Let Them Cook

Years ago, I remember reading an article about the director Ang Lee. The day before he begins a new shoot, Lee cooks. If I recall correctly, he prefers making dishes from his native Taiwan, but that might just be a misremembering on my part. Maybe he likes soul food or chicken cacciatore. Regardless of the what, there is the why.

Why devote an entire day to creating a meal that will be devoured in, at most, an hour? Then again, why devote months or years of one’s life to making a movie that will be devoured in not much more time. Or a painting that may be glanced at on the way to the toilet? Well, because, that’s why.

Cooking is unlike most creative endeavors because it serves a purely practical purpose. Food can be as utilitarian as a microwave burrito or as bespoke as a gluten-free, nine-course vegan tasting menu. Given the abundance of good ingredients on grocery shelves in most developed countries, the act of creating a meal can be as haute as we choose.

I consider myself a fairly serious cook, though I didn’t begin actual cooking until Martha returned to school when the kids were young. We were living in the wilds of Connecticut, a couple hours by train from her New York City classes, and so it fell to me, several days a week, to provide dinner for the family. Before that, I contributed the occasional dinner, but my ambitions were constrained to that which could be heated in a skillet or assembled in a tortilla. Once I found myself in the position of head chef, however, I gradually began expanding my culinary capabilities.

There was the Moroccan tagine I made soon after we both resumed our educations. I don’t know where I found the recipe or why I thought I could handle something whose name I wasn’t even sure I was pronouncing correctly. (Most of you probably already know this, but I had never heard of a tagine before that, and didn’t know if it was pronounced ta-JEAN or ta-ZHINE. It is the latter.) The tagine was the most complicated thing I’d ever made, and my memory of that first foray into high-ish cuisine is that I spent literal days preparing it. Of course, I did not, but I was unused to devoting even more than a single hour to meal prep and so it seemed like an impossibly long time. Why did I do it?

Nobody had suggested to me that I needed to up my dinner game. I just did so because I thought cooking would be a good skill to acquire and because I wanted to impress my wife. Was she impressed?

She was.

More than that, though, I was impressed. Not with my non-existent kitchen skills, but with the process. Here, laid out for me in a neat recipe, were step-by-step instructions for creating deliciousness, which is beauty for the tongue. Beauty – yum! Recipes are little miracles, aren’t they? A few dollops of this or that and you’re recreating somebody else’s masterpiece. Even better, it’s a masterpiece you can eat.

Consider the difference between trying to follow Bob Ross as he instructs viewers how to paint a landscape versus Julia Childs teaching viewers how to spatchcock and roast a chicken. One is likely to lead to an unsatisfying, smudgy result. The other is likely to lead to a fantastic dinner. I won’t tell you which is which, but if you’ve ever tried to eat a Bob Ross painting, I can assure you they are an acquired taste.

Cooking is craft. It’s science. It’s math. It can be art. It’s also a daily opportunity to express love. The opening scene of the terrific film Chef depicts John Favreau making lunch for his son. The food is simple, a grilled cheese, but the care Favreau’s character puts into it, the way he cuts it into triangles and arranges it on the plate, one half leaning against the other like an old friend, tells us everything we need to know about the glowering chef. The son, of course, doesn’t even notice the attention paid to his meal. He doesn’t need to. A parent’s love demands no acknowledgment.

This is not the actual grilled cheese from the film, merely a cheap imitation. Yet, look how lovely. .

Yesterday I returned home to an empty house after a few days away. Martha is visiting family in Minnesota and my son was at work. Flights leave me increasingly depleted as I get older, and my first instinct upon considering the night’s meal was to order a pizza for myself and the kid. But then I thought about what he’d probably been eating the previous few days while I’d been away. There was an empty box of Kraft macaroni and cheese in the kitchen garbage bin. I knew I was flying out again the next day, today. I decided to cook.

Of late, I’ve been saving recipes that I might like to try, and I pulled out one for a fancy black bean soup. I’ve made good black bean soups now and again, but I’ve never found an excellent one. Figured I’d give this one a shot, even though it necessitated a trip to the grocery store. Ugh, I thought, Why must I love my child so much?

Upon my return, I got to work. I pureed and peeled and chopped. I stirred. I pickled onions! I sliced avocado and, even after all of that, somehow mangled the presentation. Had I been thinking about writing this piece today, I would have taken a photo, but you can satisfy yourself by looking at the marvelous photo in the enclosed recipe and imagining it looking five times worse.

A wonderful aspect of cooking is that the visuals can be terrible and yet the product may still turn out fantastic. Such was the case last night. What a terrific soup, dotted with chipotle pepper, sour cream, and heaped with crumbled tortilla chips, a perfect meal for a chilly December evening. We each had two bowls and there were still leftovers. And yes, I’ve been farting all morning.

Was my son impressed with my efforts? He didn’t say, but probably not. He’s grown up on the good cooking of Martha and myself, and now takes it for granted. I am happy for him to do so. We don’t need to talk about what I did for him; instead, we talked about his day and politics and UFOs and the stuff that we talk about at the dinner table. That was more than enough for me. It is a fine thing to consume the food one has made for the people we love with the people we love. I cook, I think, for the same reason as Ang Lee. Because it is an offering and a humility and a grace. I don’t need my loved ones to fawn over it. I just want them to enjoy their food.

And here is the recipe for black bean soup, written by Julia Moskin. She calls it “Best Black Bean soup,” and I’m not going to argue. I’m also going to take screenshots of the recipe because it might be paywalled.