TWO

Two Ingredients · No Asterisks

Seventy-five dinner-party dishes,each a little kitchen alchemy of just two ingredients —made ahead, and finished in front of your guests, glass in hand.

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“The height of sophistication is simplicity.”

Clare Boothe Luce

The Book

This is not a book about doing less because you can’t be bothered to do more. It’s a book about what is revealed through simplicity.

What This Means

Elevated

Most two-ingredient recipes you’ll find online are a can and a box. These are traditional dishes from the tables of France, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the American South — food you’d be proud to set in front of guests.

Magical

Every dish is a transformation. The ingredients in this book are emulsified, aerated, caramelized, fermented, or dissolved — becoming something neither could be on its own.

Unhurried

Most dinner parties ask the host to choose between the kitchen and the company. Here, the work is done earlier in the day, and each dish is finished in a few calm minutes in front of your guests.

Two ingredients means exactly two. No sneaking in a few more under the guise of “pantry staples.” Read the rule →

Glossary

Half the pleasure of this book is in the words — so here is how to say them, where they come from, and the small stories hiding inside each.

How We Count

The Two-Ingredient Rule

Plenty of recipes claim to use only two ingredients. Then, ten seconds in, the cook in the video reaches into the pantry for salt, pepper, oil, maybe a pinch of dried herbs, none of which count, apparently. The two-ingredient dish now has six, and the commenters notice every time.

Two ingredients means two ingredients. No asterisks. Everything that goes into the dish is counted. Here is how I count.

I don’t count the way a chemist would. Salt is sodium and chlorine (NaCl); water is hydrogen and oxygen (H₂O); an apple holds hundreds of compounds — over three hundred in its aroma alone, on top of its sugars, acids, vitamins, and pigments. A cook, though, counts each of these as one thing: salt, water, and an apple.

A prepared food sold under one name can be a single ingredient like butter, mustard, mayonnaise, miso, chocolate, and stock. Each is made from several things, but you buy it as one item. Salted butter belongs here too: it’s a food in its own right, the way Parmesan is.

A mix is also a single item on the shelf, but it serves a different purpose. It combines ingredients to do part of the recipe for you. Cake mix, pancake mix, and self-rising flour all fit here. Self-rising flour, for instance, is flour, baking powder, and salt — so a bread dough made with self-rising flour and yogurt is four ingredients, not two. Other cooks are welcome to count self-rising flour as a single ingredient, but I don’t.

After that, one test settles the rest: if it ends up in what you eat, it counts. Salt used to season food counts; oil poured over the dish counts; the starchy water combined with cheese to make a sauce counts. But salt packed around a whole fish and cracked off after baking, water used only to boil pasta, a thin film of oil to keep food from sticking to a pan — these help the cooking without becoming part of the dish, so they don’t count.

An ingredient can appear twice. The lime in a Key Lime Pot is juice in the custard and zest on top; the chocolate in a soufflé is in the batter and grated over the crown. Same ingredient, in a second form. Nothing else touches the plate, and the photographs follow the same rule.

A Note on Salt

Salt is the first thing everyone asks about, so here is where I stand.

Salt is an amplifier more than a flavor. It makes food taste more like itself. How much a dish needs is a matter of taste, and taste belongs to the person eating. So in most of these recipes there is no salt in the pot. Put a salt cellar on the table and let each guest decide. It’s an old courtesy. In medieval halls a great salt cellar sat in the middle of the long table, a show of the host’s wealth, since salt was costly. The family and the most honored guests sat at the host’s end, “above the salt”; everyone else sat below it.

When salt is one of the two ingredients, it counts. Shio-Momi is cucumbers and salt, and nothing else. When salt is a vessel, packed around a whole fish and cracked off before anyone eats, it doesn’t.

And some ingredients bring their own: salted butter, Parmesan, soy sauce, miso, anchovies, and bacon. Each is a food in its own right, and each is one reason these dishes rarely need much help from the cellar.

That is the whole rule: two ingredients, everything in the dish counted, no exceptions for “pantry staples.” Other cooks and cookbooks draw the line where they like; this is where I draw mine.