Cooking as Ritual
Cooking and I had for a long time a love-hate relationship. Cooking was the name given to that which stood in between my lover, eating, and I. Cooking was the reason for the mess in the kitchen, the pots to be scrubbed, and thus, the hands that curled like raisins around a pillow of suds and heap of steel. Eating was my harlequin lover, the one who played to my senses and the only one for whom such an impending cleanup seemed acceptable. I’ve long romanticized eating—but with a recent appreciation for process, the mere act of cooking quickly awakens the soul like a knife across a bundle of basil: breathing odor across the cutting board, wafting up my spine.
When I was kid and my friends were purchasing comic books, I was purchasing cookbooks—or perhaps more embarrassingly, I was writing rock star chefs who would then in time send me autographed copies of their latest tomes. While some prized Spiderman and the Hulk, I kept Jean Georges and Ming Tsai snug behind Lucite next to my bed. When I went away to college, I did not at first pack the cookbooks, perhaps thinking food would be about sustenance, and there would be no time for the slow courtship of ingredients and personality I had long savored. Yet, I couldn’t stop buying new cookbooks, sometimes staring for hours at the pictures wondering where the vision to create these things began. I spent most of my time in college in the dining hall; surrounded by the people and the smells I enjoyed so much. Sometimes, I would sit through meals, holding court over a mountain of dirty plates and half-full glasses.
On today’s trip, my local farmer’s market produces several interesting finds, including a handful of leeks too fragrant, too beautiful, to merely turn over to someone else’s care. I found them, tucked in between bags of mixed greens and just beside the butternut squash. Everyone wanted the butternut squash. I lurched for the leeks. My mind raced, and I dashed three stalls down: fresh butter, creamy like fudge.
Back in the kitchen, it’s a symphony of noises: the crack of a pepper grinder, the groan of boiling water, the hiss of a blender. There is a calming way these noises flood over me. There is ritual and there is practice in the seemingly mundane: chop, stir, pour. Today, there’s no recipe, just simple ingredients and the patience to keep tasting and tweaking. And when it’s my mother’s macaroni and cheese recipe, still kept on the oil stained note card she wrote it on years ago, it is a dialog between past and present—reinvigorating the tastes and smells that called me to the table so long ago. Cooking is about a ritual, the most essential of human practices—it’s about knowing what our food looks like before we play with it and knowing how to be ready to take risks and slice.
When I was kid and my friends were purchasing comic books, I was purchasing cookbooks—or perhaps more embarrassingly, I was writing rock star chefs who would then in time send me autographed copies of their latest tomes. While some prized Spiderman and the Hulk, I kept Jean Georges and Ming Tsai snug behind Lucite next to my bed. When I went away to college, I did not at first pack the cookbooks, perhaps thinking food would be about sustenance, and there would be no time for the slow courtship of ingredients and personality I had long savored. Yet, I couldn’t stop buying new cookbooks, sometimes staring for hours at the pictures wondering where the vision to create these things began. I spent most of my time in college in the dining hall; surrounded by the people and the smells I enjoyed so much. Sometimes, I would sit through meals, holding court over a mountain of dirty plates and half-full glasses.
On today’s trip, my local farmer’s market produces several interesting finds, including a handful of leeks too fragrant, too beautiful, to merely turn over to someone else’s care. I found them, tucked in between bags of mixed greens and just beside the butternut squash. Everyone wanted the butternut squash. I lurched for the leeks. My mind raced, and I dashed three stalls down: fresh butter, creamy like fudge.
Back in the kitchen, it’s a symphony of noises: the crack of a pepper grinder, the groan of boiling water, the hiss of a blender. There is a calming way these noises flood over me. There is ritual and there is practice in the seemingly mundane: chop, stir, pour. Today, there’s no recipe, just simple ingredients and the patience to keep tasting and tweaking. And when it’s my mother’s macaroni and cheese recipe, still kept on the oil stained note card she wrote it on years ago, it is a dialog between past and present—reinvigorating the tastes and smells that called me to the table so long ago. Cooking is about a ritual, the most essential of human practices—it’s about knowing what our food looks like before we play with it and knowing how to be ready to take risks and slice.
posted by Josh Labove at
11:07 AM
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