January 2004

The Joy of Cooking

Not too many days ago, my great-aunt died. I never knew her well when I was a child, so some of that familial closeness was lacking, but I'd come to see her more often since my 18th birthday or so, and I'd come to quite like her, in a distant, adult way.

Bet's passing put me in a rather strange mood. At her memorial, I thought about my two grandmothers --Bet's sister, one of them-- both of whom died when I was young. I thought about what I'd learned from these three old women, now gone, and I thought about the things I never did learn. For instance, not one of them, to my knowledge, ever taught me to cook a thing.

This seems, in the great scheme of things, a small omission, but I feel it as a particular loss. Cooking is for me a tradition, a skilled craft, and a way of communing with the past, future, and present. If I like a person, I try to cook for him or her. If I feel a person's having a rough time of it, I invite him or her to dinner. It's a way of reaching out, for me, and it saddens me that I cannot really reach back, as it were, to my grandparents and their food and their meals. It makes me feel as though I passed up an opportunity that I never even knew was there. Now that I'm a cook, it's too late for me to learn from these women. When I could have learned from them, none of them would have ever thought to take a boy into the kitchen, and I'd never have thought to follow them on my own. It seems a pity.

I am, however, being a romantic again. Who knows what I really could have learned? By all accounts, my mother's mother was a dreadful cook; my mother herself learned to cook through trial and error during the first days of her marriage. My memories of my father's mother's food are dreary enough too: dry meat, boiled vegetables, store-bought bread. So, did I really lose anything?

Perhaps not. After all, my rootless cooking allows me to monkey about, I suspect, more than most people who were brought up in a certain style of cooking. I'm quite content to make Tunisian harissa with Mexican chiles de arbol and my miso soup is almost always made with chicken stock in place of dashi. I serve red wine with fish, and I'm never going to cook my greens all day long with a piece of sidemeat because I don't like them that way. Additionally, because I never had a cooking teacher as a child, because I never cooked as a child, I never picked up bad habits when I was young, so all those expensive cooking classes found me willing to do things their way, without years of contrary training to overcome. I can hold a knife right (pinch the blade at its base --just beyond the bolster-- with your thumb and forefinger, use the rest of your fingers to hold the handle), I can let meat sear without poking at it, and I can stand in front of an oven without opening it every 5 minutes. I can chop onions faster than my mother now, despite her having had 30 years' more practice.

All in all, the lack of tradition in my cooking (for that's what I think it is) is a lack of weight. Nothing locks me into a certain mode of thought or taste. It allows me the dilettantism I so enjoy. I'm a dabbler: I can cook a little something from everywhere, and I like it that way. It means dinner is varied throughout the week, and it means I can play around with various flavors others might not think of. If I serve sliced mangoes with julienned pickled ginger and black pepper, no one can fault me: I never claimed I was traditional.

Still, there is still my grandmother's cast iron pan. It's a 12.5" behemoth I rescued from its hiding place in a closet in a house in South Carolina. I scraped the rust off, put a seasoning back on, and brought the beast home, where it's now one of my most prized possessions. It works well, of course, but there's more to it than that. It was my grandmother's. It's a root. That pan, along with a carbon steel knife my dad gave me, the spice rack my sister made me, the chinois my girlfriend gave me, and a few other items given to me as gifts or hand-me-downs, is what my kitchen is all about: the people I love.