What's Cooking?

I don't cook because it's trendy. In fact, I don't do anything because it's trendy. I like what I like, and I do what I like because, well, I like it -- genuinely, from the heart. While there are the "faux foodies" (as I call them in "The Problem With Poseurs") out there, and while people often accept them as the real deal, I don't. I don't accept them because I have no tolerance for artificiality. But also, I don't accept them because they are, in effect, trivializing the art of cookery and its meaning to the cook through their feigned passion for it.

It may reasonably be taken as a given that I cook because I love food, I love to eat. As Luciano Pavarotti and William Wright wrote, "One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating." So, yes, I cook to eat; I learn dishes that intrigue me, or that I love, I cook them, and subsequently, I gleefully gobble them up.

But for me, the glee rests not only in the gobbling, but in the process. As Julia Child put it, "Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet." I couldn't agree more because, not only do I consider cooking an art, but also, because I simply love cooking. I love the chopping (yes, even onions, in fact, especially onions); I love the clean crunching sound of a chef's knife slicing through a stalk of celery, and I love the scent released when mincing rosemary, or chiffonading basil. I love the way heavy cream, thick and white, coats the inside of a clear glass. I love the hiss of garlic hitting hot olive oil, and even more, its unmistakable aroma. I love the "chef's samples": not-so-surreptitiously stealing a shaving of Parmigiano Reggiano, or popping a chocolate chip (or two, or three...). I love folding said chocolate chips into the structured silkiness of a meringue batter.

The labor is one of love, and joy. While quick-and-easy recipes are great, I mostly enjoy making involved ones, and, within reason, tend to avoid shortcuts because, aside from striving for authenticity (especially with ethnic dishes), I don't want to cut things short. I love to linger in the kitchen, one of my favorite places in the home, and one of the places where I feel most at home. I love the warmth of the oven on a cold night, especially when the smell of cinnamon or warm chocolate is radiating from it. I love the miraculous effects of the range on a stove top: it boils, it simmers, it sautés, it fries, it melts, and it heats. I love seeing a dough coming together, or a sauce reducing, or a ganache gleaming. All these things are, literally, a feast for the senses. And yet, there is more at work, here.

Many people say it: "Cooking is therapeutic." And it is. I love cooking because, like the act of eating as described by Pavarotti, one must devote time and attention to it. It helps one to focus on something other than stress, work, trifling people/situations, and it clears the mind. The most important thing, when you're in the kitchen, is to keep your mirepoix from burning, or your sauce from sticking (and let's face it, there are other, more cathartic therapeutic merits to punching down risen dough). Everything else is filtered out while you escape into a world filled with sights, sounds, and smells. It is a healthy respite from the wearisome world; some people choose delusion, I choose cooking. This is why the two do not meet -- paper moons and mezzalunas don't mix. Phonies cannot truly love cooking because it isn't enough and it, too, exists within their realm of unreality, defined and colored by delusion. Cookery for cookery's sake is what brings true contentment.

When free of fakery, cooking, with all its hard work and joys, is therapeutic because it is a very real way of creating something, of making something beautiful and beneficial through the healthy expenditure of energy and concentration. And, perhaps, above all else, the most important ingredient -- trite tho' the expression may be -- is love, which, when true, can only be positive: love for food, love for cooking, a healthy love for self, and a love for others. When cooking is steeped in, and based on, love, it creates more love -- love within the cook's heart, love for one's guests, love for life, and by extension, love in the world. And this is precisely why it must come from the heart, and speak to the heart. Indeed, as the French have it, "La cuisine est un révélateur de l'amour."

- Lisette