Cook (the) Books

    Let me start by saying that I am not a cook, at least not a natural cook who is filled with passion and is naturally creative in the kitchen.  Okay, I'm somewhat competent on the grill and can make a pretty decent poached egg, complete with runny yolk that ooze over a nice piece of buttered toast.  And I even make a surprisingly good vegetarian lasagna (gasp).  But to be thinking up dishes such as roasted beets with goat cheese or making home-made mozzarella (supposedly rather simple)...forget it.  Which is why I recognize the efforts of chefs overall, from high-end gourmet chefs with Michelin stars to short order breakfast cooks* who can pound out dozens of orders at a steady pace for hours, from over-easy eggs side-by-side with chicken fried steaks and an order of waffles.  How in the heck do they manage to keep everything in order for tables 4 through 15 when everyone is wanting something different?     

     These thoughts came about because for some reason I've been going over a few of my older cookbooks although not so much for the recipes but for what I missed in reading about what the author or authors had to say about their cooking...why they got into it, why they love it (still), and why on earth they felt the need to spend months putting out a recipe book.  When you think about it, putting together a cookbook takes a lot of work.  If you're the non-famous chef/author, how do you get a reader to not only pick up your cookbook and thumb through it, but then to actually purchase it?  Would you need to have a spectacular title or an ultra-specific topic (50 Ways to Leave Your Okra) or would that limit your audience?  What about glossy photos ($$) or a celebrity to help promote you ($$$)?  You'd certainly need inventive and tasty recipes, ones separate and unique from the thousands of other cookbooks, not to mention the zillions of recipes that appear each month in cooking magazines.  And finally do you decide you want a hard bound book, a paperback or a simple spiral binding, all big decisions if you didn't get a publisher to take a chance on you; or (if you are indeed going it alone) do you skip all that expense and go online only?  The main question you'd have to ask yourself before you even begin such an undertaking is...can you even really cook?

    A show my wife and I were watching had a female business executive being interviewed and she was asked, "What's your passion?"  The executive was surprised at the question and told the interviewer that she thought that that was a rather odd way to start.  And yet the word passion is what seems to emphasize the difference between us dabblers in the kitchen and those who are yearning to be a chef about to enter the brigade de cuisine.  Still, the writing of a cookbook seems yet another leap beyond even that chef passion and one that proved interesting to me.  I had to ask myself, why would a cook take the time to put together something so complicated (think of you writing down just one recipe and how meticulous you have to be to provide all of the exact measurements and times involved to create the dish).

    My first venture into reading cookbooks came some 45 years ago when I spotted two cookbooks being sold in the produce section (yes, the produce section) of my local Safeway grocery store.  Greene on Greens was by the well-known (but not to me) Bert Greene who wrote with wit and humor, at least to my novice-cook's eyes; his recipes were inventive but basic and the dang book was only $9.95 if I remember correctly, a price that appealed to my meager pocketbook-eyes as well.  Here's a tidbit on his first bite of an artichoke, he being a soldier fresh from the end of WWII and now sitting rather uncomfortably at a couple's ritzy dinner: As the correct utensil for eating an artichoke is the fingers, the shock was mesmerizing.  Served my portion with a small bowl of warm hollandaise, I could not perceive (even at close scrutiny) what joy was to be obtained by sloshing a leaf in the liquid and then apparently only wetting one's tongue with it.  However, that experience, once tried, altered my culinary perceptions forever.  I must have praised that first course extravagantly, for the table partner on my right raised an eyebrow.  Pushing her untouched artichoke in my direction, she exchanged plates so discreetly that neither our hostess nor any other guest was aware of the transaction.  But I could not resist a question.  Why?  She smiled sweetly at the empty plate before her.  "I was born in Castroville," she said.  "It's a small town in Northern California that some people call the artichoke capital of the world.  My father grew nothing but artichokes on his farm and I ate them every day of my life until I got out of there."  My table companion was a very attractive blond and despite her forthrightness was so soft-spoken no one else heard a word.  "I'd rather eat a rattlesnake than an artichoke," she murmured.  "And come to think of it, I have!"  Nothing she said cooled my ardor, for I finished her portion as well.  I do not remember another dish of the meal.  But the first sublimely nutty flavor of that leaf I will not forget until my last breath is taken.  

