Cooking

I did more complex cooking this week than I normally do. I made a casserole for my department's annual Thanksgiving potluck. And I baked a cake and made cranberries for a church get-together. (My normal cooking is fairly simple: salads and eggs cooked various ways, maybe some pasta sauce...)

And you know? I like cooking. I especially like cooking for other people. I take a certain pride in that I make things from scratch - I could have used a box mix for the cake, I could have opened a can for the cranberries, but I didn't.

(Funny story: one of the high muckety-mucks where I work goes to my church. His wife came up to me after the dinner to ask me for the "wonderful recipe" I used for the cranberries. I kind of gawked at her for a moment - this is a grown-up lady and she doesn't know how to fix cranberries? and then I was like, "Uh...buh...it's the recipe on the back of the bag." Which it is.)

But I like cooking. I guess part of it is because not everyone bothers to cook from scratch any more. I do it as an artisanal thing, as a "I have mad skillz!" thing. That I have a bit of knowledge that is apparently arcane to some. And I do just enjoy it - I like chopping up vegetables, I like the quiet alchemy of cornstarch thickening gravy, I'm endlessly excited by the fact that leaveners work to raise cakes and breads.

(One of my friends who is a health freak cooks - even though she acts as though it is a Major Burden - because she says she doesn't want her family to fall prey to the fast-food culture. Yeah, whatever. Just don't come being a martyr to me about it, and don't also be all high-horsey and "I'm so much better than those Bad Moms who pick up Arby's on the way home")

I suppose I'd feel differently if I lived in a house full of greedy grabby people who sat down at table, inhaled what I had prepared, burped, and scrammed, without thanking me or offering to do the dishes. I can see how it'd become a burden then. (But I can also see how you could subtly train your family, by, say, feeding them on paper plates until someone twigged to the fact you wanted help). And kids can learn to cook - that's partly where I developed my love of it, my mom "let" me help her in the kitchen, shelling peas and husking corn and measuring stuff for her. I'm sure that at some times my "help" slowed her down more than her working alone, but as I got older and more skillful and was able to take over whole big sections of tasks - like chopping the vegetables for stew - it probably paid off.

I have tons of cookbooks. I like to sit and flip through them, often while I'm eating. I especially like the ones where the author makes small comments at the head of recipes, either about their history or their origin or their particular memories of it. If I had not been in freak-out mode the first week of this month, I would have made Election Cake for the 7th. I love the IDEA of Election Cake. I love the history of it. Someday, dammit, I am going to make Election Cake (which is actually like a fruited yeast bread) for Election Day and bring it into my department and tell people about it - because, again, I live in the South and Election Cake is apparently and old-timey New England thing. But I think people need to know about Election Cake. It's an idea that makes me smile, and in a way, it encapsulates a little bit of how people used to feel about elections - that they were an event, they were something to be celebrated.

The whole sensory experience of cooking is a big part of why I love it - you can see and taste and smell and feel and even HEAR (something sizzling in a pan, the sound boiling water makes when it's just right to put the eggs in). I am, in some respects, a very material person: I enjoy stuff, I enjoy being able to work with stuff, learn its properties, work with those properties to create something. I guess you'd say I'm a hands-on learner.

But I also can appreciate that recipes carry a certain baggage with them - lots of them have a history to them, lots of them are very specific to a particular time and place. Who hasn't had the experience of tasting a cookie that's just like the cookies their grandma made? I make a lot of "southern" dishes even though I am a "Yankee," because I feel like by eating the cuisine, I can absorb a little - and understand a little - of the culture. But I still make my "Yankee" dishes, I still make the old German recipes and the old Scots baked-goods that recipes got passed down for in my family.

There's a satisfaction in cooking - it's a tiny bit of control over a tiny portion of the world. I don't bake bread often (I wish I could force myself to take the time to though), but when I do, there's this sense of mastery, of being able to do something very REAL and very devoted to the process of keeping one's self alive. As opposed to the more intangible and evanescent world of teaching and research, where it would be hard for me to lay my hands on someTHING and be able to say, "I made this."

I once read an essayist who commented that people in academe need some kind of a creative (literally creative; as in making stuff) hobby as a balance for what they do during the day. At the risk of using an already overused (and misused) phrase, for me it "keeps it real." It keeps me grounded in the material world. And it also gives me a series of predictable things - cooking, for me, is more predictable and reliable than the slippery world of human relations, where you deal with so many unknowns, where the response you get may be totally unrelated to your inputs. Somehow, it's comforting to come home at the end of the day and make roesti potatoes or to fry up a steak - food behaves mostly how you expect it to; if you change the inputs, the outputs change. Not so in dealing with people, as I've found to my dismay.

So I was a little saddened to think, after catching part of the CBS Sunday morning show where they talked about how the old-line, hard-line feminists rejected cooking, rejected cookbooks. As I said, I suppose that if you lived with a boorish husband and lumpen children (but isn't that lumpenness partly your fault?) who never praised your cooking, never thanked you, never offered a day off, you could come to feel abused. Or if you lived with a little Napoleon who had to micromanage every calorie or every therm of cooking heat used, you'd come to resent the whole task.

But, barring the unpleasant human relations (and isn't it funny how so many of the things I complain about come down to that?), cooking is a joy. It's nuturing and creative and even if it's "just you" you're cooking for, it can be a pleasant, even sensual, experience. And I guess it makes me sad to see people politicize something so much that they suck the possible joy out of it for themselves. Because there IS a joy, in standing alone in a quiet clean kitchen, late in the evening, carefully and concentratedly stirring a pot of boiling water to make just the right kind of vortex so that the white of the egg you want to poach will wrap properly around the yolk, swaddling it, making a complex mass, while bread toasts (or sits already toasted and buttered in preparation). And there's a joy in knowing that a fresh egg will swirl just right but a slightly aged one can be encouraged to swirl by a shot of white vinegar in the water....and the pleasure of anticipating the perfectly cooked egg, with its firm but yielding white, and its still-liquid (health-alert nannies be darned) yellow yolk.

For me, cooking is taking a moment out of time - it is taking a small chunk of my day to take care of MYSELF - where I am not having to listen to the calls and demands of job or volunteer work. Where I can concentrate on one thing and one thing only, and drink in all the enjoyment of working with stuff - stuff I know well, stuff I have mastery over. Stuff that is pleasant to look at and to smell and to taste.

And I know, there are people who hate cooking, who see it as drudge work. And I have to admit some missionary zeal on my part there - I'd love to drag them into my kitchen and convince them, show them the joy I feel creating food, the little miracle of combining ingredients, and maybe evangelize them into loving cooking, loving good food, like I do.