My favourite cookbook, Cooking Com Bigode, is both more and less than a standard recipe book. Less, in that it’s low on specificity, with recipes vaguely suggesting “some onions”, “lots of carrots” and “enough water”. But also more, in that you don’t just get recipes: you get patterns. As the author Ankur Shah puts it, “For each recipe the general theory (pattern) is explained and variations are offered.” He calls the process ‘The (culinary) Jazz’. I owe my own cooking skills to this approach: improvising around patterns, learning by trial and error, exercising resourcefulness and creativity with whatever’s in the fridge, rather than shopping for particular ingredients and measuring them precisely.