What an Italian Cook Taught Me
"What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world."
Anyone who's had a parent or perhaps a grandparent devoted to cooking knows food is more than food. When made by the right person, food becomes small mysteries channeled with all the love and affection a person can muster. It absorbs all the wonderful qualities of a loving parent, grandparent, spouse, lover, or even child.
In a bite, you not only learn about its creator but also yourself. You inherit knowledge of your past, not just of your family but also your culture—of what makes you you. That you are never alone.
This is why I read cookbooks. A good cookbook is not just a repository for recipes. In a good cookbook, food becomes metaphor for home, a conduit to pass down to its recipients the life lived by its creator. For this reason, one of my favorite books, cooking or otherwise, is Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
Of Italian cooking, Hazan writes:
"Eating in Italy is essentially a family art, practiced for and by the family. The finest accomplishments of the home cook are not reserved like the good silver and china for special occasions or for impressing guests, but are offered daily for the pleasure and happiness of the family group."
Here, Hazan clarifies the differences between home cooking and restaurant cooking. It's cooking in the home where food is not made for profit but to keep you fed, alive, and satisfied. It's the opposite ethos of the restaurant because in the home, every meal is a minus in the financial ledger. But it's a sacrifice any home cook is willing to make over and over again.
Food in a restaurant is food made by strangers where flavor is judged in a vacuum. It's a transactional act. In home cooking, flavor, love, connection, and companionship are intricately intertwined. In the home, food is a relationship.
Hazan continues:
"Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life."
This is not only true for Italy but all regional cooking. Home cooking is cultural exchange. Food is material. What's at the heart of the matter are familial bonds, community, and the greater understanding of one's place in existence.
"It is not created, not to speak of 'creative,' cooking of restaurant chefs. It is the cooking that spans remembered history, that has evolved during the whole course of transmitted skills and intuitions in homes throughout the Italian Peninsula and the islands, in its hamlets, on its farms, in its great cities. It is cooking from the home kitchen. Of course there have been—and there still are—aristocrats' homes, merchants' homes, peasants' homes, but however disparate the amenities, they have one vital thing in common: Food, whether simple or elaborate, is cooked in the style of the family. There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine because there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking. All roads lead … home…"
All roads lead home. That line shattered me into a million pieces. It's what we all want, isn't it? Whether we pursue money, sex, power, gastronomic experiences, or survival, we just want to be closer to the home of yesterday. Whether it's the love we felt as a child or the love we wished we felt.
On clarity and getting to the essential, Hazan writes:
"Perhaps without my always being fully conscious of it, the dishes continued to evolve, moving toward a simpler, clearer expression of their primary flavors and toward a steadily diminishing dependence on cooking fat."
Nothing starts from a blank slate. There's already a messy and capricious starting point. That's where our stories begin; that's the preexisting conditions we build from. Then in an impermanent life, rather than adding more and dividing our attention and energy, moving towards a few rich passions and priorities will greatly enhance those experiences while reducing the obstacles to satisfaction.
Take great care when finding your primary flavors. Be attentive and respectful, and don't take them for granted.
"In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce."
Whether in society or the kitchen, the important things don't trickle down from the top like cheap sauce or cheese to cover up for bad ingredients. It's the other way around. We start with the ingredients, we start from the bottom up. Only then is there balance.
"Flavor, in Italian dishes, builds up from the bottom. It is not a cover, it is a base. ... a foundation of flavor supports, lifts, points up the principal ingredients."
Cooking is democratic. Every ingredient has a say. It builds from the bottom, and rather than hiding the flavors of the base, the flavors of the base are enhanced and uplifted. It's not something different from its foundation, it is the foundation only stronger and richer.
If we build from the bottom and consider our ingredients, then the job of the sauce isn't to cover up but highlight. Clarity is to maximize the flavors that are already there. If we keep adding more at the top, how will we taste anything?
"I believe with my whole heart in the act of cooking, in its smells, in its sounds, in its observable progress on the fire. The microwave separates the cook from cooking, cutting off the emotional and physical pleasure deeply rooted in the act, and not even with its swiftest and neatest performance can the push-button wizardry of the device compensate for such a loss."
Hazan adds:
"I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles. I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping."
Like anything worthwhile, home cooking is not convenient cooking. Convenience removes us from direct experience. Since life can only be known through experience, to remove ourselves from direct experience is to remove ourselves from the act of living.
We're in such a rush, we miss recognizing that the part in the middle, the thing between birth and death, is everything. What is in need of praise is not speed but slowness and clarity. Being slow, taking time to do things, doing one thing at a time—doing things—experiencing, is human life. These minor, inconvenient, human elements are what separate humanity from machine.
"Do not throw out the water in which the mushrooms soaked because it is rich with porcini flavor. Filter it through a strainer lined with paper toweling, collecting it in a bowl or beaked pouring cup. Set aside to use as the recipe will subsequently instruct."
And water, so common that we take it for granted. Yet water is essential. Common things are essential.
