The Art of Cooking
This afternoon, I finished Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples, a wonderful story of her journey to be a successful food critic and a woman who both understands what she wants and goes after it. I’ve read several of her books, and I am fascinated by how food helped her discover who she was and how it helped her define her life. Reichl talks about food as if it is not just sustenance, but also art, and in doing so, she highlights how food is almost never just about food; it reflects the way we live our lives.
Mostly I have been a cook for function. We need to eat; someone needs to cook. That someone is almost always me. When I got married, I watched a ton of Food Network shows which taught me a handful of useful skills but didn’t get me any science behind why certain foods cooked the way they did, or any confidence outside a recipe. I did learn some great recipes, and some of these became solid staples. Over the years, from reading (I love cookbooks and food memoirs), I learned still more, and from cooking with my mother and grandmothers, I learned more yet.
Have there been failures? Sure, but they have been the kind of failures that don’t matter, easily wiped out by Little Caesar’s and the next thing to make. You try to taste and figure out what went wrong, and you move on. There’s a new deadline coming up, a new meal where everyone is expecting to eat, and yesterday’s mistakes are pushed back.
In fact, that is one of the things I really like about cooking--mistakes don’t hang around to make you feel like you shouldn’t try again. In cooking, you just have to keep moving; you don’t have time for endless revision and tinkering and being embarrassed, because there’s a table full of people with their eyebrows raised, just waiting for you to feed them. You present what you have, and you try to do it better next time.
I am learning--from the practice, from listening to smart people, from trying new foods and new tools and new techniques--that Ruth Reichl is right: good food is a way to both learn and share a part of yourself. I have truly loved cooking during the pandemic, and especially over the last two months in Bri McKoy’s Everyday Kitchen Masterclass. As we piled plates with nachos and cheered on Great British Baking, or we cranked the oven for Change Your Life Chicken, good food kept us nourished in our bodies but also in our souls, while we shared fears and memories and stories and passed the plates for seconds.
I keep coming back to a quotation from Brian Andreas (I think I saw Ruth share it): “There are things you do because they feel right and they may make no sense and they may make no money and it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other and to eat each other’s cooking and say it was good.”
If there is an art to this kind of living, then that art is always finding its reflection in others. So I pour some of the last Chex Mix in a bag to take to my father; I box our favorite chocolate chip cookies for my grandmother; I forego leftovers on the potato soup so I can take some to my other grandmother. I want to cry because some days cooking is too much, and some days it is not enough. But it’s something I have.
It’s not just food. But it is important, and it is (usually) good.
