Cooking
I make a really rich fugio sort of dish sometimes when I’m looking for ways to increase my lean protein and fiber intake. It’s a fairly simple dish, just browned beef, a few roasted peppers–chile and bell, a quick deglaze with some red wine vinegar. I try to stick to the Caledonian origins of the meal by using oregano and thyme in fairly heavy quantities.
There’s a sort of pall that settles over me sometimes when I cook. I can’t explain it, and I can’t really give it the credit it deserves with simple words and nuanced instruction. When I cook, I think of the evolution of the food over time. I don’t believe in the stricture of recipes. Improvisation and constant refining are more my style. At this point, I can more or less add flourishes here and there with some confidence that it will not be terrible. When I make meals like this, where the measurements are by touch and sound and by the eddying and emergingly complex ripples of vapor off of the pan of hot brown and red and green, I think of someone married to recipes. She had them saved and preserved in the falsity of a digital forever, never to be altered. And she would always use the recipe, without waiver or falter. Her food was never bad.
It is sad.
I generally use dried herbs in any full flavored dish where simmering is involved. They work just as well, and they keep better. It is important to wait until the last fifteen minutes or so to add spices that may grow bitter or overstrong.
With the middling high smell of onions and beef simmering in the tomatoes and peppers and garbanzo, I pulled out a three finger pinch of thyme and let some fall back into the jar until I had the right amount. I milled it together in my hands over the pan, letting it fall, and the rich green leapt up on the rising steam. The oregano got a heaping two finger pinch and was ground between my fingers, rolled away and left to the hand of gravity to be delivered to its already cooking brethren. Any ingredient you plan on using only for flavor must be treated so, it is necessary that you crush it to release all the trapped things you desire from it to color your creation.
June 24, 2008 at 3:58 pm
People forget (rather quickly) that cooking, like most worthwhile things, is part technique and mostly art. You need to understand the science, but if you are a slave to the rule system you will only perpetuate the flavours of academia.
Also, you cook better the more practice you have. Any good recipe is a work in progress; it lives through time and you tweak and change it to suit the circumstances. You learn to know which ingredients you can lose if you’re caught short, and when to abandon the dish because you’ve passed a critical barrier. And also how to take advantage of mutations.
When people tell me ‘I can’t cook’, I know that what they’re really saying is ‘I’m not interested in knowing how to cook’.
June 24, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Any good recipe is a work in progress; it lives through time and you tweak and change it to suit the circumstances.
You really got exactly what i was struggling to say. The food is a living thing. Lately I have been absolutely fascinated with emergent complexity and its ramifications for just about everything I do. Cooking has definitely been an exercise in mutation and selection. I don’t make anything the same way I did a few years ago, but the genus is roughly recognizable. The bad experiments (tumeric is just about impossible to use) have been winnowed out, but the good experiments (wet sage brush smoke) have been kept and compounded upon. It is a complicated evolution, sure, but the sort of half-ass random that is evident from stromatolites to macroeconomics.
My biggest problem with Food Network junkie cooks is that they think aping someone else’s art is the same as creation, though I have to admit those aped creations can be OK. Pastiche turns into parody almost. And not taking into account the millions of variables from ingredient selection to differences in altitude drives me batshit.
Me and you need to sit down and discuss these sorts of things over some Ardbeg.
June 24, 2008 at 5:15 pm
You’re such a nerd. Even about cooking. Parody, pastiche, Baudrillard. It’s almost too much, but still adorable. You’re still adorable.
June 24, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Of course I’m adorable. But a nerd?
June 24, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I agree. Slavish overdedication to ‘recipes’ only cooking is so boring. Half the fun of messing around in the kitchen is the messing part, adding a bit of this, or that, and seeing if it is palatable. And something about cooking is so cathartic. That, and spending money. Seriously. Oh, well, there’s drinking as well.
June 25, 2008 at 12:56 am
You have to put your personality and passions into cooking, otherwise it’s as bland as old spices. I admire men in the kitchen, and I’m a bit of a foodie myself.
June 25, 2008 at 2:18 pm
It is sad. I am married to recipes.
Luckily, my husband is a great cook! I’m too afraid of screwing up the food to try something that hasn’t been done and documented by someone else.
June 25, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Carolyn: Recipes are a good idea if you have absolutely no desire to learn the science of cooking. Or if it’s something new. But I’ve always liked Jazz more than Classical.
Clea: Men afraid of the kitchen are generally worthless lovers. I’ve heard.
Chickie: Don’t be afraid of the recipes. Like I said, you will never make anything bad.
June 26, 2008 at 11:36 am
I think recipes are a good way to introduce new things and inspire.
Sometimes a recipe will introduce a combination I would never have thought of, or an ingredient I have never heard of.
I know enough to not have to measure and I use recipes more as guidelines. I think recipes are a good inspirational tool just like anything else in art. I may see another designers work and it will provoke a design idea of my own, but I didn’t copy, I was just inspired. :)
June 26, 2008 at 11:36 am
p.s. don’t you dare take out my smiley!! I know how much you like them.
June 26, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I’m waiting for you to write something new, my dear. I don’t feel like writing, but you always do.
June 26, 2008 at 9:13 pm
>>Lately I have been absolutely fascinated with emergent complexity and its ramifications for just about everything I do
Oh yeah. We really do need to sit down with a bottle of ‘beg. If people learnt to spend some time with emergent complexity, then this whole ‘God’ thing would just vanish. And then we could start to ask some really important questions…
June 26, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Jen: Art is a constant commentary without authorship or origin. So, what you create is always a tribute to something. The trick is to make sure it is a tribute and not a pantomime.
MA: I have nothing new, dear.
Rev: Like, “Why is smoke so perfect in both whiskey and the voice of a woman?”
Greater questions are rarely asked.
June 30, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Indeed. And in food actually. Mesquite-smoked lamb… mmm.
And in music if you want to extend the metaphor.
July 1, 2008 at 5:30 am
Very true. I’m not saying it has to sound whiskeyish for me to like music, but it’s a big step in the right direction. So when is Perpetual Ocean putting out the honky tonk album?
I’ll play the beer bottle slide.