We race to get past the ordinary and familiar, running past the essential, only to get too far from home and having to race against time to reconnect with our primary: like our family, our community, our health, our breath, our planet.
"Water is at the same time the most precious and most unobtrusive ingredient in Italian cooking, and its value is immense precisely because it is self-effacing. What water gives you is time, time to cook a meat sauce long enough without it drying out or becoming too concentrated, time for a roast to come around when using that superb Italian technique of roasting meat over a burner with the cover slightly askew, time for a stew or a fricassee or a glazed vegetable to develop flavor and tenderness. Water allows you to glean the tasty particles on the bottom of a pan without relying too much on such solvents as wine or stock that might tip the balance of flavor. When it has done its job and has been boiled away, water disappears without a trace, allowing your meats, your vegetables, your sauces to taste forthrightly of themselves."
Moreover:
"What you keep out is as significant as what you put in."
What is of value is time. And having only the essentials give you more time with the essentials, creating more room for growth and more time for relationships to blossom. Time is love. Time is a teacher.
Plant a seed, then give it time. Teach a child, then give them time. Mastering the primary flavors is to master time. In any developing relationship, time is essential.
With simple Buddhist cooking, to achieve flavor rather than rich ingredients, the monk uses time. It is their greatest asset. Time beats money. Time beats everything. Rather than fight time, choose a few things then devote time.
Time nourishes. Time decays. But in the magic of cooking, the decay of time is what nourishes flavor.
"Because the flavor of vegetable soup improves upon reheating, you needn't make this minestrone entirely from scratch the same day you are going to serve it. You can cook the soup that constitutes its base a day or two earlier..."
Just as with people, some things need time and a second (and third) chance to bloom.
"May be frozen when done."
Developing skill or knowledge doesn't mean you have to use it right away. Apply when needed. Have your freezer and mind stocked with options.
Remember:
"Blandness is not a virtue, tastelessness is not a joy."
And work with what you have:
"Virtually anything edible can become the flavor base of a risotto..."
Make sure to distinguish the essentials from convenience. Meaningful relationships take time, but what is essential is meaning.
Before the cup, there was water. Before the wheel, there was travel.
"Before there was an oven, there was bread."
The goal is to live a rich and textured life within your existing conditions. But challenge your conditions when needed, and add spice for taste.
"Pizza is made for improvisation and brooks no dogmas about its toppings."
Cooking is creative. Food is art. And if you get lost, improvise. Have fun.
"I don't cook 'concepts.' I use my head, but I cook from the heart, I cook for flavor."
Sometimes it's not about what you say but what you do. Better than words, love as an act of service can encompass your mind, heart, and soul.
"Once the pasta is sauced, serve it promptly, inviting your guests and family to put off talking and start eating."
Observe the progress of your meal. But once the meal is served, observe your guests.
"What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world."
Life is experiential. Live a rich experience:
"An Italian meal is a lively sequence of sensations, alternating the crisp with the soft and yielding, the pungent with the bland, the variable with the staple, the elaborate with the simple."
Some people can go about their lives believing the world is binary. Black or white. Bland and flavorless. But with cooking, as in martial arts, when you believe something fallacious, there's instant objective feedback. You lose the match. Your meal is awful.
During a meal, many processes and flavors are happening at once. It's not black or white, but everything at once.
Distill and chill:
"Cook at a lively heat. ... Stir from time to time. ... Taste and correct for salt and hot pepper. ... Toss the pasta with the sauce, then add both cheeses, and toss thoroughly again."
Once you begin, keep it lively. Check your progress and adjust as you go along.
"The explanation is that I consider cooking to be an act of love. I do enjoy the craft of cooking, of course, otherwise I would not have done so much of it, but that is a very small part of the pleasure it brings me. What I love is to cook for someone. To put a freshly made meal on the table, even if it is something very plain and simple as long as it tastes good and is not a ready-to-eat something bought at the store, is a sincere expression of affection, it is an act of binding intimacy directed at whoever has a welcome place in your heart. And while other passions in your life may at some point begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do."
Hazan expands further:
"The Italian comes to [their] table with the same open heart with which a child falls into [their] mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place."
When my mother was alive, she put all her love and effort into her meals. When I asked her why, she told me all the ways she felt she was lacking, not only as a mother but also as a person. But the one area where she felt she could impart all of her essence was in her cooking.
She was in many ways a victim of circumstances, but in the kitchen she was a maestro. She told me when she cooked, she didn't think about recipes, she only thought of her children. For these reasons, it is not enough to say she was an excellent cook. There are many fine cooks and chefs, but not all are loving home cooks. And I'll never taste her home-cooked meals again.
So when I miss her, I pick up a cookbook. Rather than replicating the taste, I want to know the thoughts of those who put their hearts and souls into their meals. So that I may better understand what she was thinking, because I didn't ask enough. Then sometimes, better than other books, a good cookbook can express the warm embrace of our mothers and our longing to return home.
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