I despise recipes that promise results without work, or success without technique. … Technique must be acquired, and, with technique, a love of the very processes of cooking. No artist can work simply for results; he must also like the work of getting them. Not that there isn’t a lot of drudgery in any art — and more in cooking than most — but that if a man has never been pleasantly surprised at the way custard sets or flour thickens, there is not much hope of making a cook of him.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, Doubleday, 1969.