CAYG

"A man's gotta have a code, a creed to live by" - John Wayne

The finest kitchen partner I ever had was my best mate, Tris. We lived together as students and rapidly worked out that our needs were in sync. He was a great, instinctive cook, taught me loads and sashayed through a crowded kitchen with the same snake-hipped elegance he commanded the catwalk. I was a student photographer, but he was already modelling … well… in between pursuing his studies at CERN and being a ski instructor. Girls came round a lot. Because of our cooking, I reckoned. Well… that was my belief.

But the best part was how neat he was. There was no cleaning up to do at the end of a session. We’d both already worked in professional kitchens and had the four magic letters screamed into us. CAYG. Clean-As-You-Go.

I know it sounds like one of those dumb training acronyms, but it’s not. It’s more akin to the Nicene Creed. If you have the moral strength to live by it, it’s a roadmap to salvation. It’s also useful to recite when under fire.

As a general rule, it means starting and finishing with a ‘squared away’ section, without having to clean down at the end. If your space is always as clear as possible, you don’t need room to accommodate expanding crap. You minimise unnecessary movement. You bring raw ingredients in. You work on them. You put the finished work in its proper place, wipe down and go again. And once you’re into the rhythm… once you’re flowing, it feels like nothing else on earth, except maybe writing. You move through your work, entranced.

I spent some of the happiest hours of my childhood in my granddad’s workshop. He wasn’t any kind of craftsman - he was a junior school headmaster - but like most men of his generation, he could fix, mend and make. I loved watching objects come together in his cracked hands. I loved the smells of wood glue and varnish, but most of all, I loved the tools. Every one of them hung on the wall, in their appointed place on a ‘pegboard’ that I could just reach if I stood on tiptoes. Every tool had an outline, carefully traced around it with white paint. He had the firm belief that any tool that wasn’t in his hand or in its outline was a potential danger. He’d learned this from engineers in the Air Force. “When a Mosquito leaves the tarmac, he explained as I listened, wrapt, it’s too late to discover you left your spanner in the engine.”

But it’s still true. It’s why we clean knives with a damp cloth and put them back on their magnets the second we’ve finished chopping. When the dirty washing-up water is suddenly billowing red, it’s already way too late.

Of course, in this line of work, one often has to cook pretty intimately with others, and it’s not always possible to be in complete control of circumstances. But I’ve got too many miles on the clock now. I’m far too Zen to shout or rant. No … it’s just that when you start to chop, you’ll find that, as your knife descends, there’s a clean board on the bench. Put a sticky spoon down on a clean worktop and you won’t even see it disappear. Just a flash of J-cloth blue out of the corner of your eye, and an inexplicable smell of D-10. Not even a disapproving, pass-agg ‘tut’. I move like a ninja, and you’ll never know I was there. Well… that’s my belief.

A while back, somebody sent me a cookbook to review. It was written, God help us all, by a Californian “Private Chef and Coach”. It contains “healthy and nutritious recipes with parallel cooking instructions for couples, to foster collaboration, socialisation and intimacy”.

Though I still find it difficult to read it without actually vomiting blood, I sort of get where it’s coming from. An ordered section is the sign of an organised mind. Sharing a workspace requires no less intimacy, creativity and mutual respect than sharing a shower. And cooking with someone who doesn’t get that is agony.

If, on the other hand, you find somebody who understands instinctively and deep in their heart that raw egg that isn’t wiped off immediately will set like epoxy and need to be chiselled off; that to pick dried garlic out of an un-rinsed Micro-plane is designated ‘cruel and unusual’ under most jurisdictions; that there is no set of circumstances known to science, philosophy or religion under which a used tea bag should be in a sink; then that one is the very definition of ‘A Keeper’.