d. A Spiritual Quest

Learning to Cook

Every person’s history is different.

I started cooking when I was in college without even a proper stove and with one dish only, a family recipe of tomato sauce pasta. I would make it every 3 or 4 days for 3 years in a row. That was a big hit with all of my friends and I am sure their praise was essential to reinforce this aspect of my identity

Working later in Morocco, with beautiful local produce, appetizing markets and a growing number of friends, I started expanding my repertoire, one recipe at a time, trying to imitate some restaurant fare, exchanging tips with others, exploring new tastes and cooking techniques, slowly gaining experience.

Afterwards, I continued to try out new things. I sought to master a good range of techniques, I accumulated layers of observations and knowledge, I learned to cook faster and more efficiently so that this activity would remain compatible with my job demands. Now that I can cook, I have almost forgotten how I got here.

I can steam, fry or grill. I can use a stove, an oven or a fireplace. I can chop, carve any fowl, stagger the incorporation of ingredients in the right order so that they are all properly cooked in the end. I can pick out the best oranges at the market or the freshest fish. No doubt there was a lot to learn and know but everything has become second nature, and somehow the process is ever more enjoyable. (1) And guess what? I am still learning every day.

The Shortcomings of Taste Criticism

While music and visual arts benefit from thorough analyses and criticism by learned experts, taste and smell have no equivalent.

Countless experts study minute differences between Mahler’s and Strauss’ composing styles, using a host of arcane concepts and communicating regularly on their findings, but nothing of the sort exists for cooking. We attempt to make our musical or visual emotions more explicit but, when it comes to analyzing a good dish, we unfortunately tend to limit our comments to the universal sound of Mmmmmh!

For wine tasting, a great effort has been made to rationalize different components of the process, from the initial visual aspects to primary and secondary olfactory experiences. Still, even with these rational crutches, tasting experiences remain different for different persons.

No conceptual tool that I know of exists to analyze cooked dishes. Our senses are imperfect. There are too many variables, too many aromas. We cannot put words on our emotions. It is the rare person who can identify the different components of a complex final taste. (2)

In most languages, we have given different labels to different colors. Some individuals may still disagree on the color of a given object, is it blue or grey for example, but at least, they can discuss it. No such thing exists for matters of flavor. I guess we just have to accept this state of affairs. 

 

Home vs. Restaurant Cooking

Countless times, at the end of a good meal, guests have commented with a definitive : “You should open a restaurant…”  This well-meaning form of praise pleases me of course, but the truth is that cooking professionally demands an overriding interest and devotion I’ve never had. Restaurant cooking is a different discipline, more demanding, more formalized, where you want to achieve a well-defined, constant result.

Actually, famed top restaurants, which I once relished, often disappoint me today, in part because I may have lost some taste acuity, but also because they are forced by their economics to engage in a kind of meaningless escalation. Their customers are well-moneyed people with hesitating taste buds who are reassured by a steep price tag. Rare and expensive ingredients will make their dining experience more unique and memorable, and thus justify the price.

I am disappointed by a cuisine which is often repetitive, too focused on protein, and too rich for me. Innovators do not fare much better. As I favor paying homage to a given ingredient, I like to recognize its original shape, and the latest trend of “molecular cuisine,” designed to provide new textures to old flavors, leaves me generally cold.

Nevertheless, the artists who own these restaurants can still dramatically surprise you and change your perspective forever. They keep exploring with devotion and humility, associating flavors, probing new techniques, contributing to the wealth of cooking possibilities and inspiring the rest of us.

At this stage, my ideal 3-star restaurant dish would be Michel Bras’ Gargouillou, an ever changing vegetable dish combining individually cooked vegetables, aromatic leaves, flowers, mushrooms, and a simple thin slice of local dried ham. This is cooking laid bare, a symphonic bliss when experiencing it in the restaurant, visually and gustatorily, sophisticated yet austere.

You go back home ready to make your own very imperfect version, or revert to simpler home-cooking dishes: A vegetable stew of carrots, onions and sweet peas, a thick grilled white veal cutlet with lemon and garlic, a ratatouille, stuffed vegetables, a good roasted chicken with perfect French fries.

By the way, all of these have no complicated sauce, just natural cooking juices. All are delightfully simple to prepare and rewarding. The hardest part is procurement. Where will you find the exceptional ingredients that will make your home dishes almost as distinctive and satisfying as more complex restaurant experiences?

A Feast for the Senses

Cooking challenges your intellect and your senses.

With experience, you use all of them, all the time, as you advance in your preparation. You know if your onions are ready by looking at them, or smelling them. A change in a gentle frying noise warns you that an ominous burning accident is about to happen. You can tell when a vegetable is ready by the look, the smell or by poking it lightly.

You also develop a critical sense you didn’t know you had, the sense of passing time. Without ever looking at a clock, you learn to know when it’s time to broil the other side of your steak, when it’s time to start re-heating the vegetables that will go with it, when your boiling pasta is ready, and even when to start preparing the three-course dinner you have planned for tonight.

Far from being a chore or a waste of time, every mundane action, like peeling potatoes, becomes a contemplative ritual, deeply satisfying in itself. It is about loving that potato, seeing the flesh appear under the skin, thinking about the Machu Picchu or the Great Irish famine, pondering the best seasoning to complement it later on.

