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Ordinary Food I was talking to a woman the other day about cooking memories. Usually, in my line of work these conversations end up in a series of one upmanships relating to dining experiences that have taken place at Charlie Trotter’s or The French Laundry. In this particular case the recollection was of a small girl watching her father make macaroni and cheese. He was a man who apparently took great pains in the perfection of small things. His method was a loving ritual of sustenance. The ingredients were prepared and mixed in a large oven proof pot which was then set directly into the oven and removed from time to time during the cooking for further incorporation of additional cheese. By the time the dish was ready, the elbow macaroni sported about like dolphins in a savory orange sea. The
strong fatherly arm stirring away at the bubbling ingredients with a
heavy sauce coated wooden spoon ... the fragrant heat wafting out the
open oven door… the glistening mound of freshly grated cheese piled on
the counter … the hungry little girl whose ardent appetite and
fascination was for the father a special seasoning….
These are powerful images. The
power of these images serves to illustrate the difference between two
very different kinds of culinary experience, that of the eater and that
of the cook. Because if appetite is stirred by this account, it is at a
deeper level than the simple desire to walk into a restaurant, order the
dish and eat. The resonance of this woman’s memory makes us want to go
into the kitchen and cook. As
it happens, I am very fond of macaroni and cheese and keep a special
place in my heart for cooks who genuinely love it. There are not many
who will admit to this. I think of it as especially symbolic of the kind
of familiar food that seems especially vulnerable to commercial
corruption – like home made spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup, baked
beans…. Dishes less out of style than no longer possessing any style
at all. Simple foods made out of simple, honest ingredients, they have
been polished by the use of so many hands that their features have been
rubbed entirely smooth. And
so we have turned away from them, thinking them entirely too ordinary to
interest us. But the truth is that we no longer know how to be
interested in them, which is a very different thing. While these things
cannot command interest, like many good things whose character has been
dimmed by time and use, they can richly reward us should we choose to
give it anyway. They do this by becoming entirely our own, such as an
old chair, plucked from the trash, refinished and then set in some
corner of a room where it shows its gratitude by melding into the new
space as if it had been there forever. It is homely that turns house
into home. If
this doesn’t make any sense it is because we have become more
accustomed to think about food as eaters, rather than cooks. Eaters
think in terms of taste. Reached for a can of Campbell’s chunky
vegetable soup, they regard it simply as something about as good as they
could make themselves. And they may well be right. If most homemade soup
was a different from the canned version as some like to claim,
Campbell’s would have been out of business a long time ago. The
difference is there, but it is up to the eater to decide to notice it. For
the cook, however, the story is not quite the same. One important
dimension of kitchen experience is what I might call – resonance, a
palpable depth to the things out of which we make our meals. In their
way, these things speak, and it is our ability to hear, to enter into a
kind of conversation with them that marks our crossing over from kitchen
worker, however skilled, to true cook. In
the modern kitchen, this resonance is often only barely perceptible;
someone else in the kitchen might not be aware of it at all, because to
the extent we can coax it into being, we increase the reality, the
meaningfulness of the cooking experience. And this resonance is
strongest in those ordinary, familiar dishes with no aura of specialness
to distract us from the actual experience of making. |
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