The paradox of simplicity

“Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he.” Arthur Conan Doyle

I have been delaying doing this post - inspired by my recent purchase of Yotam Ottolenghi's latest book, Simple - because well it's not that simple to write about simple is it? Even if you are restricting your thoughts to food. I mean first define 'simple'.

The dish at left - Avocado butter on toast with tomato salsa looks pretty simple from a distance. Smashed avocado on toast with some tomatoes and lettuce or something on top. But it's not quite that simple, because when you look at the recipe you find there are 13 ingredients, 11 if you don't count salt and pepper and the recipe takes up a whole page. There are two different herbs to chop, limes to zest and juice, and garlic to peel (always a pain to me). But it is actually quite simple and certainly not difficult, with three major components - the avocado butter, the tomato salsa and the assembly with the toast. And it can be more or less made in advance - well the components, and combined at the last minute. And doesn't it look gorgeous? Probably tastes good too. Not that I shall be making it any time soon because David doesn't like avocados. But it's also not simple in other ways. Obviously the sheer gorgeousness of the look and the taste too, is dependent on those tomatoes, so you must use excellent tomatoes - easier these days than in the past, unless you grew your own, but nevertheless it would take a bit of work to find the right ones - maybe a longer journey than usual, or a wait until the next farmers' market, or forking out a bit more money that you may not have. And ditto for all of the other components.

Ottolenghi is not known for simplicity. His recipes tend to have long lists of exotic ingredients, some of them almost impossible to find - urfa chilli flakes, black sesame seeds ... although times have changed and a quick glance through the book brought home to me how many of those ingredients are now available in your local supermarket - black garlic, tahini, harissa, couscous, pomegranate molasses, tarragon - even limes. None of these would have been in my local grocer's or greengrocers in my childhood - we didn't even have supermarkets until I was about ten.

He freely admits he is known for his complexity and indeed, one of his books, Nopi is, in a way, the complete opposite to Simple, for it is all about highly complex restaurant food. He also admits that simple can mean a number of different things to different people:

"there's more than one way to get a meal on the table and ... everyone has a different idea of which way is simple." Yotam Ottolenghi

His book is punctuated here and there by spreads like this one. Again, not that simple really to produce the meal. Each dish represented there might be simple, although doubtless with their own individual complications but putting the meal together is a whole lot more complicated and dependent upon timing and organisation.

Going back to that definition of simple - well yes I know, I didn't produce one - Ottolenghi has six in this book - simple is not easy, not quick and not - well - simple. It's complex and complicated, even difficult in many different ways.

"There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard." Martin Scorsese

Making things look simple or even easy is often very tricky. In the commercial world Apple's computers are predicated on simplicity - they are easy to use - who invented the phrase 'user friendly' I wonder? They are also very simple and stylish to look at. Clean is the word most often used to describe the Apple look. And yet these are massively complex machines, and getting them to market has involved thousands of hours and goodness knows how much brain power.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Steve Jobs

I guess his aim was to make life simpler when really he has ended up making it more complicated, and it certainly wasn't an easy process to achieve the superficial simplicity of the machines. He (and his team) have changed the world. As have others of course, in other areas.

And what about life itself?

“Life itself is simple ... it's just not easy.” Steve Maraboli

You could say life is simple - you are born, you live, you die. You need food, water and sex to keep the human race going. Everything else is extraneous. And yet nobody lives a simple life. To live a truly simple life you would need to live completely alone, because as soon as you interact with another human being, on however basic a level, things get complicated. So does a hermit live a truly simple life? I suspect not, for surely his or her brain is still working away even though they do very little, and the brain is a very complicated piece of work. And then even though they may not eat much, they have to eat something, so getting that food must be complicated - at least initially in setting up a system. Maybe they grow their own - some would say that is simple - but it really isn't and I'm living proof of that.

Birth itself - the fundamental basis of life is not simple either. Yes - a couple have sex and create life, it grows, and is pushed out when ready. But none of that - not any of the steps mentioned is simple. It's a miracle, it's beyond understanding really and it can turn out in so many billion ways - the earth currently has over 7 billion people - each one unique - even twins.

But I digress, from food and from Yotam Ottolenghi's book. I have just been for one of my walks and as I walked I thought about how to tackle this post, and decided in the end to do a sort of series - each one focussed on one of his definitions of simple. This post is just a sort of introduction, that tries to see whether there is such a thing as simple food. Can you be a cook without cooking anything for example? So I will end with a few really, really simple foods.

Simplest is raw - fruit, vegetables, even meat and fish.

An apple - now what could be simpler than that? Well yes, but if you care about where your apple comes from and what kind of apple it is then it's not so simple, and do you just bite into it or do you slice it up, do you peel it ...? Some raw things are more complicated to prepare - a mango for example, or steak tartare. And once you start combining all those raw things into a salad or some sort of raw food platter it really starts to get complicated. What goes with what, where will you put it on the plate, does it need some sort of dressing or sauce ...?

Are you a cook if you serve an antipasto platter of things you have bought from here and there, or have in your store cupboard? You might have made that dip, and baked the cheese, cooked the asparagus and made the dipping sauce, and if you did then this platter is obviously not that simple. But even if you did buy everything, deciding what to use, buying, preparing (cucumber, asparagus, baking the cheese) and assembling is not simple. Easy yes. Simple no.

And the simplest meal we know - bread and cheese - what about that? No cooking involved, but again you've got to choose and buy - or even make the cheese and the bread - and the wine to go with it. Mind you it is pretty simple at its most basic. Though there are literally thousands of things you can cook with just those two ingredients, not all of them simple - fondue, quiche, welsh rarebit, pizza ...

A boiled egg and soldiers? Nothing simple about that. How fresh do your eggs need to be, how do you like them cooked, how do you achieve that, what bread do you use to get the required texture and how long do you toast it? Do you toast it? Hens' egg, duck egg, quail egg - the last are probably not serious complications, but nevertheless you can see that even this most basic and simple of meal is really not simple, and possibly one of the most difficult to get just right.

In fact it can be just as simple to throw a whole lot of things in a pot, put them in the oven for an hour or two and eat. But then - again, what goes with what? That really is a basic requirement of a good cook I think, though the genius cooks always seem to think of something new to go with whatever they are dealing with. And then there's all the chopping and cutting up, the choosing of liquid, and the time. Easy, but not quick and certainly not simple because you are dealing with several components.

You just need to think it all through a bit. Clear your mind like Steve Jobs, take a deep breath and go for it. Simple.

"The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way." Keanu Reeves