cooking
Context for everything I will post about cooking
This section will likely just end up as a recipe book of all my favorite recipes. I am hoping that it inspires me to cook a bit more than I currently do, and better yet, I hope it helps me answer all of my great cooking dilemmas. We'll see.
You can refer to the eating section to better understand my relationship with food as a child and young adult, and whatever reasonable leaps you can make from that about how I was as a cook when I eventually started taking it more seriously are almost certainly true. Around the time I realized that eating fast casual food and ordering in dinner every night was unsustainable, I started to cook more. I think, at least at first, cooking felt more like a problem that I was trying to solve than like the art that many people who cook think of it as. I would buy ingredients for one meal, then realize that grocery stores don't exactly sell products for single meal cooking, leaving me with a bunch of ingredients that I didn't plan to have. I would then either have to figure out how to then use those ingredients or get frustrated and let them rot, then throw them away. I didn't want to cook basic meals because I had convinced myself that I was doing this as a replacement for things that I was eating more regularly, and sure, that was only just fast casual food, but even that food felt more complex and interesting than chicken and rice. This went on for a while, and because this was my new 'hobby,' I would talk about it with everyone. Coworkers, friends, family, etc. I must've sounded like such an idiot talking to these people, because here I was describing to them the basics of cooking like it was one of math's still unsolved problems. "So, I bought this jar of bay leaves that ran me $4.50, but I only needed one bay leaf. I bought $43 worth of ingredients for just one meal. Has anyone considered this???" It reminds me of how we think about Christopher Columbus now, and I was Christopher Columbus. Not a compliment.
An aside...
For whatever it is worth, I am being self-deprecating, but I still believe in some sense that these problems are relatively unsolved for me. There are obvious solutions if you are trying to solve only one problem at a time, like "how do I reuse the ingredients that I bought mostly for this one meal?" or "how do I get the necessary amount of food or meals at a cost below that of exclusively non-cooking eating?" But if you add even one more variable or requirement, like "without eating the same or similar food multiple times this week," obviously it becomes a bit more complex. Maybe I'll write my way into solving this problem for myself. Or maybe one of my friends will. There is someone I know on Twitter who goes by @NeastWS that I am fairly certain has come as close to solving this as one can. This is me begging him to lay it out for the world.
In time, I slowly started to get better at all of this, and I owe most of that to another one of my internet friends, Norm Gambles. If you are reading this Norm, I miss you. Norm taught me all the places to look, he put me on to Lucky Peach and Serious Eats and Modernist Cuisine. He taught me who in the world of cooking to trust and why to trust them. He once told me, probably after I had just gotten done complaining about how apparently you have to also clean after you are done cooking, "you will know you are a good cook when your meal is done and your kitchen is already clean." I didn't much know what he meant at the time, but now I do, and I tell it to everyone I know when I talk about cooking. While consuming all that he shared with me, I still encountered a lot of the problems I describe above, but I felt a bit more inspired. And though I didn't exactly see the solutions to all of my questions with cooking, I started to believe that they existed.
Most of the way that I think about and talk about cooking on here will be related to some combination of how my brain works and when in my life I started to think about cooking more seriously. I like to think of myself as a naturally curious person - as everyone fucking does - and I didn't even begin to think about cooking until I reached adulthood. Everyone that I knew who cooked seemed like the type of person to whom it came naturally. I didn't have recipes handed down from generation to generation. I was in a totally unfamiliar place, and I was incredibly skeptical of everything. Your grandma never stops talking about how she stopped going to school after she met your grandpa in 8th grade, are we sure this is the best way to make lasagna? Why a half teaspoon but not 4/7ths of one? You're just going to put in an amount of tomato paste that feels right? What the fuck does that even mean? I was measuring two tablespoons of oil to put in the pan before cooking like some sort of physicist trying to solve whatever problems physicists solve. But all of the people that Norm told me about seemed to be thinking in the same way. Harold McGee, Nathan Myhrvold, Wylie Dufresne, J. Kenzi Lopez-Alt, Samin Nosrat. Loads more I am sure, and some like Harold that were challenging our understanding of cooking as long as 40 years before the time I started becoming interested. When I read stuff like this, the natural inclination to call bullshit stood out, but they were also asking questions that just made sense to me when I read them. If not all salt crystals are the same weight, then is 1/4 cup of salt really 1/4 cup of salt? What are fats and what role do they play in cooking? Is the centuries(??)-long tradition of just cooking in a pan over a fire really still the best way?
