About — The 20-Minute Table

Twenty Minutes Is Plenty

This book was written for the stretch of life when dinner has to happen anyway. There is a small person who needs feeding at six, an adult who has not eaten properly since breakfast, and about twenty minutes between the two.

Most of what makes cooking slow has nothing to do with cooking. It is the deciding, the shopping, the hunting for a jar of something at the back of a cupboard, and the washing up that follows. Those are the parts a new parent has least of, so those are the parts this book removes — not the cooking. Nothing here is a shortcut version of a longer dish. These are dishes that were always fast, drawn from the kitchens where speed is not a compromise but the whole tradition. You are not being handed a lesser dinner because you have a baby.

Everything is built on whole ingredients, which is less an ideology than a practical matter: they cook faster than you think, they taste of what they are, and they let you season a dish rather than negotiate with something already seasoned for you. Every recipe was written to leave one pan or one basket behind, and the washing-up line at the foot of each page is the constraint it was designed around. Every one also ends by telling you how to get a toddler’s portion out of that same pan.

Ten rules for a twenty-minute dinner

Preheat before you chop. The air fryer or the pan should be properly hot by the time the board is clear. This alone takes three or four minutes off almost every recipe here, and it is the difference between food that browns and food that steams.

Cut for the clock. Nothing cooking in under fifteen minutes should be thicker than your thumb. Small and even beats big and hopeful, and it is why the meat in this book is nearly always sliced or cut into strips rather than left whole.

Season twice. Once in the pan, once at the table. The second pass is nearly always acid — a squeeze of lemon, a splash of vinegar — and it is what makes fast food taste finished rather than merely cooked.

Always add something raw. Herbs, sliced chilli, spring onion, a spoonful of yoghurt. Fifteen seconds of work, and it is the difference between a meal and a plate of cooked ingredients.

Wash up while it rests. Two minutes with the pan still warm, instead of ten with it cold. Every recipe here is built around one pan or one basket for exactly this reason, and the line at the foot of each page tells you what you are committing to.

Read it through once first. Thirty seconds now saves three minutes of standing over a hot pan working out what comes next. Every recipe in this book is short enough to hold in your head, which is deliberate.

Salt the water, not just the food. Pasta, couscous, rice and greens season from the inside if the water they meet is salty. Nothing you add afterwards ever reaches the middle.

Buy the thigh, not the breast. It costs less, it cooks faster than you expect, and it forgives the minute you lose looking for the tongs. Fattier fish forgives in the same way that lean white fish does not.

One pan means one pan. If a recipe tempts you into a second, ask whether the thing you would cook in it could go in beside the first instead. It usually can, and the washing up halves.

Cook the same one twice in a fortnight. The second time takes two-thirds as long, because your hands already know it. That, rather than any shortcut, is where twenty minutes actually comes from.

The whole thing is also a printable 217-page book: download the PDF.

Take it, cook it, change it

Every recipe, the typesetter that turns them into the book, and this website are on GitHub. The code is MIT, the recipes are CC BY 4.0. Fork it, add the dinners your family actually eats, translate it, print it for the inside of a cupboard door. Nobody should have to choose between eating well and having twenty minutes.