The rise in popularity of recipe boxes is just the beginning of a revolution in food-prep convenience. Here’s what’s next
Humans love to cook, ever since a caveman accidentally roasted his own forearm on a bonfire and reckoned it smelled kind of delicious.
From there it was a short jump to cooking meat that wasn’t attached to our arms. Soon ancient humans were experimenting by throwing bigger and bigger animals on to the flames. Mice at first, then otters, swans and, eventually, our old friend the cow – who is still a very popular animal to eat today.
Fast forward a couple of million years (of what I am going to go ahead and presume is totally uneventful culinary history) and here we all are today riding around on trains and scrolling through pictures of sandwiches on our phones almost all of the time.
Our days are structured around food, from our morning egg breakfast to our goodnight egg snack. But even though we’ve been eating ever since we were primordial tubes with a mouth at one end and an anus on the other, food remains an ever-changing concept. New ingredients and dishes become fashionable, while others – like ham and bananas hollandaise (a real thing, see recipe below) – are consigned to kitsch vintage cookbooks, to be purchased as ironic gifts.
These new subscription services send you the precise amounts of all of the ingredients you need to make quality meals at home, which I know because I listen to podcasts about gruesome murders that exclusively advertise food and mattresses.
The most recent change in cooking has been the advent of mail-order recipe kits, with invariably friendly sounding names like Hello Gastro, Happy Kale Time or Enter The Hungerbox. These new subscription services send you the precise amounts of all of the ingredients you need to make quality meals at home, which I know because I listen to podcasts about gruesome murders that exclusively advertise food and mattresses.
Meal-kits are a novel and futuristic concept, straight out of a very boring episode of Star Trek. Receiving a baggie of exactly three chilli flakes is far more convenient than buying the five kilo sacks of chilli flakes that, given the huge popularity of these recipe boxes, I can only assume is the smallest size that Tesco do.
But let’s not stop here, not while there’s still so much more convenience to be mined from the inexhaustible quarry of wholesale vegetables and zero-hours contract courier services. We can make food delivery even more efficient if we think beyond these simple meal-kits.
Take, for example, the chimney stack of your home, rendered obsolete by local wood burning regulations. It could be converted to a makeshift meat silo, storing a two-storey tall trunk of solid house-beef that’s dispensed out of the fireplace when needed, via an app. Four times a year a trained engineer will feed additional meat into your chimney stack, switching to turkey around November, with Premium subscribers enjoying bonus stuffing and cranberry sauce.
Alternatively, you could just enjoy some delicious ham and bananas hollandaise.
Ham and Bananas Hollandaise (Serves 6)
- 6 medium-sized bananas
- 6 thin slices of boiled ham
- 60ml lemon juice
- 3 tablespoons of mustard
- Enough hollandaise sauce to cover (from a jar is fine, nothing can make this any worse)
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 200C. Lightly coat a shallow baking dish in butter. Peel the bananas, sprinkling each with half a tablespoon of lemon juice to prevent darkening. Slather the ham slices with mustard. Wrap each banana in its very own slice of ham.
- Arrange this monstrosity in a single layer and bake for ten minutes. Remove from the oven – not stopping to think about what’s happening – to pour over the hollandaise sauce. Bake for five minutes more, or until slightly golden. Serve to your horrified guests/secret basement family.