On Cooking

by James Simpkins

The term cooking—when I say it, anyway—means taking raw food items, preparing them and applying heat or culinary technique to affect change—not throwing a frozen pizza in the oven. In the ever-augmenting rush of our daily lives, cooking is taking a back seat. Without putting too fine a point on it, I think we’re just lazy.

James, what are you talking about? What about The Food Network? “Julie and Julia”? Rachel Ray? I mean, food is so “yum-o”, how could the practice of cooking go second fiddle?

Well, to use those examples: 1) The Food Network is a TV channel---you really shouldn’t be cooking yourself when the next episode of “Look How Much Better I Cook Than You Do” is on. 2) “Julie & Julia” is a decent movie about a young woman with a cool blog idea piggy-backing on a cultural icon. At least she’s in a kitchen. 3) Rachel Ray has a talk show. I know that after I get done listening to all that high discourse, I’m too tired to cook. Michael Pollan just wrote a great (and slightly less catty) piece on this very topic of not cooking in the New York Times Magazine that I’d recommend reading. The upshot is that cooking as entertainment necessarily wants—no, needs—you out of the kitchen. I’d like to convey a couple of my own reasons to get back into it.

Cooking, first, last and always, involves work. As Anne Frank has told us, “Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.” This satisfaction can come directly from taking a little more time preparing meals. I realize the pre-chopped and washed lettuce mix at the grocery store can seem alluring when you feel like a salad, but really---you can do it, and for substantially less money.
 
Monday night I was dealing with the $25 worth of vegetables from the farmers’ market that I had purchased the day before. It took less than an hour to take dirty beets, dirtier leeks, a bunch of wild onions, a couple heads of lettuce, and a pound of radishes and transform them into a mass of picked, washed, scrubbed, dried, peeled and ready ingredients. I think it’s that step that most people don’t want to participate in—the transformation of foodstuff to ingredient. Yet as a cook, this is where learning about food starts and ends. There is just no substitute for time spent holding and handling the foods you’re working with.

While I don’t pretend to know why, after lots of time working with a certain foodstuff, you develop a kind of sixth sense about, say, that lime you’re holding, the feel of it in your hand, its scent, and how it occurs to the eyes. In a split second your brain will compare it to the hundreds or thousands of limes that you’ve held before and tell you whether this will be one of the good ones or not. (If limes aren’t something you buy a lot of, just look for ones that with thin, smooth skins and that are slightly soft to the touch. These guys have LOTS more pulp and juice than ones with thick skins, and the method works with lemons, too.)

Look, most time spent in kitchens is prep work. The act of putting perfectly julienned carrots into braised greens simmering on the stove is a no-brainer. Cutting each carrot strip into the 2” x 1/16 inch slice required to produce a julienne is quite another. I’ll let you guess which one makes you feel better accomplishing.

Knife techniques aside, when dealing with vegetables, you can expect mostly work. Going to the farm or market to buy them, soaking notoriously dirty leeks for the third time, or removing all the pith and seeds from peppers-it all takes time and energy. So what’s the payoff for spending time in the kitchen? For me, it’s about others as much as myself.

Going to markets and farms in search of my foods create an experience that I am participating in an old and important life ritual--not to mention I feel like I couldn’t eat any better than I do.

In just the past year I have met people who produce some of the best quality food on the planet right here in Connecticut and all through a commitment to cooking “food” instead of with products. I also get to spend more time around people I like.

Have you ever tried to cook for just yourself? If so, you have already realized its many foibles, not the least of which is that no recipe ever ends with “Serves 1.” If you take the time to prep a bunch of food and make something with it, you are much more likely to call someone to share it with you. Plus, when my wife knows that everything we’re eating was grown within a five mile radius, she likes me more. She’s told me it makes her feel like I am taking care of her. I can imagine this would be true for friends, too. In short, taking the time to prepare and cook whole foods invites you to invite others to be around; to share something; to be part of your life.

Just for comparison, run to the store and buy the pre-chopped lettuce mixture, dump it into a bowl and pour some dressing on it. Now tell me: Who grew that lettuce, and where? And how long ago? When you can answer these types of questions, I promise you will feel better about the work it takes to cook and the food that goes into your body. And—if you’re anything like me—you’ll feel better about yourself, too. Just the plastic bag the pre-chopped salads come in will require about 1000 years to return from whence it came while the waste from a fresh head of lettuce will disappear overnight in an active compost pile.

So, is it worth the extra few minutes to wash and dry and tear that fresh Bibb lettuce? You’ll never convince me it’s not.