Rethinking cooking
“Pleasure is the baseline”
I just finished this inventive, quietly moving book about cooking. Written by
, it blends her work as an academic with her experience as a home cook. The result is a unique, kaleidoscopic book that touches on Greek epics, the politics of food, history, culture, gender and, most compelling for me, her personal history in the kitchen.“I am writing against the tendency for people to diminish cooking as almost the opposite of thought,” she writes partway through the book. It’s a line I’m still thinking about.
To me, cooking is either an enjoyable, creative hobby or a boring but necessary task. Its essentialness dulls the need to think about it more deeply than that. Most of the time, my cooking is functional. I cook because I have things to do. I cook because I need to eat something that will maintain my productivity.
But I’m missing out. Cooking (& eating) has so much more to offer us. This book centres the body. It centres pleasure. My favourite section, which is helpfully excerpted here, celebrates Nigella Lawson’s insistence on the sensory delights of food.
“She will not trivialise pleasure or pretend it’s not foremost in her mind. She is telling me and you that we are worthy of pleasure and should prioritise it, too. She wants us to cook so that we can find the way to our own hearts through our stomachs. Nigella encourages readers and viewers to refuse the abjection of their bodies. Pleasure is the baseline.”
I remember watching Nigella with my mother as a young teen. We marveled at her audaciousness, sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night wearing a pink, satin dressing gown and devouring another serving of dessert. I remember the time she boiled her Christmas ham in a litre of Coke, a recipe we replicated at home. It was treacly and dark, a revelation after a lifetime of bland, watery ham.
The author sometimes posts snapshots of her breakfasts online which I often see while eating my morning porridge, the same breakfast I’ve been eating for more than a decade. The preparation has varied: hot or cold, overnight or instant, with fresh or dried fruit, with milk from an animal or a plant. I pack porridge when I travel and have spent more money than I'd like to think about buying it while living overseas. Its reliability is its own reward. The simplicity of its flavour, the reassuring coziness of feeling full afterwards, the near certain guarantee that I won’t be ravenous and moody all day because I’ve had a decent breakfast.
What we eat shows how we live. I cook to work through my anxieties, to sustain myself, to show my love. I cook to impress, to grieve, to celebrate. Cooking is always a collaboration - with the ingredients, with the tastes and desires of others, and with the elemental power of nature that makes it possible to convert woody cabbage into buttery soup.
To me, cooking has always been a way to heal yourself. Both in the immediate sense (from the day’s anxieties and stressors), and in the grander sense (from the death of a loved one, and bone-shattering trauma). It provides a way back toward the sensory pleasures of life. A way toward humankind, after periods of isolation.
During the pandemic, I dreamt of having dinner parties around the big table I bought second hand online. They never happened. By the time the restrictions were lifted, I had fallen in love with my partner. We made a home together and I left my big table behind. But the fantasy was enough to stave off the worst of the loneliness.
Last night, I baked salmon and vegetables as I often do on a Monday night. It’s a quick, mindless but delicious dinner. Half moons of red onions (which are purple, but whatever!), cherry tomatoes that are more flavourful at this time of year, sweet broccolini and two simple slabs of salmon, all seasoned with salt, pepper and decent olive oil. On the stovetop, I sauteed some fresh green beans in oil and lemon juice and cooked some rice. We ate that, plus a tub of leftover burnt/well crisped veg from Friday night’s solo dinner1.
Eating it was one of the best moments of my day. I spent 5 hours deep in a new story, but that paled in comparison to the sensory delight of those flavors. To the knowledge that I’d made something delicious and wholesome, without really thinking about it.
Cooking and writing balance each other well.
Cooking is embodied, sensual, communal, satisfying.
Writing is intellectual, heady, frustrating, solitary.
After writing all day, I often retreat to the kitchen for respite. Making cakes has become a gentle ritual this year. On autopilot, I can follow the same method with a variety of flavours and textures and reliably have a delicious cake on the table within an hour. When my brain is stuttering and my eyes are tired, I crave the feeling of flour between my palms. It brings comfort to measure the ingredients, to mix the batter and know that whatever else has happened, I can depend on the cake.
I’ve always thought of cooking as the opposite of intellectual work. It is embodied, and therefore frivolous. The finished meal lasts only a matter of minutes. Soon afterward, it becomes (literal!) shit. And yet, its pleasures are boundless.
“The primary measure of culinary knowledge is whether it brings pleasure to the body, and to what degree, it is inherently erotic.”
The book, which is almost like a sibling to this one, pokes at the boundaries that exist between things that come from the body (our appetites, desires, vulnerabilities) and the things that exist in the mind (theory, academic enquiry, knowledge). It reframes cooking not as something ‘domestic’ and therefore ‘feminine’ and therefore ‘unserious’ but as an art and practice that not only sustains the human race but provides texture, meaning and joy in our lives. It is annotated throughout, in the style of Maggie Nelson.
A recipe, like a screenplay, is a stand in for something else. It comes to life only when it is made. A combination of the cook’s body and the ingredients make it real in a way that language cannot. The book describes the intimate process of cooking a recipe so much that it becomes part of your body. How the repetition of whipping and chopping and stirring becomes part of your body’s way of being in the world. I’ve scrambled thousands of eggs but have never considered it as a bodily experience.
“The route to the recipe is made by tongues.”
Food is one of the essential unifying experiences of being human. We encounter it several times a day, either as a cook or an eater. It is also inherently biographical. The story of my life can be told through the things I’ve cooked and eaten. The meals I’ve shared with people I loved, or with strangers I’ve crossed paths with only briefly. And yet, I rarely think of the lineage I’m part of when I crack eggs onto lemon zest, or blitz a soup in the wintertime. Cooking has traditionally been feminised and therefore trivialised. It’s time to take it back.
My partner and I are squeezing in one last summer trip to Italy later this week. Normal programming will resume in mid-September. Thank you, as always, for being here.
While my girlfriend was out eating tandoori monkfish, I worked late and ate oven chips with veggies patties made of quinoa and kale. Deliciousness all round!
thank you so much Clare!