Curious cooks never stop adding new techniques or tastes to their repertoires. What are yours?

Thankfully no one ever knows it all. For a curious cook the infinite possibilities of ingredients and traditions means there is always another way. Whether one learns at one's mother's knee or by swapping recipes or going to cooking classes, or from reading or looking over the shoulder of a confident cook, the journey can be absorbing and almost all-consuming.

Here and there along the way a bit of passed-on wisdom or a special tip becomes part of one's own repertoire. I spent a week with America's godmother of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan, in the mid-1980s in Venice. Marcella was fond of saying, as she scooped diced onion into a cold frying-pan and followed it with a slosh of olive oil, "It'll get hot sooner or later".

Cooks I have worked with have found it quite daring and maybe even a bit shocking when I sometimes do the same thing.

She also showed me how to peel a red or yellow capsicum using an asparagus peeler. This was a revolutionary step, as cooks were mostly instructed to roast capsicums over an open flame until well-blackened to remove the skin. But she wanted to use her capsicums raw, so they could gently cook without collapsing. These meltingly soft and sweet golden or scarlet capsicums became one of my favourite ways of accompanying seared salmon or a grilled lamb rump or quickly cooked lamb fillets. The oily juices made a perfect sauce.

She also made a lovely salad to accompany vitello tonnato using paper-thin slices of fresh lemon, lightly salted, rinsed and dried and then combined with the thinnest shavings of capsicum, again peeled raw and dressed with beautiful oil.

The best-known codifiers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century French cuisine are perhaps Escoffier or Madame Saint-Ange. Accepted flavour combinations were rarely deviated from. Sorrel, for example, is served as an accompanying puree, made with either reduced veal stock or cream or sometimes rice, or occasionally as a small dish on its own with soft-boiled eggs, or as a delicious soup to be served in the spring.

The inventiveness of Jean and Pierre Troisgros in creating their iconic dish of salmon with sorrel sauce would have seemed revolutionary to the French diner in the late 1970s. And yet the combination was perfect. Oily rich fish, a cream sauce built on a reduction of herby vermouth and the sharp acidity of the sorrel. The sorrel was roughly torn and served only just collapsed, and the salmon itself was flattened into a thin escalope and seared in the all-new Teflon pans for a moment so that it was practically raw in the centre.

I spent a week in the kitchens of the Restaurant Troisgros and watched with fascination as the cooks made a large pot of sauce vin blanc, which was variously deployed. A ladle of sauce into a clean pan, a handful of something else, a small knob of butter, a swirl of the pan and away it went. Efficiency without compromising flavour. In went a handful of sorrel with the salmon; julienne of carrots, leeks and cucumbers for poached oysters; and a touch of saffron and fresh tomato for the shellfish.

Cream sauces are rarely seen these days but they can still charm if served in small portions as part of a well-balanced meal. I sprinkle the fish with lemon salt and use fat-reduced cream of 18 per cent butterfat, and it works perfectly.