Without wishing to brag, I am considered to be quite a good cook by my friends. Some even use the epithet 'gourmet', though the word always makes me cringe, particularly since I prefer to let good ingredients speak for themselves and have never had the patience to 'gussy dishes up to look fancy.' That being said, if I truly am a good cook, it is probably due to a large extent to a few basic principles that I firmly believe. Namely, to be a good cook you have to love food, you can't be afraid, and you have to be willing to experiment. Beyond that, I think it is simply a matter of experience, like riding a bicycle. Let me illustrate my three basic principles through a couple of anecdotes taken from my life.
Principle One: Love Food
The idea that you can't be a good cook without loving food was brought home to me while I was living in a commune in England. It was our practice to cook for one another in rotation, and on the whole the meals were surprisingly good, though none of us had much money to spend on ingredients. There was however one notable exception. There were two members of the community (lovers) who had absolutely no interest in food and happened to be vegetarians. The inevitable result was that whatever new concoction they tried out on us was quite awful, and we would rather unkindly refer to the dish as 'Gunge' -- typically an unsightly casserole of nuts and tomatoes and other vegetables put through the blender and baked in the oven. I was not the only one to seek out invitations on the evenings when they were scheduled to cook.
Conversely, the opportunity to enjoy good food is among the happiest early childhood memories I have, such as the delicious meals my grandmother would prepare, the recipe for one of which I describe below (Fried Veal Liver with Capers and White Wine) . Also, I will always remember my first meal in a restaurant--I was probably five or six and had won a lottery ticket that gave me a meal for two. I can still taste today the 'Koenigsberger Kloepse' (a type of meat dumpling typical of Northern Germany, whose recipe I offer below) that my father and I had as a result of that win. And then there is the memory of the meal of 'Steak and Frites' that my father prepared for us upon his return from Paris, where he must have enjoyed it on more than one occasion, my father having been quite a gourmet in his time. However, beyond that one meal, I can't remember him having spent much time in the kitchen.
Even nowadays, when I travel, much of my enjoyment of the places I visit is based on finding good restaurants and enjoying a meal. In fact, a major part of my exploring of city neighborhoods is to see if I can identify a candidate restaurant for the evening meal, whereby I typically look for restaurants in neighborhoods that are off the beaten track. While I have to admit that I've come up with a few 'duds', I've had incredible experiences that also enabled me to get to know the local people in a way that a tourist who sticks to the standard sites and the mainstream eateries never does. When I return home, I not only have fond memories, but new recipes based on the meals that I ate.
Principle Two: Don't Be Afraid
The second principle to being a good cook is that you can't be afraid. When I met my first lover in England, his culinary repertoire was limited in every way, largely because he was afraid of the kitchen, afraid that he could not put together anything other than the two or three dishes he had down pat. I quickly declared in action, if not in words, that I would henceforth take care of the cooking. The payoff for me was that during the years while I had rooms in college, where cooking was not really an option, I had the run of his kitchen and was able to prepare many a meal. This arrangement also gave me the opportunity to learn to cook for larger numbers, because of the large crowd of friends that typically came together after the concerts Andrew directed. Nowadays it does not faze me in the least to prepare a meal on my own for 60-80 people. You simply have to take your time and work in an orderly fashion.
I'm glad to say that in the meantime Andrew has become quite a good cook himself, and I thoroughly enjoy the meals he prepares when he visits me here in Washington, DC. In fact, I've even adapted one of the recipes that he uses back home in England (Baked Salmon).
The converse of Andrew's timidity keeping him out of the kitchen was true of my mother, in what is truly a story of courage. When we first came to the US, she had two options. The first was to follow her profession as a portrait artist, which would have required her to travel and regularly leave me with relatives, in what really did not seem a viable soution. The other option was to become a housekeeper until my father was able to join us and they could set up shop together. The drawback of the second option was that my mother knew very little about cooking. However, she bit the bullet and quickly became truly proficient, though she will be the first to admit that she was never a born cook and claims to this day that she "lacks that fine palate." I still enjoy reading the diary she kept of the recipes she prepared for the relatively demanding household where she worked for over two years.
Having courage means that you have to be prepared to accept the occasional abysmal failure, though I've been fortunate that there have been relatively few of those. In addition, one has to keep in mind that the kitchen is not without its dangers, and courage should not lead to foolhardy behavior. Stoves are hot and oil catches fire, as I found out myself one day, when I accidentally let a Wok get too hot. Similarly, if you use sharp knives without due attention, you can end up with a nasty cut. I'll spare you the details ...
Principle Three: Go Ahead and Experiment
The third, and last, principle to becoming a good cook is that you have to be willing to experiment. There are plenty of cookbooks around that will enable you to prepare meals of every imaginable variety, if you follow the recipe closely enough. But if you are not willing to experiment, you and your guests will always know that there is that little something missing that makes the difference between a good and a truly excellent meal. For myself, while I've got a whole rack of cookbooks, I rarely if ever stick strictly to the recipe as it is written, adding a tweak here and there as the mood strikes me. I'll mention some of my favorite authors as I dicuss the recipes in the pages that follow.
Beyond that (as I said before), cooking well is largely a matter of experience. For, despite what the cookbooks might lead you to think, a confident cook has an amazing amount of leeway when preparing a meal, unless you are trying to do something that is particularly complex (which I generally avoid, because I don't enjoy spending all day in the kitchen). It is because of my belief in the relative tolerance of good ingredients that the recipes that follow tend to be fairly imprecise. Enjoy!