Mindful Doodles #471 – Different cook spoils the broth:
There was a different man cooking and selling food at the stall which I regularly patronized. I wondered if the food would taste the same. Yes it did. A different cook did not spoil the broth. Because this different cook followed the standard recipe of cooking the dishes.
I think the meaning with the proverb, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”, is that many cooks use their opinions on how to cook one broth. Too many changes on one broth can make the soup taste out of tradition, or abnormal from its traditional taste. If each cook made their own version of the same type of broth, their individual broths would taste great. But if many cooks worked on one broth to send it into different directions, then that broth would taste funny.
I think a different cook would not spoil the broth. This cook would make the broth taste different.
How do different cooks make the same dish taste the same? There was a standard way of cooking which the cooks followed. Apart from the carbohydrate base which contained more moisture than usual, the other dishes looked and tasted the same. One of the most useful commercial packs of frozen vegetables, is the corn-carrot-pea pack. This can be added to any other vegetable base to create a new dish. For example, corn-carrot-pea with potato, corn-carrot-pea with a green leafy vegetable, corn-carrot-pea with scrambled egg, corn-carrot-pea with long beans, corn-carrot-pea with cabbage, and etc. If you need to cook for variety, whip up these nutritious combinations by just changing the base vegetable.
