Not a Good Cook, but a Constant One
Good morning.
A few Sundays ago, I woke up after a night of drinking feeling shameful and cold. It’s the feeling that comes after a night of drinking where yes, you can remember everything you said and did, but you have this sense of unease that permeates everything. Yes, I remember what I said and did, but what if it made someone upset in a way I didn’t notice? What if everyone is talking about how terrible I was? What if I made some sort of mistake?
I’ve only recently discovered that lots of people feel this way; someone who knows about stuff like this went so far as to say it’s a neurotransmitter deficiency that kicks in the day after, and I’ve chosen to believe them and not look it up. But let’s return to the scene. I wake up, shameful and cold. My cat is pawing at me to feed him, so I get up to do it, and I decide that the only thing that is going to make me feel better is making chicken Vesuvio, a recipe I’ve had in the back of my mind for a week or so. I pad downstairs to the kitchen, pull up the recipe on my laptop and queue up a Last Podcast on the Left series I think I’ve listened to at least three times. I pull out the chicken thighs to season, I brown them in my dutch oven. I slice the potatoes, I roast them in the oven. I cook garlic in butter, add chicken stock and white wine and peas and the chicken thighs. I combine everything, I broil it in the oven, and as everything begins to come together and the smell fills the house, as I pull the dish out of the oven, wait for it to cool and take the first bite, everything begins to feel just a little bit better. The shame dissipates, and it becomes something I can control.
I think there’s this misconception, among both people that know me well and people that don’t really know me at all, that I am a “good cook”. I am not a good cook. I have horrible knife skills. I am constantly making substitutions because I never have the correct ingredients when attempting an overly ambitious recipe. I’ve tried to employ mise en place, but I always end up with too many mismatched bowls and not enough counter space. Every time I try to make toast not in a toaster it either ends up soggy or burnt. I did poach an egg once, but I think that may have just been dumb luck.
I am not a good cook. I am merely a constant cook, a person who decided at one point or another that she has to cook in order to remain sane. It began when my friend Sarah (who I would describe as an excellent cook) lived with me for a summer and taught me the basics of how to crack an egg, that you always need more salt than you think you do, how to not be afraid when you’re cooking meat. Perhaps when I’m cooking, I’m returning to that summer with her, the simple joy of it, of that first real summer of growing up. Who knows really.
I think, for me, cooking is the closest thing I have to a practice of meditation. The whole of it soothes me, even the early stages of making a dish that you might not consider “cooking” – the sifting through recipes to suit whatever mood I’m in, reading it, the writing of the grocery list, the strolling through the aisles talking to myself. And then what follows: the chopping, the mincing, the measuring and the browning and the deglazing. For me, cooking has just the right blend of repetitive motion and critical thinking that allows me to forget everything else and come back to myself. It’s not like my mind doesn’t wander, like I don’t think of other things. But I find that when I’m cooking, my mind stays away from repetitive cycles of self-loathing, for the most part. My mind stays away from the things that scare me, and I can focus on the task at hand and want to do it well, and be proud when I do. I suppose I think of it the same way some people think of exercise: “Today may suck, but things will get better if I can just cook.”
Maybe it’s a control thing. I am having trouble controlling my thoughts and feelings, so I move to the kitchen, where I can control the knife and the heat and the ingredients in my hands. But then again, I would never say I feel fully “in control” in the kitchen. I’m not a good enough cook to feel that way. When I’m in the kitchen, I feel more like I’m exploring. I wander away from my brain, into the rhythm of a dish, whether it’s something I can make from memory or something so new I can barely look away from the recipe. And in this wandering, I pull myself out of the recesses of my brain and back into my body, back into myself.
Sometimes this leads me down a path of absurdity, with four dishes in my fridge at one time and leftovers for ages that I won’t touch because I have to cook something new right now, but most of the time I can reign myself in. When I cook, I find that I am allowed to swing widely from practical to extravagant, because who will know but me? Whose whims am I at the mercy of, besides my own? How joyful is that?
On this Sunday, I FaceTimed a friend as the day came to a close. “How were you able to do that?” she asked, “to make something like that when you woke up feeling so awful?” I laughed, clarified that my limit is nausea, which I didn’t have (I’m not a superhero, mind you), and I answered. “It’s the only thing that makes me feel better, really.”