and has spent his time backpacking in South East Asia Africa and thinking about cooking, judging from this Comment is Free post:
Backpacking is all about adventure and new experiences: doing things you wouldn’t normally do, trying things you wouldn’t normally try, and taking chances. On my first trip, I wasn’t quite so daring when it came to food. I was surrounded by delicious, fresh local produce, but I ate mainly from a tin. Why would anyone, myself included, choose to scrape overcooked baked beans from the bottom of a pan instead of rustling up something fresh?
My epiphany came on Tiwi Beach in Kenya. I was smearing peanut butter on a piece of bread, as I did every lunchtime, when a local fish-seller came by, pushing his bicycle through the sand. In his bike basket, peeping out from under big green banana leaves, were fresh prawns, caught that morning. I remember looking at them wistfully, trying my hardest, but failing, to remember a recipe. Someone bought a bagful. I went over to him and asked, “what are you going to do with them?” “Eat them of course,” he replied, looking at me like I was a bit deranged. “But what recipe are you going to use?” I said. Then he told me something that would change the way I cooked forever: “There is no recipe, I’m just going to cook it.”
I should add at this point that the guy in question was French, so this came out as, “Zere is no resipee, ahm juss going t’couk eet”. I don’t want to get melodramatic, but it was a big moment for me. He’d uttered what I took to be a sacred truth – and the French accent made it even more hallowed. No recipe? My world was crashing down. What about scales and measuring jugs? How are you supposed to know when things are ready?