Every night after dinner last week, I read a library book titled “A New Take on Cake”. The book lists 175 ways to doctor up a cake mix so you will think the cake was made from scratch. I’m going to bake one this week; I will let you know how it goes.
My philosophy of food began when I was about twelve. My father was a CPA — a certified public accountant — and the founding partner of a regional accounting firm. Around age 12, he taught me how to keep books for one of the family businesses. We often discussed the economic and accounting principle of “diminishing returns”. After a certain point, extra time, materials, and effort produce smaller and smaller results. A savvy person identifies when this begins to happen and stops there. This universal principle applies to many things.
I read “A New Take on Cake” with this in mind. A baker could make a cake from scratch that takes twice or three times as long as using a mix. But would it taste two or three times better?
To know for sure, a person would have to design a two-cake study and use a stopwatch. A baker could select a recipe from the book, and then bake the same cake using scratch ingredients. Then, the baker could make the “fooled you with a cake mix” version. A blind taste test, where neither the taster nor the person giving the test knows which cake is which, would objectively reveal the winner. But would it be better enough to justify the additional effort?
Another example of diminishing returns is a simple tomato sauce that simmers away for 30 minutes. The sauce may be 90 percent as good as one tended to for three hours. A soup made from what’s in the fridge may deeply satisfy without the need to roast bones and strain stock. The three extra hours spent creating an elaborate dinner may not increase the guests’ happiness nearly as much as a relaxed host or hostess would. More effort doesn’t always produce a better result. Sometimes it only produces more pots, pans, and dishes to wash.
The goal is to identify the sweet spot, where effort and reward meet in perfect balance. Go past it and the pie may be prettier and the sauce slightly more complex, but the cook may be unhappy. That surely counts as a loss on the household balance sheet. “A New Take on Cake” is available through the Sage inter-library loan system.