I love food. I love the taste, feel and scent of it. I'm not alone in this. I also think about it a lot, not just from a consuming point of view - though it does consume me - but from a...cultural? philosophical? ideological? perspective. I am fascinated by the why of food. We human animals have taken the three things we have to do to survive as a species and have turned two of them into Art with a capital A.
The other is Eating.
Cooking started out as a way of making the inedible edible. Good start. I wonder when it changed to making the edible a pleasure?
There is so much attached to food for us - family, culture, religion. Perhaps the last thing we lose as the descendants of immigrants is the food of our culture. My family has been here for at least four generations, more in some cases, and yet I still make springerle at Christmas. Most people don't really like them, but you should hear my brothers complain if I don't make "the bathroom tiles" as one of them calls them. (It took much experimentation in technique and quantity to get them approaching edible. I had some epic failures as a teenager!) Why am I so attached? Partly it's the memories of those failures, partly it's the memory of my Mother, who dragged me through it and changed proportions and was totally honest when it came to those failures, but also it means I'm still German. And English, and Scottish, and totally American, but still Greman too. My Mother made springerle, her mother made them, and probably her mother made them - I never asked if Mom knew, and now I regret it.
People live through recipes. Mom died over two years ago, but her notes on her recipes mean that she still can talk to me; remind me that the oven on Albany Ave ran 25 degrees hot, so every temperature in the Mirro cookie press book has been changed to reflect this. There are moments reflected from times before I was born that bring me closer to her, such as my grandmother's oatmeal cookie recipe that has a note on the back telling Mom that "Doug (my father) would eat them any way you made them because he always bragged about your cooking." This gives me a faded, grease stained, dog-eared snapshot of my Mother and Father as newlyweds, before the children, before the divorce, as a couple. I never knew them this way. Remembrance of things past that I don't remember.
I cook because I love. I cook for family and friends to show them my most basic form of attachment. It sounds a bit womanly and a bit simplistic, but while it's not the only reason, it's the main reason. If I invite you for a meal, I am expressing that I wish to be part of your life, and want you to be part of mine. If you are my guest, you are my family. The hearth is the center of the home and the fruit of the hearth joins us together.
Why do you cook?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've been thinking about this since I first read it. My tradition with food is more like oral history then yours. I think this might be because my mother was not a baker.
ReplyDeleteBaking is such a science that you need very specific ratios, hence the need for a recipe. Cooking, home cooking in my family that is, not so much. Sure, my mother had cookbooks, some traditional and some popular at the time. She read food magazines. But ninety percent of the time she navigated by memory, experience and taste.
I was the baker in the family. Baking was structured in a way that appeals to me, that could be followed on my own and in my own time. It is a challenge which provides treats as trophies. Trophies that you can share.
I envy you those recipe cards, a physical, kinetic reminder of times spent together.
What I have is the small cast iron skillet that my mother handed down to me where she taught me to fry eggs, and brown cubes of beef that had been dredged in seasoned flour to begin her 'Irish' stew. That and the non-recipe recipes passed to me by example and repetition. Simmer this, add this at the end, a handful of that or a pinch of this. I have most of my comfort foods, meals I grew up with that my mother made by heart.
Pat, you bring up a good point - nostalgia is so often attached to a food oriented item. Your cast iron skillet is the perfect example of that. I am particularly nostalgic about a large glass divided platter that we always used, and I still use, for serving the cookies at Christmas. It just wouldn't be right to do it any other way!
ReplyDeleteI almost think that well-loved tools carry the shadow of those who used them, so they still are with us.