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Looking back on these recipes, I’m happy about how useful they remain. Which is as it should be: good, simple recipes are not trendy but timeless, or nearly so. Simple, as a friend of mine said to me, need not mean simple-minded. As much thought and work may go into figuring out a great three-ingredient, thirty-minute recipe as one that includes thirty ingredients and takes three hours. The fact that the preparation and execution are faster and easier does not make the recipe less sophisticated, complex, or desirable—indeed, it may make it more so.

Many of these are traditional recipes from around the world, updated. Almost all of them require a minimum of technique and/or a minimum number of ingredients; when they’re not fast, they’re “largely unattended,” a phrase I adore for describing the kind of cooking that lets you leave the kitchen for long stretches. In general, my approach is less-is-more, an attempt to produce recipes that are so sophisticated, savvy, and fresh that they will inspire even experienced cooks while being basic and simple enough to tempt novices.

As you look through these recipes, you’ll see that my style of cooking is more flexible than that of many other cookbook writers; it’s not the style of chefs but of traditional home cooks, who’ve always made do with what they’ve had. Sometimes the success of a dish hinges on a single ingredient (obviously, you can’t roast a chicken without a chicken), but more often it does not—herbs and spices can be omitted and substituted for one another, chicken can pinch-hit for fish and pork for chicken (and vice versa), many fish are interchangeable, many vegetables can be treated the same. To a beginning or only slightly experienced cook, these recipes and variations can be followed step by step; eventually, these cooks will gain the confidence to begin creating their own variations. To a veteran cook, these recipes—like all others—are just descriptions of a general technique applied to a preferred set of ingredients, not to be taken too literally. But veterans will find plenty of good ideas here, too.

This way of thinking, that cooking is not a set of dogmas but a craft that can be learned and enjoyed, is no longer the most common approach. By the thousands, people go to cooking schools to learn standardized skills; this approach didn’t exist a hundred years ago and barely had any traction at all until the 1980s. For people who want to go into cooking as a profession, I have no problem with this (though I always encourage young people to do things the old-fashioned way, by finding a chef who will work them to death for a couple of years). But when faced with the choice between ironclad recipes or those that encourage flexibility, I always opt for the latter.

Nor is this a theory; I learned it by cooking tens of thousands of meals at home, almost always for my family, almost always without adequate time or planning. The organized chef knows what he or she is going to cook and has all the ingredients at hand. But most of us decide what to prepare based on what’s in the fridge, pantry, or shopping bag. Minimizing the required number of ingredients, then, is a top priority. Recognizing that some ingredients can almost always be switched or dispensed with is an important axiom.

Stripping recipes to their bare essentials and seeing ingredients as interchangeable are big parts of the Minimalist plan, but there is more. Home cooks in the United States are seeing the introduction of a new set of basic recipes, not the French classics revisited or the Italian staples revealed—although these are certainly parts of the trend—but the informal, quick, everyday food of households from all over the world.

In cultures where cooking is thousands of years old, most recipes are little more than combinations of the ingredients that appear seasonally. Now, for the first time in history, the standard ingredients of many of those cuisines are available at most supermarkets, opening new possibilities to both novice and experienced cooks.