I started thinking about all of this much more seriously as COVID approached, then I quit my job and people weren't exactly leaving their homes very often for the next however many months. I really should have just kept my job. No one told me how serious this thing was going to be and how little was going to be expected of people at work during this time. Whatever. I now had a bunch of free time and a near total inability to go out to eat, so I sort of went all-in on the cooking. I had acquired quite a few recipe books and started acquiring more. In every book that I seemed to read, there was someone else who influenced the writer or cook who I would then read about. Or a concept that was new and exciting. And I'd read about that. It felt like a never-ending exploration into cooking, working mostly backward, but constantly closing the gaps I have talked about here. I did this fairly aggressively for about 8 months, before I returned to the work force and public spaces started opening up a bit more.
One thing that I want to make clear about my relationship with cooking - and eating - is that a lot of this reads like I was only interested in the part of it that was more science than art. But that is not entirely true. This was just a reasonable starting point for me to understand it more fully. I was deathly afraid of even just using replacement ingredients or not getting the ingredient weights correct, knowing that if a meal turned out differently than I'd expected, I wouldn't be able to know for certain how or why without blaming these things. The stuff that suggested you taste something to see what it was missing really terrified me. Is this missing salt? Is it missing oil? How the fuck should I know? I don't even know what this is supposed to taste like to know whether or not it tastes like that. For this to work for me, I had to do it all in the way that started and ended with strictly trusting the methods and processes of people who thought about all of this stuff well before me, then tested it over and over again, then wrote about it. If I did something exactly as instructed or designed, then whatever it tasted like is what it was supposed to taste like. In time, though, I worked backward toward a more complete understanding of the process. Having that foundation allowed me to better understand and embrace the roles of the different ingredients, the reasons for their inclusion, the importance of their ratios to each other, etc. So, I still treat cooking more as a science, because I don't understand why it wouldn't be treated that way, but I am far less rigid now. Maybe easier said, I respect and appreciate Jacques Pépin as much and probably more than any of the 'scientists' of the cooking community. (In large part because those people do, too.)
Somewhat relatedly, but not really, I do also want to briefly talk about cooking and eating less as a process and more as a thing. If Bourdain said it, I probably agree with it. I have always been enamored with him. The way he talks. The way he writes. The way he thinks about what food should and does represent. All of it. He is one of those people that - for me - when I read his writing or listen to what he has said, I feel like he is communicating beliefs that I already had but may not have necesarily ever truly thought or voiced beforehand. Constantly in the state of "yes, thank you, someone fucking said it" even though I never even had. The 'art' part of cooking that I really enjoy is the part of doing it for other people. Often times, when I cook something at home for my fianceacute;e and I or for a group of people, by the time I am done I am mostly disinterested in what I think about it. But I am extremely interested in and hopeful of what other people think of it.
That seems like a good enough introduction to how I think about cooking for now. The last thing that I will say, somewhat for accountability, is that I hope these pages allow me to continue learning about cooking. The way I learned to cook and the way I cook now are fairly representative of the people from whom I learned. But one day, these people will be exactly like the grandmothers that I slandered a few paragraphs ago. The world moves fast, and what we understand about cooking today is likely to evolve. I don't want to be the person sitting there telling my kids to sous vide and pressure cook shit after new methods have been discovered or old methods proved better. Help keep me honest; if you are learning things, please share with the class.