The devil's in the detail

Now what does that mean?

I think it could be interpreted in at least three ways and I might think of a few more as I go along.

Firstly - and the one most relevant to me is that assembling the detail is a devil of a job. It's very relevant to me at the moment, because we are currently in the throes of checking everything before we embark on our French holiday. We are staying in ten different places along the way (I think it is ten), leasing a car and meeting up with ten different people along the way. There are addresses, bills, phone numbers, directions, arrival and departure times as well as a ton of other trivia to make sure we have correct. Me - well I suppose I'm a bit slapdash, but I do have all the information filed away in a folder, and also on my computer. And it did take me a while, but not that long really and not all in one concentrated effort, because I have filed bits of paper along the way.. And I must admit I probably put more faith in paper than the computer, though I have filed things away there too. But I guess you can lose the paper. My husband, on the other hand, slaves away at assembling it all in a computerised document, causing himself a lot of stress in the process. But then I guess we all do things differently. And it is true you have to read the fine print. But it is a devil of a job. So much so that you begin to wonder whether it is all going to be worth the effort. A bit like the Christmas turkey really - well the whole Christmas thing.

And I think there you have the second interpretation of the saying - the hidden and/or unexpected problem, or difficulty - a nasty surprise when you get down to the nitty gritty. For the devil is nasty. The little thing that has the potential to spoil everything. I do hope that, as far as our holiday goes, we don't find any of these - a church bell clanging loudly on the hour just outside your house, all night long - a main road passing by your front door - or even worse, some traffic lights - a thirty minute drive along precipitous mountain roads to buy your baguette for breakfast - no decent restaurants within a twenty mile radius. These and many more such nasty surprises are possible (and have happened). I do everything I possibly can to avoid them. I ask questions of the owners about bread, churches and restaurants, I pore over Google maps and their satellite views and I check out Trip Advisor reviews. But that little devil of a nasty surprise is always possible. Something you didn't think of.

And lastly it can be devilishly difficult to do something really complicated or to produce something perfect - as in the beautiful photograph at the top of the page.

Which is where I come to food.

Because all of those three possible interpretations can easily be applied to food. In the first instance, those long and complicated recipes with long lists of ingredients or long lists of instructions - like the baguette recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 2 are daunting - so daunting that one often does not try. Though one should. I was put off for years from making risotto, because all the recipes made it sound so complicated and difficult, but when I actually tried I found that it's actually a very simple and satisfying process. In this instance you need to follow the detailed instructions, but they are actually not that difficult.

The hidden or unexpected problem. Well I think that all depends not the quality of the recipe. You should always read through a recipe before you try it, make sure you have everything to hand and prepared. Sometimes though you come across a badly written recipe which suddenly tells you to do something that you were not prepared for - which is why you should read it carefully first - or sometimes they actually miss something out. I confess I cannot think of an example at the moment, but I do know that I have had minor catastrophes because something unexpected happened along the way.

As for the last one. Well I shall never be able to produce something like the dish in the picture, though maybe I should try. I simply am not careful and precise enough.

And this can probably be applied to everything I do. I'm a generalist really. I know a little about a lot, but not an encyclopaedic amount of detail about anything. And I don't want to know that much detail I think. When I am writing these posts, I dip into the world wide web and I find all sorts of fascinating stuff, but once I get into long articles about chemicals, or economics or even the qualities or otherwise of a particular food, I start to lose interest. Being a generalist makes you a good librarian (which I was) unless you are a specialist librarian - like an art librarian, or a librarian in a specialist kind of library. Then you have to know the detail. But then again I do quite lie nitty gritty little details and enjoy puzzling out things - like family history - I have spent hours and hours poring over documents trying to establish who married who or where they were born. And being a generalist gives you a wider perspective on things I think as well. Possibly a more open mind.

“The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.” - Hyman G. Rickover

And this picture is not really relevant, but I did like it.

I meant to say something more deep and meaningful in this post, but I see I have been my usual slapdash self and not really said anything much at all. I was just overwhelmed by the project of assembling all the details of our trip in a particular way for my husband. It's all nearly done now though. And then I found this rather lovely quote, which is not quite what I have been writing about but I wanted to share it anyway.

“Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification - crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.” - Roman Vishniac