Five great foundations
There are five great foundations to fine cookery
Of these five ingredients the cheapest by far are eggs, and there are literally thousands of recipes for this extremely nourishing food. Compare the price of eggs to that of the others, or indeed to the price of fish or meat, and you will see that eggs stand out by far. Pure extra virgin olive oil is expensive, but there is absolutely no substitute. Butter, too, is expensive, but again there is no substitute – don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that you can use other vegetable oils or butter substitutes in fine cooking – you can not. In many cases where a recipe calls for cream, you can use whipping cream rather than double cream. It is cheaper and less fattening, but if the recipe calls for a cream that has to be reduced in a sauce, it can be better to use double cream. Reducing single cream to the correct consistency you may have to use so much single cream and reduce for such a time that it would have been cheaper to use double cream in the first place.
I will say only one thing about using wine for cooking – never cook with a wine that you would not be prepared to drink – if you wouldn’t drink it, don’t use it.
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