10.06.08
There Is Nothing That Can Be Cooked That You Cannot Cook
“Well, it’s easy for you to say it’s easy to go vegan,” the e-mail said. “You are obviously very skilled in the kitchen. It isn’t so easy for the rest of us who… can’t cook like you do. Especially not all the exotic stuff you make.”
This e-mail that greeted me this morning wasn’t the first time I’ve had someone respond in this manner to my cookery reports, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But I thought it deserved some comment here, because in most cases, I honestly think that wails of “but I can’t cook like you do! it’s too hard!” are untrue, and unnecessarily limiting to the people who are stuck in the rut of believing that they cannot, for whatever reason, cook.
I draw a sharp distinction between not being able to cook and not wanting to cook, for one thing. It may be that you just don’t really like to cook. I think that’s perfectly fine. There are many things I don’t really like to do, including but not limited to driving in heavy traffic, going to the dentist, and sweeping floors. Just as I have managed to arrange my life so that I rarely am compelled to drive during rush hour, many people manage to arrange their lives so that they are rarely compelled to cook. I think that arranging not to have to do something is an intensely smart solution to the problem of hating to do it.
On the other hand, sometimes I have to be somewhere at such time as makes it necessary that I drive during rush hour. And sometimes people who don’t like to cook need to eat when they can’t afford, or simply don’t have physical access to, other folks’ cooking in whatever form. Sometimes my kitchen floor is a grotty mess and I can’t stand it one more minute and I sweep it whether I want to or not. Sometimes people who don’t like to cook can’t stand eating prepared food one more minute, either, and they end up in the kitchen glaring at their pot, screwing up their courage to attack the problem personally. Life’s like that.
That’s where both skill and guilt enter the picture. Many people who do not like to cook feel a lot of guilt about not liking to cook. They know that eating prepared food gives you less control about what you eat not just in terms of nutrition but also in terms of things like knowing whether or not those eggs were from battery-farmed chickens, or knowing whether or not those salad bar veggies were doused in sulfites to keep them looking fresh. They also know that when you don’t cook your own food, you’re stuck with what you can get instead of necessarily being able to get exactly what you want. And they know that there’s a whole huge social and emotional thing connected to cooking: food is love, food is culture, food is art, and all that. It can feel like, and sometimes be, a big hairy deal to not like cooking. It can feel like, and sometimes be, an even bigger, hairier deal to not know how.
Here’s the thing: there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. Yes, I mean you, the one who doesn’t know how to boil an egg.
Kitchen skill is, yes, skill. I won’t deny that. But skill can be acquired. That’s the whole point of it being a skill. You can learn a skill.
Kitchen talent is a different story. I won’t deny that either. Talent cannot be acquired, and having talent does make it easier and faster to learn skills, and makes it possible to learn them at a higher level than might be feasible for someone without the same talent. But even if you have zilch in the way of talent, you can still learn enough skills in the kitchen to turn out decent and tasty meals if you are so inclined.
It’s a bit like playing the piano. Few of us will ever be a Sviatoslav Richter or an Anthony de Mare or even a Tori Amos. But virtually anyone, if sufficiently motivated to learn the skills, can learn to play scales, bang their way through a Scarlatti sonatina, or thump out “Heart And Soul” or, Heaven help us, the power-chord opening to Van Halen’s “Jump.” And an awful lot of people can learn to play well enough to entertain themselves and their families and friends, or sightread Christmas carols at a party, fill in for their church’s organist when she’s sick, or even be part of a band or an amateur chamber music group.
Skill and talent, taken together, form a continuum. It would be cruel as well as inaccurate of me to suggest that any random passer-by could, given sufficient time and tutelage, become a Julia Child. But that does not by any means detract from the fact that Julia Child herself spent the first thirty or so years of her life as a committed, happy non-cook. She learned, and in the process discovered that she had a rare talent. You may or may not have a rare talent. But learning you can do.
But I digress. You will recall that I said above that there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. I meant it.
