Low Price Cooking

As a teenager, I used to astound my friends by cooking the perfect omelette. And I always told them the secret was in the cooking oil.

Once back in their own homes, they would have a go at making one. They’d take their mother’s most expensive cooking oil, pour it into the pan, break some eggs, whisk them and pour the mixture into the frying pan. What ensued might be an interestingly textured scrambled egg ensemble. But not an omelette by any stretch of the imagination.

There are many lessons to be learned from this story. Don’t make assumptions might be one. Another could be wait until you have all the details before you rush off. But I think it’s more about this: ask the right question, and you’ll get the right answer.

Sure, cooking oil is important to making an omelette. There are two reasons. First off, to make a great omelette you should pour in enough cooking oil to line the cooking surface of your frying pans. The egg mixture will stick straight away if you try pouring it directly onto the frying pan. Secondly, you need to let the cooking oil get hot. Extremely hot. The cooking oil in the pan needs to be very hot, but it doesn’t need to be smoking to avoid sticking your omelette to the frying pan. And that means you’ll end up with a well-formed omelette, not a pan of scrambled egg.

But the right question wasn’t ‘What’s the secret to making a good omelette?’ Firstly, that assumes there’s one secret. For another thing, it leaps to the conclusion that there is a secret. There’s no secret to making an omelette, or in the cooking oil. Ask that question and you get: ‘the secret’s in the cooking oil’. So my friends thought that using special/expensive/fancy/organic cooking oil would transform their omelettes. They focused on the object itself like good little consumers.

The right question could have been, ‘How do you make the perfect omelette every time?’ - which would have produced an outline of the procedure from cracking the eggs to levering the omelette onto the plate.

An even better question would have been, ‘Could you show me how to make an omelette?’ - and I would have been delighted to. There was no secret after all.