Passing on the secret sauce

Chefs used to guard their recipes closely. Now, they share their techniques with the world. Read between the lines when you cook, not every recipe is easy

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Do you use cookbooks? I have to say that I don't; which may explain why I am such a bad cook. My problem is that I lack the patience to follow a recipe. And all my cooking is pretty last minute, which means that by the time I decide to cook and start looking at a recipe I discover that I don't have half the ingredients, decide to improvise and end up making an entirely different dish.

For years, I have consoled myself with that old cliché about the difference between the French and the British. A Brit, it is said, finds a recipe, makes a list of all the ingredients required, and goes out and buys them before starting work in the kitchen. The French, on the other hand, go shopping, find fresh and interesting ingredients and then come back home and work out how to use them.

This sounds good in theory, but is not actually true. French cooking can be complex and involves exact quantities of each ingredient so, unless you are Alain Ducasse or Anne-Sophie Pic and can invent perfect recipes on the spot, the recipe is crucial to the process.

You only realise how important recipes are when you see professional chefs fight over them. They hide their recipes (even from each other), and a line cook who has worked in a Michelin three-star restaurant will always get another job in a fancy restaurant because he will know the secrets of the chef at the threestar restaurant and will be able to reveal the recipe.

That's as true of Indian food. For instance ITC, unlike most hotel chains, will not let its chefs publish the recipes of its most iconic dishes, because it regards them as proprietary information.

The Taj, in contrast, has always shared its recipes and has even published cookbooks on the grounds that culinary knowledge is meant to be shared. Modern chefs in India have followed the Taj's lead; the Indian Accent cookbook contains recipes of the restaurant's most famous dishes.