As far as I'm concerned, food is the best thing in the world. Right back in the very beginning it was the ultimate temptation, the fruit of the forbidden tree. And yet we don't just eat fruit anymore, we have come so beautifully far since then. We now have steak and chips, fried chicken, cupcakes and the bacon double cheeseburger. We may have been kicked out of the garden but the world still seems like a pretty fantastic place to me, and food might actually be worth it. Food has become linked with culture, with wealth, with sex and with pretty much everything else good. It's that perfect mixture of sustenance and indulgence, necessity and decadence.
Food is not just food anymore, it is a creative outlet. some people wont just make a meal, they'll make a masterpiece. We share recipes amongst ourselves, altering and perfecting them; handing them down through generations and passing them around communities until there are recipes for an immense number of meals and delicacies available throughout the world to anyone who wants to look for them.
This sharing of recipes used to be something personal, a gift handed from one individual to another. The introduction of more and more cookery books to the world changed all that however and suddenly there was a 'correct' way of making things and at first this seemed to be dictated by women of high society with no real cooking experience at all. That changed of course and cookery books are now a fantastic source of various tips and recipes. I think I could probably amuse myself for hours just looking through a good cookery book, thinking of ways to adapt their culinary marvels to my limited budget. The internet allows me to do this and has brought a personal nature back to the world of recipes. I was absolutely thrilled when I found a recipe for Dublin Coddle that looked absolutely great to begin with but then had also been commented on by dozens of people suggesting variations and adaptations. The recipe itself was written much like any other, with a sort of dispassionate formality, but the comments had all the colloquialisms and exclamation marks you could want.