     That was passion.  And from Greene I went on nabbing cookbooks such as Sundays at Moosewood and The Silver Palate, then Harold McGee and even annual cookbooks from the local Buddhist temple in Hawaii (lots of "local" recipes).  Alas, the more I read the more I wanted to try out the dishes, clipping recipes from magazines and gluing them in my "own" recipe book, indexed and marked with whatever corrections I felt were necessary.   But now, looking back at all of that effort and enthusiasm so many years ago, the reality was that little of that lifestyle came to be; mine was not to be the flour-dusted kitchen with cleaver knives scattered across deeply grooved butcher block counters, pans filling the sink while meat seared on the grill.  What had once seemed so vast and full of possibilities in my younger days had turned out to be a rather small and limited culinary department.  Of the thousands and thousands of recipes that sat in those cookbooks (many of those being constantly shoved to the back to make way for even more of them in the front), I found that I had tried to make less than 1% of the dishes.  Certainly they all "sounded" good, but the truth is everything seemed encapsulated in the fate of my recipe "clippings," now so old that many have come unglued and fall off of the pages like faded pictures.  These days when I glance through even more recipes, I find that my thoughts of "that sounds good" turns out to really mean "That's something I'll never make."

     Add those cookbooks and recipes to my ever-growing pile of magazines, books, emails and podcasts and admittedly in the end, I will have likely glanced at (or at least retained) the same <1% of any of the material.  It's beginning to feel sort of like life.  Meet a friend you haven't seen in some years and be asked what's been going on and you find yourself summing up everything from the last few years in about 30 seconds.  It's the highlights, the experiences and changes that you remember and mention.  But did those small steps and contributions actually  made a difference?  Could I ever write a cookbook?  No (this blog has sort of become my "cookbook").  But that's okay.  As my wife always reminds me, the important thing to ask yourself is did you bring kindness into the world?  Maybe somewhere along the way I may have made a dish that brought a speck of a smile to someone, a dish that was shared with memories of laughter and good friends, or of families getting together, bringing back the smells and flavors of grandma's and mom's cooking.  If I somehow brought even a portion of that into someone else's life then that may have proved far more valuable than me trying to exactly follow a recipe. 

     When her young daughter, Sylvia, unexpectedly passed away, Liz Nuemark and her husband went on to open Sylvia Center, a farm for social healing.  She also became co-author of Sylvia's Table, where she wrote: I learned several years ago that tragedy is not something that happens to someone else.  Life is both wonderful and terrifying, and it is how we blend the two that defines who we are.  The passing of Suzanne Landry's father from recurring cancer had her write in her cookbook: Soon after, I began a journey of my own healing.  My dad's death at such a young age, my own health challenges, and my children's chronic health problems were the catalysts to my journey.  It's been fascinating to explore the connection between food and healing, and thirty years later, I'm still captivated by it (that was a part of her book's introduction, The Birth of My Passion).  And then there were the Lee Brothers (they started out by selling boiled peanuts) and their Southern Cookbook: Where did the South get its reputation for being so hostile to vegetarians?  We don't know the answer, but we have a hunch that the brawnier side of southern food --the all-night vigil with a whole hog over a log fire, the catfish caught with bare hands and dunked in a fryer-- is what southerners tend to show off (and people outside the South like to imagine).  I must admit that that is my impression... 