Cooking was not handed down from on high by a jealous and capricious Deity who liked to see humans fail. Cooking, by the very fact that it is a practice evolved to help feed people and thus keep them alive, is something that has to be able to be done with success by virtually any member of any society or culture anywhere. Everywhere in the world, people cook, and many of them with the most rudimentary equipment and ingredients and under the most challenging conditions. Cooking does not require the ability to read, count, or precisely measure, for if it did, a huge swath of the globe would have starved to death by now. The same thing would’ve happened if it required precision equipment or exact temperatures. Pretty much all you need to cook is fire, a vessel you can put in the fire that will hold food while it cooks, a stick to stir it with, and a knife to cut things up with.
It is not, as they say, rocket science, and you should trust no one who tries to tell you that cookery is a mystical magical secret science that only the most talented and educated adept can pull off. That’s horseshit. Billions of people would starve if that were true. Yes, sure, cookery can be an art, and in some cases, also a science. But most of the time it’s just cooking, and it’s a set of interrelated skills, and you can learn how to do it too.
Once you have acquired some basic skills, you can figure out where your talents lie, or perhaps more importantly, where your talents do not lie.
Probably 80% of what I cook, and maybe more, comes under the general heading of Peasant Food. I do this because while there are modes of cooking that require split-second timing, refined technique, and consummate artistry, these are honestly not my strengths. I have neither the compulsivity nor the finickiness, to say nothing of any knack whatsoever for a lot of the techniques that veer heavily into the territory of the visual arts.
The beauty of Peasant Food is that it requires none of this. If it is a food that poor people eat (or have historically eaten), regardless of where in the world it comes from, you can pretty much rest assured that it is both a) reasonably easy to make and b) almost invariably forgiving. It may take a long time to cook, as some Peasant Food dishes do–because it was both easy and pleasant to leave a covered pot nestled in the embers of a fire all day while you worked doing other things and come back to find that dinner was hot and ready–but for the most part it doesn’t take all that long to put Peasant Food dishes together.
For a great many years, my cookery relied essentially on two techniques: pan-frying and simmering. This was because that is all you need to know how to do for a positively gargantuan percentage of the world’s Peasant Food cooking. If you can fry and simmer, you can make virtually any soup, stew, or gumbo. You can make pasta sauces and fricasees. You can make a huge swath of dishes in the Indian cuisine vocabulary, another huge swath of Italian ones, a giant wodge of North African and east Asian, and not a small percentage of European foods besides. (”Exotic” just means something unfamiliar in your home culture. It does not, at all, mean “difficult.”) You can make eggs several ways, and pancakes, and even, if you are ambitious, homemade English muffins. You can eat rice and noodles and potatoes and oats and barley and millet and Jell-O Pudding. If you can fry and simmer, you can also saute, braise, poach, and steam. Among other things. Sure, you can branch out if you want to. But you don’t have to. If you can fry and simmer, you can eat like a king, or at least like a very well-fed peasant.
That’s the thing about cooking, from where I sit. You may not have the talent or desire to do the difficult stuff, but almost everyone can learn to do the easy stuff. At least sometimes. And so much of the difficult stuff is not stuff you really have to know how to do very often, or even at all, especially if you stick to Peasant Cooking. So I do encourage people who have even the slightest interest in cooking to try it. It’s a good Life Skill to have, like knowing how to swim.
Truly, the worst possible thing that can happen is that you screw up and something comes out inedible. When this happens, and it will, you will not be alone. Trust me when I say that all of us screw up sometimes, even those of us who have a lot of skills and talent as cooks. (It’s the other reason people order takeout.)
I suppose basically, my answer to the “but I can’t cook like you do!” people is that I haven’t always been able to cook like I do, either. I did not spring from the womb knowing how to make good home fries, or knowing what the difference is between a sauce bearnaise and a sauce hollandaise. (In fact, I’m not sure I know that even now, without looking it up. I am not much for French haute cuisine.) I have screwed up my fair share of dishes. (My first attempt at scrambled eggs was memorably crusty, and my first attempt at baking bread produced something that I could literally have used to wedge under truck tires to keep them from rolling backwards.) Doubtless I will screw up more.
I had to learn how to do this stuff. As it turns out I am also moderately talented at it. But I had to learn.
If you want to, so can you.
And if you don’t want to? That’s okay. I’m not the one judging you. And if you’re nice to me, I might even invite you over for dinner.