It is also about using a knife, a fascinating tool which demands that you concentrate on the “here and now,” whether you are slicing fish for sashimi or chopping up ingredients for your mirepoix.

In short, cooking is about using your hands and your brain, an experience close to the artistic process, with the same addictive and rewarding effect.

The Love of Life

Let’s not be squeamish. We eat in order to live, and for that we must take away the life of other living organisms: Fish and cattle, chicken and egg. Even vegetables or cereals die when we decide to use them for our own good.

Japanese people routinely thank nature’s bounties before they start any meal, uniting the enjoyment and the sacred. For cooks, who essentially deal with raw ingredients and transform them, this appreciation should start even earlier, at the market. (3)

I love going food shopping. I may have a good idea of some of the items I want to buy: fish, for example, or poultry that we have not had in a while. Variety is a key to a good diet and I certainly maximize this aspect. But mostly, produce dictates its will, serendipitously: I select ingredients because they inspire me that day, because of the way they will complement my previous purchases or simply because they look or smell so good!

Abiding by the season is a sure way to respect nature and mark the passage of time. For example, in southern France, May is the month of new sweet green peas, fava beans, and green garlic, marking spring’s renewal.

Even if tomatoes are today available all the time, everywhere, in all shapes and forms, I use them sparingly, either raw or cooked, until they are vine-ripened and give off their haunting aroma, from July to September.

For me, the main benefit of local produce is not so much its abstract lower carbon footprint as its short supply chain and its generally better taste. These gleaming strawberries were picked yesterday, at the same time this firm mackerel was brought to port auction. What luxury! How can it be better than that? 

Fusion or Confusion?  

Fusion starts when you spread butter on a slice of bread and associate these two flavors. In a way, it is synonymous with cuisine.

Even before the great exploratory boom of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, many fruits, vegetables and cereals had moved away from their original zone of cultivation and were adopted by other populations. In Europe, to flavor a rather bland diet, spices were imported from the Far-East at great cost.

Then, European and Western choices changed drastically and for the better after the “discovery” of the Americas made many new ingredients available. Timid at first, the rate of change gradually accelerated to the point where these ingredients are now cornerstones of the different cuisines of France, Italy or the like. All these “new” traditional cuisines developed independently, building on previous knowhow, local preferences, climate, growing season and adaptability. French and Italian cuisines are close but have retained their idiosyncrasies or, to express it better, their internal coherence and meaning.  

I love this new globalized world. I find cross-cultural encounters at once thrilling, challenging, and desirable, for men and women as for cuisines.

However, as it is currently practiced in many restaurants and blog recipes, “fusion” often does away with well-honed traditional associations of ingredients or new harmonious juxtapositions for the sake of displaying would-be creative (arbitrary) combinations. Although it appeals to many people (Sooo creative..!), I believe it loses culinary and gustatory meaning.

It is appealing to jump from one taste universe to another, to add a foreign touch to a favorite dish, and to invent a new combination entirely. But when you do, you must have an objective or a purpose for the final result. (4) If we let chance replace talent, given the number of world cuisine ingredients available now in the United States and the possible combinations of all those, we can expect billions of new unsatisfactory “fusion” dishes. Can the tide be reversed?

Cooking in the Real World

The current erosion of home cooking and taste education in developed countries is often explained by a lack of time, but this does not withstand a serious analysis. If you are genuinely interested in cooking, you can always “find the time” to do it. Of course, it helps to be happily married and share values and responsibilities

In the real world, I had to work myself, 60 to 70 hours a week. My wife also worked, and we managed to raise a family, maintain social contacts, and attend to multiple interests. We both cook pretty well, each of us with our own preferences, which helps with diversity. After the week-end errands and cooking, the refrigerator would be fully stocked with fresh and pre-cooked items, enough for the whole week. We have both always loved leftovers and this helped.

We thought our main cooking responsibility to our children was to nourish them well, with regularity, while educating their taste. It would be the rare American child who would request pork roast with Brussels sprouts for his 10^th birthday. It happened to us and we are still proud. Today, we are cooking for and with the new generation, walking the fine line between pedagogy and fun, with great hopes for the future.

We have also had many guests at home and prepared countless meals together, engaging in different, complementary tasks, and managing yet another invitation with exhilarating success.

Strangely, I suddenly miss not having had the experience of cooking with other adults more often. Most of the time, we invite 4 to 6 people and preparing a full meal is technically quite achievable in a short time. However, I wonder now if I could sometimes share more with the same good friends by giving up my preferences for inspirational last-minute cooking, planning ahead, finding ways to share tasks, and witnessing together the gradual transformation of promising raw produce into a delightful meal. Only food related conversation would be allowed.

Although less efficient, wouldn’t it be more enriching for all people concerned?

(1)    In his blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer wrote in 2009 a wonderfully penetrating article on his experience of home cooking.

(2)    In the same article, Jonah Lehrer explains it well, writing about ”the way the flavors I could name mingled into a taste I could not”

(3)    Loving produce means that you have to find your own balance between quality and cost. Farmers markets in the US are generally the best bet. I would exclude air-conditioned, morgue-like supermarkets, which should be more appropriately called undermarkets, at least for fresh produce!

(4)    This is why the backbone of tradition is so important, not as a straitjacket but as testimony to previous efforts and wisdom accrued over time by countless unsung and unknown contributors.