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Nov. 15th, 2007 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI just had a really interesting, and entirely unexpected, conversation with my team lead.
He had last week off of work to attend a French cuisine class. He's really into the theory and and practice of cooking and, since coming back, has been talking to all of us here about all the fabulous dishes he and his classmates made and all the great kitchen technology he used, like the oven that injects steam into itself to keep bread from drying.
He was talking today about the new way he's learned to make pie crusts (combine the butter and flour and what all, chop it into pea-sized bits, then smear it across the counter and scrape it together two or three times to break up the gluten) and how to check the doneness of meat by finger-touch, and I expressed amazement at all of the elegantly simple techniques there are to food preparation that I would never have thought of. Cooking, I told him, is something that, while it looks fascinating, I don't think I can get into. It just doesn't seem to fit my brain. Expressing his surprise, he explained what cooking is to him.
Cooking, he said, is story-telling. It's an expression of history. It's a reverence to those who you've learned it from. As an example, he talked about going away to college. When he left home, he asked his mother to give him the recipes for some of his favorite foods. But not just the recipes; he asked that she write down the steps she took in preparation. For instance, the house he lived in, growing up in the small town of Savannah, Illinois, was usually cold. So the first thing that his mother would do as she prepared the angel food cake that he loved, was to put the cake pan on the stove and bring it up to room temperature so it didn't cool the dough too much and make it stick. In these written recipes, there was so much more than the preparation and cooking of food; there's the story of its circumstances. Echoes of the uniqueness of the environment and person living there that, recorded there amongst the measurements and temperatures and antiquated words like 'sorghum' (that he actually had to call home for an explanation of!), are now forever remembered.
He likened it to his father calling his refrigerator an icebox, and the thermostat controlling the furnace a stoker. Though he poked fun at the phrasing when he was a boy, now that he's grown up, he uses the terms himself once in a while these days, out of respect. To keep the memory.
Perhaps then, it's not so strange for someone, as they begin their preparations for a cake, or a pie, to take out the pan and, in a perfectly warm kitchen, let it sit out on the stove for a little while, just to make sure it gets up to room temperature before the dough goes in.
He had last week off of work to attend a French cuisine class. He's really into the theory and and practice of cooking and, since coming back, has been talking to all of us here about all the fabulous dishes he and his classmates made and all the great kitchen technology he used, like the oven that injects steam into itself to keep bread from drying.
He was talking today about the new way he's learned to make pie crusts (combine the butter and flour and what all, chop it into pea-sized bits, then smear it across the counter and scrape it together two or three times to break up the gluten) and how to check the doneness of meat by finger-touch, and I expressed amazement at all of the elegantly simple techniques there are to food preparation that I would never have thought of. Cooking, I told him, is something that, while it looks fascinating, I don't think I can get into. It just doesn't seem to fit my brain. Expressing his surprise, he explained what cooking is to him.
Cooking, he said, is story-telling. It's an expression of history. It's a reverence to those who you've learned it from. As an example, he talked about going away to college. When he left home, he asked his mother to give him the recipes for some of his favorite foods. But not just the recipes; he asked that she write down the steps she took in preparation. For instance, the house he lived in, growing up in the small town of Savannah, Illinois, was usually cold. So the first thing that his mother would do as she prepared the angel food cake that he loved, was to put the cake pan on the stove and bring it up to room temperature so it didn't cool the dough too much and make it stick. In these written recipes, there was so much more than the preparation and cooking of food; there's the story of its circumstances. Echoes of the uniqueness of the environment and person living there that, recorded there amongst the measurements and temperatures and antiquated words like 'sorghum' (that he actually had to call home for an explanation of!), are now forever remembered.
He likened it to his father calling his refrigerator an icebox, and the thermostat controlling the furnace a stoker. Though he poked fun at the phrasing when he was a boy, now that he's grown up, he uses the terms himself once in a while these days, out of respect. To keep the memory.
Perhaps then, it's not so strange for someone, as they begin their preparations for a cake, or a pie, to take out the pan and, in a perfectly warm kitchen, let it sit out on the stove for a little while, just to make sure it gets up to room temperature before the dough goes in.
