We write a version of this piece at the end of every year. It’s one of the more useful things to do: stepping back from individual recipes to identify the ideas that actually changed something in how we cook. Some years the lessons are technical. Some years they’re more about approach. This year, they were mostly about time.
The thing about time in the kitchen
The most consistent thread through the year’s cooking was a renegotiation of time — what it’s for and what it buys you.
The obvious version of this is long-cook cooking: the braise that requires three hours, the slow-roasted shoulder that takes four. The time in these cases is non-negotiable and the payoff is direct — the collagen converts, the flavours deepen, the food becomes something that an hour of cooking couldn’t produce. This we already knew, more or less.
The less obvious version is the time that doesn’t produce transformation but produces depth: the onion caramelised for forty minutes rather than eight, the garlic sweated in oil for ten minutes before anything else goes in, the sauce reduced for longer than seems necessary. These are not slow cooking; they’re patient cooking. The distinction matters. Slow cooking requires planning. Patient cooking requires attention in the moment, and the willingness to let a process continue until it’s finished rather than moving to the next step as soon as it seems technically adequate.
The quality of adequate versus actually ready
Related to the above: we spent considerable time this year thinking about the difference between food that is technically cooked and food that is actually ready. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of the flavour lives.
A browned onion is technically cooked in five minutes. But it takes forty minutes, at low heat with patience, to reach the point where the natural sugars have caramelised and the water has cooked out and the thing is genuinely sweet and rich rather than soft and slightly translucent. Both are called caramelised onions; only one actually is.
This applies everywhere: the mushroom that needs to go beyond soft to genuinely brown, the carrot that needs to cook until it’s actually sweet rather than merely tender, the sauce that needs reducing past the point of adequate to the point of right. The lesson of the year is mostly about extending the timeline of cooking by about twenty percent — not through slow cookers or lengthy recipes, but through patience at each individual stage.
The herb we reached for most, and the oil we used differently
Tarragon became a more central herb in the kitchen this year — partly as a result of writing about it in the summer, partly because it turned out to pair with autumn and winter food as well as spring and summer cooking. A tarragon cream sauce on chicken. Tarragon stirred into a warm potato salad. Tarragon in a compound butter served with fish. Its anise note is specific enough to define a dish without taking over it, which is a quality very few herbs have.
Olive oil changed its role slightly: less as a cooking fat (good for most applications but occasionally wrong) and more as a finishing ingredient. A drizzle of genuinely good extra virgin olive oil over finished soup, roasted vegetables, or grilled fish has a different quality from oil cooked into a dish. The best bottles of oil are wasted in a hot pan. They belong at the end, or not on heat at all.
What didn’t change
The things that worked in previous years — the habit of tasting constantly, the commitment to adequate seasoning, the preference for a simple dish done well over a complicated one done adequately — all remained true and will remain true. The fundamentals don’t date.
The other thing that didn’t change: cooking for other people as the primary purpose of cooking. The technical lessons, the ingredient discoveries, the seasonal shifts — all of these are in service of the meal, and the meal is in service of the people at the table. This year or any year, that remains the point.
What we learnt this year is what we relearn every year with different specifics: patience, attention, and the discipline to let something finish before moving on to the next thing.