     That's part of what cookbooks do, if not helping to introduce your mind to different cultures then they at least want to introduce your taste buds.  Which is all quite different from the commercial food industry which processes convenience and packaged goods, adds artificial sweeteners and takes out fiber.  What happens when your taste buds sense "sugar" but leave both the brain and gut asking "so where is it?"  Studies on your body's reaction have been pulled by soda companies, but the research on fat has continued, and it's not good.  Said Michael Moss in his book Hooked: ...fat has learned new tricks.  It no longer merely defends itself from attack.  Now it goes on the offensive.  When you fall off the dieting wagon and your shriveled fat cells replenish themselves with a rush of triglycerides from the excess food, the fat cells send chemical signals to the nearby veins, causing them to sprout out toward the fat.  This increases the blood supply, which helps produce new fat cells.  Fat is devious in another way.  No one should be fooled into thinking the body-sculpting process called liposuction is a reliable way to lose weight.  It removes fat only from where it is most visible.  In the mode of self-preservation, new fat will accumulate around the heart and other inner organs, which is associated with an increased risk of heart disease.

    Our foods and are tastes are changing.  Who knew that aquaculture would be supplying the majority of the fish we eat, said Bloomberg Businessweek.  Or that consumers reducing their meat consumption are beginning to tire of soy- and wheat-substitutes and turning instead to...peas (think Beyond Meat and the majority of the new entrants into the alt-meat market).  Heck, I just learned that steaming eggs is as effective (better, in my opinion) than the old way of just dropping them into a pot of boiling water (although boiled eggs admittedly sounds better than "steamed" eggs**).  Sometimes it takes a new outlook, a willingness to try that expands our horizons.  Yuan Longping, defying Mao's Cultural Revolution, created hybrids of rice that were "salt-tolerant to grow by the coast, cross-bred with maize to be more nutritious, enriched with Vitamin A to improve people's eyes," said The Economist in his obituary.  He also helped to save a good chunk of the world from famine.

     When my brother and I were children we looked forward not to a sweet dessert after dinner but to chazuke, a simple dish of tea and rice.  We could only have it after we had finished our meal, but we looked forward to it as easily as another child might look to ice cream.  To this day and as plain as the dish is, it brings back fond memories of both my aunt and grandmother.  Connie Schultz wrote an essay in TIME about aging and being a grandmother: On Twitter, I noticed a smattering of similar messages coming mostly from people younger and more conservative than I.  Something along the lines of, “Hey old people, you’ve had a good run but I still want to eat at restaurants, so see ya.”  Being 63, I may have escaped their first round of expiration dates, but the longer the pandemic dragged on, the closer I could feel their price guns stamping in my direction.  Grandma clearance sale, aisle seven.  For a while, I collected screenshots of the worst of these posts.  Boy, was that going to be an essay.  At some point, though, I remembered that lecture I used to give my kids.  About how our energy is like a bank account, and we can spend only so much of it in any given day. “Invest wisely,” I used to tell them.  Amazingly, they still speak to me.

     Alice Waters of Chez Panisse put it nicely in Food & Wine: At 10 years old, you're still learning.  I thought at 20, if we were still there, we'd probably be around a lot longer.  And then 30 comes, and there was a maturity.  At 40, you had confidence, but a midlife crisis, too.  And then you're 50.  She's talking about her restaurant, of course, but she may as well be summing up what cooking and food does.  After all, Just look at Mory Sacko, "the newest star of Paris' restaurant scene," said TIME.  Opening his first restaurant of African, French and Japanese flavors, he was awarded a Michelin star...Sacko is from Mali.

     Cookbooks can be a brief yet engaging guide to this changing world, and in a way we're all writing our own cookbooks, constantly searching for and adjusting the ingredients of our lives, mixing and tossing until we find that perfect blend to suit our taste.  Some of us will be lucky and discover that our "recipe" has turned out better than we expected and left us content; while others will continue to search and invent and explore, always curious, always adventurous.  But in the end, something seems to always pull us back, Ratatouille-like, searching, yearning and craving for that one perfect recipe...a home-cooked meal. 

*A terrific dive into the world of short order cooks appeared some years ago in The New Yorker; you may come to appreciate your diner breakfast a bit more after reading it.

**For that matter, who knew that shrapnel was originally an invention by a WWI British soldier who created a cannonball that released its contents when exploded in the air, allowing the pieces inside to continue along the projected path in an spreading arc (he was never publicly credited); the inventor was a soldier named Henry Shrapnel?