Sometimes, our quest to master a recipe can descend into obsession. Just ask Josh Osman.

Everyone who loves to cook has one dish that defines them – where your taste and flair reaches their heights. It’s more than a recipe, it’s the edible manifestation of your personality. It’s the one safe yet exciting recipe you know will please any crowd, and one you will nail every single time. 

My dad’s is his rock cakes – hard on the outside, but they crumble when you poke them the wrong way. My mother’s is her biryani, a Mauritian recipe for a spicy mixed rice dish passed from the hands of her mother, and her mother before her.

For many, this signature dish is familial – passed down and adapted through generations, from grandparent to grandchild. For some, it’s inherited verbally, or for others it’s stored on a single piece of paper in a glass bottle à la Krabby Patty. Mine, however, came from The Guardian.

One early evening in June 2020, I decided I wanted to learn to cook again – I’d spent so much time as a child in the kitchen with my mother, making everything from roast duck to rock cakes. Mining through the depths of the internet, I came across a Guardian article titled, ‘How to cook the perfect lamb tagine’, by columnist Felicity Cloake.

The article begins with an exploration – of what a tagine is, what meat to use, what spices to use, and how to finish it. Cloake draws on a wealth of recipes for inspiration, including Moroccan chef Nargisse Benkabbou, and Zette Guinaudeau-Franc, a French author who lived in Morocco.

Enraptured by the colours of the dish, and the masses of onion, I immediately darted to my kitchen to get a start. The first time I cooked the dish, for myself and my parents, I followed the recipe verbatim: exact measurements of spices, exact weight of vegetables, and near-exact sizes of diced meat. 

“I needed to make it again. I needed to make it until it was perfect”

Needless to say, the dish was a hit – delightfully savoury yet so sweet, as the dates, apricots, and slowly caramelising onions melted into a sauce. It was incredible, nearly living up to its name of a “perfect lamb tagine”, but not quite 100 per cent for my taste. I needed to make it again. I needed to make it until it was perfect.

The next Saturday, I looked again through Cloake’s introduction to see how the other chefs varied their recipes. Benkabbou’s spice list was considerably longer, and various chefs suggested different cuts of meat. This time, I added ground coriander, a touch more ginger than the last time, and fewer dates than before. Close, but not quite there. The following Saturday, I tried again.

I cooked this dish, incessantly and obsessively, over the summer of 2020, until it became the only thing I would cook, at any opportunity. As I left home to go to university for the last time, I was unable to try it for a long time and slowly lost my ability to cook anything beyond 15-minute stir fry noodles and quick lentil stews. As delicious as they were, there was something profoundly missing.

I yearned for the days when I had hours on end to spend in the kitchen, watching the steam percolate the lid until it formed clouds above the bubbling surface of the stew as it simmered. Scents of saffron, cumin, and onion permeated the house, and the dish, awaiting to be eaten, became a part of the house.

On the very few occasions I was able to make the dish, while I was visiting home from university, I would still only make it for my parents and myself, practicing for the day when I would be ready to share it more widely. And that day came, on 11 December 2022, when I hosted my first ever dinner party, at my home in London, with friends from university.

Unsurprisingly, the fear settled in – What would I cook? How would I cook for eight people? Would there even be a dish that fit the bill? My mind hovered over one idea: Felicity Cloake’s perfect lamb tagine… but would it be perfect enough?

By the stove, my tiny kitchen knife bolted mechanically through an unholy mass of onions. As they cooked down, I prepared my spice mix, opting for a list closer to Benkabbou’s: saffron, ground coriander, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. While the gargantuan tagine cooked down, I skittishly entertained my guests, checking the stove every ten minutes until it was time to add the dried fruits. This time, I opted for dried figs – less overwhelmingly sweet than the dates, which I’d come to find a little sickly. 

At the table, my friends eagerly (I’d hoped) awaited their dinner, hours in the making. As I plunged my ladle into the immense pot, my arms shuddered. It needed to be my perfect tagine. Not Felicity Cloake’s perfect tagine, but mine. To cut the drama short – it was great. It wasn’t as sweet as Cloake’s, and there was a slightly richer taste, but that was just how I wanted it. But it still wasn’t perfect.

Over a year later, I emailed Felicity Cloake, whose entire column is dedicated to crafting ‘perfect’ recipes, eager to understand more about how she manages to master a new dish every two weeks. She was overjoyed to hear that I’d found such joy in her recipe. Through voice notes at 11pm, awaiting a cheesecake in the oven from an old recipe, she tells me: “The column works so well because the recipe is my perfect iteration of something to suit my taste, and the taste of the people who try it, though mine is final.

“I actually very rarely get to make things again – always on to the next dish, or retesting old ones to repurpose them,” she says. “This baked cheesecake is actually an old one! I’m always making another column, so I make a lot of food.”

What strikes me most about Cloake’s experience is when she tells me that when you’re a jack-of-all-trades, you don’t really have a signature dish. “There’s my daal (dried split pulses often used in soup-like dishes) ironically featured on the packet of a brand of split peas – I probably should’ve complained about that several years ago,” she jokes, but it still sticks with me. This is my foulest nightmare. Moving on from a dish before I have the capacity to perfect it? 

Perhaps, with the luxury of time and being able to cook what I please, I have obsessed over this lamb tagine until it has become my ‘signature dish’, though not through intention. It may well remain my signature dish, a sign of how many times I have strived and failed to make the “perfect lamb tagine”. But I can guarantee that I will not stop.