then of course what it will all cost in terms of time and money to do so.

As promised I’ve detailed my finds and excursions in order to coordinate the shopping. Getting things, the so often tragically looked element of most recipe books, is taken well into account. I have scrounged around with my ears to the ground and grapevine, nose to the grindstone, performing general recon on the best, most worthwhile gets, the ones that I think matter anyway when it comes to groceries, and in doing so, as I know many of you don’t or won’t live in North London, am also just trying to exemplify the spirit of curiosity and treasure hunting that I think we should all incorporate into our own grocery shopping. It’s my pleasure to highlight many of the best providers of produce near me, pontificating on what’s what, what’s worth it when it comes to where’s nearby, and to provide instruction on how to get what you deserve. I’ve detailed the costs for each thing and each shop, as well as have a handy list you can check off when you’re looking for what you need to get. The groceries list is absolutely everything one would need, assuming you were starting completely from scratch. Please buy only what you need, and use up what you already have.

Of course all cooking boils down to a recipe. The recipes in this system are presented plainly, with unapologetic insistence for you to have a scale (it will make your life easier!). I’ve also included the totality of equipment, of stuff and space you’ll need to make each recipe, and of course what order to do things in so that its as smooth as can be and you aren’t accidentally washing and drying the same bowl ten times over before anything’s done, and you aren’t needlessly piling up dishes willy-nilly either, or just opening and closing drawers the whole time. For overarching days and dishes, I’ve included the order in which each recipe or steps of each recipe- if there’s overlap, should be done on “The Month” page so that you can actually get things done and aren’t eating at eleven pm every night because cooking took one million hours. Between you and me in all recipes you’ll experience tension between controlled repeatability, explanation, and situational instinct, and you have to trust you’ll make the right choice (which can sometimes be chalked up to “a learning experience”) - I trust you. I’ve tried to minimize the dilemma, please follow the recipes as closely as you can unless you don’t want to.

Rest, simplicity, familiarity, dinner out, takeaway, fish fingers, repetition, old reliables, are all in play as they’ll improve our day/week/month/year/life at the right times, they’re important for a well and truly lived domestic system, and frankly inevitable if we don’t want the concept of cooking to impossibly consume our lives instead of taking part within it. Restaurant meals and takeaway are built into the programme rather than treated as lapses. And besides! I love eating at restaurants! Who doesn’t?! When they’re good at least, as true bastions of goal setting hospitality and cooking skill- concentrated, fantastical reminders of what can be so good about being alive. Restaurants are important. And so I’ve opined on my own experiences, recommendations to arrange attendance at the certain London restaurants of my choosing. I’m ranking takeaways, and deciding where makes sense to go to again and again. Take a spin.