Life at Uni: Cookery concepts 101

By Gordon Rugg

If you’re cooking for yourself for the first time, you might find this article amusing. (Maybe not very helpful, but there’s a fair chance it will be amusing…)

I know someone who used to be an army cook. The principles below are based on what he told me about his cookery training in the Army.

I suspect that his stories didn’t do justice to that fine institution, and that they contain some adjustments of the truth for greater dramatic effect, so please treat the information below with due caution.

The four food groups:

There are four food groups, namely:

• Vegetables
• Meat
• Pastry
• Chocolate

Basic cookery:

• Boil vegetables till they go soft.
• Fry meat it till it stops bleeding in the middle.
• Bake pastry till it goes hard.
• Eat chocolate before anyone else can get it.

Intermediate cookery:

• Eggs come out of chickens, which are meat, so eggs are meat, and should be fried.
• Mushrooms are not vegetables, pastry or chocolate, so they are meat, and should be fried.
• Onions are honorary meat, and should be fried.

Advanced cookery:

• If meat is hard after you fry it, then treat it as an honorary vegetable, and boil it with vegetables until they all go soft. That gives you stew.
• If you put stew in pastry, then you get pie.

Legal disclaimer: We accept no responsibility for anyone basing their food preparation on third-hand stories from former army cooks with a track record of telling tall tales, about how things may or may not have been done half a century ago.

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