Cooking and Life

I suppose that I believe that the act of cooking often serves as a mirror into the character of a life.  There are intimate connections between what we eat and its preparation and who we might be or think we are; as the cliché contends, “We are what we eat.” And the opposite is also true: we eat what we are! There is an ethics to our food consumption even as there is an ethics to how we live our lives. Henry David Thoreau speaks to this relationship when he says, “But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.” I recall foregoing lettuce and grapes to support the strike and unionizing of mostly temporary and under paid farm workers, and I have been long a vegetarian for an assortment of reasons, both political and personal. My father had urged us to eat everything that was on our plate because there were hungry people over there, but he also taught us that it is good to leave something on our plates to remind us that others remain hungry with nothing on their plates. How we ate became a moral activity that reflected who we were. Eating became emblematic of life choices. In his book that recounts the trip Thoreau made with his brother John down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he says, “When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar,—this alone will last you a whole day;—or if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. Any one of these things I mean, not all together” (italics added). Thoreau would prepare his meals as he lived, with temperance, economy and moral conscientiousness, and this was consistent with the moral stances he assumed in the world. Thoreau advocated for a life of leanness and liberal concern before liberal was a cynical word for a dubious politics. In “Slavery in Massachusetts” Thoreau had forcefully decried the execution of John Brown who he believed to be a hero and martyr, and Thoreau railed against the surrender of the escaped slave, Anthony Burns, to his Southern owners by the Boston authorities. We approach food as we do our friends, family and neighbors and as we do the exercise of our lives.

Cooking like breathing and movement, sustains life. The yoga instructor quietly repeats, “Breathe, just breathe, align your movement to your breaths.” I have always had difficulty with that process. And the preparation of food, too, requires attention, patience and alertness. So does life. I’ve had considerable difficulty with that process. I too quickly lose patience, attention and alertness. These days I fall easily down the rabbit hole my phone provides me. But recently I twice screened The Taste of Things a film about food and love in which the two categories are intimately related. Indeed, Dodin states that “everything started with something they ate,” referencing the story of Adam and Eve in the garden eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. In the relationship between Dodin and Eugénie, Monsieur Dodin first reads the recipe; that is, he creates the dishes, and then Eugénie prepares it. She is the cook! The two have been partners for 20 years. Repeatedly he has asked for her hand in marriage and consistently she refuses him. But during the meal that he prepares for her after her illness, Dodin hides a ring within the dessert, and unwrapping the dessert and discovering the ring, Eugénie smiles and accepts his proposal. Cooking and love are here linked. In one of the final scenes in the film, Eugénie asks Dodin, ““Do you see me more as a wife or a cook?” and Dodin responds, “A cook,” and with the same smile she wore when he proposed, Eugénie says, “Thank you.” That is, Dodin loves Eugénie because her passion for food preparation translates into her passion for Dodin and vice versa. If she were viewed first as a wife, Dodin would be bound to her by custom and by law, but as his cook her passion for food is inseparable from her passion for him. They are what they eat! “And there’s nothing that you eat that I don’t eat, too,” Dodin tells her. Now, I believe the food in this film is certainly more glorious than the bread to which Thoreau has alluded, and they do tend to prepare and eat not any one of these things as Thoreau had recommended, but, indeed, to repast on all of them. The sumptuous multi-course meals they prepare and consume was staggering. But the meal’s preparation does not at all prejudice either Dodin or Eugénie. Though this film is about food, and as a vegetarian I was not overly interested in any of the recipes (except maybe for the Baked Alaska!), I was fascinated by the dedication Dodin and Eugénie enacted to every aspect of the culinary art and to their lives and love. As they devoted their days and years to the food, so did they devote their love for each other. 

I am not so enamored of food nor do I possess or am interested to acquire such skilled preparations in the kitchen; the care and cares with which Dodin and Eugénie’s meals are prepared have only a vague similarity to my culinary efforts and techniques. Well, in fact my meals have very little in common with those of Dodin and Eugénie except perhaps that we both employ food stuffs and prepare them in a kitchen. I have been cooking meals in my kitchen for much of my life, at least for fifty-odd of my seventy-seven years. I have fed my children from my anxious effort in the kitchen. I believe they consumed both, but they have survived and even thrived. Often the meals have turned to odd. Once I tried to prepare a vegan sloppy joe but the dish somehow turned out a bright shade of pink and no one partook.  I am a careless cook: And it may be true that in the same amount of time I have grown as well to be a somewhat dedicated, somewhat successful and careless lover, father, friend and scholar, though perhaps for each with different intensities. 

I am the founding member of an organization I have taken to calling “The Careless Cook Club.” Perhaps there are other yet anonymous potential members. I invite them all to join my association and tell with care the stories of their careless cooking and living.