James May - Oh Cook!: 60 easy recipes that any idiot can make

Hello readers. I may be wasting my time writing this introduction. As I sit here, with my plate of Fortnum & Mason petits fours , I have no idea what the contents of this book will be.

This is no ordinary cookery book. This is different, because the author cant cook. Usually, with these TV/cook-book tie-in jobs, the book comes first, and then selected bits are filmed for the show. The idea behind Oh Cook!is to learn on screen and then put the successful bits into print.

But, contrary to typical book-writing practice, Im writing the introduction first, rather than after reviewing the finished work. Nothing has actually been cooked yet, and no recipes written up. So it could be that youll never read this; that the whole endeavour will be remembered as nothing more than a mushroom cloud of oily smoke hanging briefly over Hammersmith before being plucked away by the wind, hopefully towards Chiswick.

Ill keep going anyway.

I shouldnt really be writing a cookery book or fronting a cooking TV show. My relationship with foodieism is a bit like the one the Archbishop of Canterbury has with Satan; that is, I renounce it.

The first thing that annoys me about all this is people who say, Oh, I love food, as if its somehow beyond the rest of us. Ive never met anybody who doesnt like food. Everybody loves food. Ask some people who dont have any for confirmation of this.

It also bothers me that foodies embrace mass production, capitalism and globalisation in every other facet of their lives, but when it comes to food, they want it produced by bucolic peasants in smocks and sold at a market. They wouldnt have an artisan smartphone or a craft pacemaker, but they want sausages produced by a man who husbanded his own pig or beer brewed according to a tradition that stretches all the way back to a marketing executives lunch.

We should remember that the industrialisation of food production fed us and liberated us from the misery of lard and tripe, and while its fashionable to dismiss this, we must remember that to do so is a privilege born of canned soup and the frozen pizza.

I could go on, so I will. Many of the car programmes Ive presented have been criticised because we drive around in Ferraris and Lamborghinis, and nobody does that in the real world. But are cooking shows and recipe books any different? Millions have enjoyed Gordon Ramsays swearing and Nigella Lawsons heaving breasts, but most of us eat supermarket ready meals, just as most of us drive mid-sized diesel hatchbacks. Its largely fantasy, and the energy density of the worlds unread cookery books would provide a years electricity to a minor town, if it was acceptable to burn books.

All this does worry me. We live in an age where too many restaurants serve buggered-about ingredients to bored people who really ought to find something creative or constructive to do; where the chef has become chef and must be revered as a temperamental artist. Cooking is not art, its a task.

Still; its a task those of us who cant really cook may as well embrace. Everyone has to eat (the much-vaunted astronauts meal pill of my childhood never materialised) and everyone has a kitchen of some sort (but see Essential Kit on for an exception). Cooking is also much more accessible than driving supercars or collecting Renaissance art. It can be done for a few quid, using a handful of implements, and literally billions of people can do it, so it cant be that hard.

Thats what this book is really about. Not a random assortment of recipes, which is like being given a fish, but a thought-out selection of recipes covering a range of basic techniques and principles, which is more like being taught to fish, if you remember that excruciating 1980s motivational poster. Jus, drizzles, foams, smashed avocado, and a bed of can come later. As Picasso said, you have to learn the rules like a pro if you are to break them like an artist.

Incidentally if youre not reading this, its because I thought sod it and ordered a Deliveroo Chinese.

Not really. Its a packet of chocolate digestives.