But Boulud was showing how a culinary deity can turn the basics - using everyday ingredients - into gastronomic bliss.
Graham's cooking style uses everyday ingredients, is fast, easy, and nutritious.
Single, everyday ingredients are being treated with the same reverence as caviar.
But in skilled hands, these everyday ingredients add up to an exemplary dish.
Girls took cooking classes that taught them how to cook more with less, as everyday ingredients were rationed and shipped off to soldiers.
The disclaimer is meant to protect people with food allergies, who sometimes die from eating just a small amount of everyday ingredients that most consumers take for granted.
I learned, by heart, how to make bombs from everyday ingredients and how to make improvised electrical devices.
The book also teaches home-style Japanese cuisine, and provides information about essential everyday ingredients in a typical Japanese home, along with recipes.
In A Sense Of Occasion,pages 118-124, a sumptuous spread is planned around everyday ingredients cleverly transformed into something really quite special.
It is still an everyday ingredient of Middle Eastern cookery, and also finds favour in Continental dishes.