Another Way of Cooking

I didn’t learn to cook until I was in my 40s, because I had grown up thinking cooking was an extremely difficult enterprise that only experts could possibly accomplish. Many people have absorbed similar sterile, perfectionist messages about cooking, believing that this skill is primarily about "obedience," as Marcella Hazan reportedly said about making Italian food. Meaning obedience to a recipe, or to a particular way of doing things. This essay is about a different way of thinking about cooking.

Last night I made red lentil dal with dark red quinoa, caramelized eggplant, sumac, kale, and so many onions. I was surprised at how nurturing it was, how good it tasted. I wasn't sure how it would all come out, just that I wanted to make a vegetarian meal with a lot of different elements put together.

I love dal, which always seems nurturing to me. But the complete dish as I planned it had so many different components in different pots that would either taste good together or wouldn't. Not knowing how cooking will turn out is sometimes thrilling for me, in the same way that gamblers and rappelers down mountainsides don’t always know how things will work out, either.

I did lay some groundwork. I cooked the dal. I cooked the quinoa. I cooked the onions with ginger, garlic, turmeric, cumin seeds, and chile among many other spices, then added about half that mixture to the dal, as part of its cooking process. With the rest of the onion mixture, I caramelized the roasted eggplant and sautéed the kale, using sumac, lemon, and a little balsamic, as well as red-hot sesame oil. I added all of these things together and mixed, hoped, adding now some salt for correction, now some olive oil for richness, for luxury.

It was just like writing, in other words.

It felt like I was on the high wire, and I expected to fall flat on my face. It was my first try at this particular jump, and I wasn’t sure if it was a jump anyone else would think was worth making. But one of the reasons I like cooking is it usually isn’t terrible if things don’t come out perfectly. If it tastes really bad or has a fugly texture or squeaks in a disgusting way, we can throw it out and have a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Somehow this fact, that screwing up is not so bad, that in any case we need dinner, and that most things taste pretty good when you’re hungry, keeps me happily reaching for the Aleppo pepper, the vinegar, the coriander, the ginger that is so wonderfully sweet and hot I sometimes add way too much of it to things. And why not? To me it often tastes like pineapple.

(I am a maximalist, it is perhaps unnecessary to say.)

It’s fun to play with material things like bits of garlic and squishy cooked lentils, especially if you’re a person like me whose regular work is at a desk. Especially if you’re a writer, say, who spends all day playing with words which, while beautiful as all get-out, can never be touched with the hands or put in the mouth.

Putting tiny tureens of water into a pot along with teeny red grains of lentil, working fire upon them until they become delightful, is a little bit like fingerpainting, which I remember with great fondness. I remember a lot of things from kindergarten with great fondness. Making a red stroke with the index finger HERE and then a yellow stroke with the pinky THERE, coming in with red, purple, royal blue and golden yellow swirls, is better than almost anything done with greater seriousness or with higher stakes.

Cooking is also a little bit like building teeny structures out of blocks and putting little play-people in them. Only in this case, I guess, my family and I are the play-people, all grown up and able to be sustained by the little dishes I produce. When I was a child, the adults around me subtly discouraged me from trying anything I wasn't good at already. I’m really glad that now, as an adult, nobody can stop me from trying my hand at new recipes, whether I know what I'm doing or not.

I’m aware that for a large subset of humanity, it matters a lot if a meal tastes so bad that you have to throw it away. Not everyone can afford to throw away the thing they cooked, even if it seems gross. Thankfully, cooking rarely comes out so bad, and many of humanity’s most brilliant cooking interventions — fermenting, boiling, cutting things with acids like lemon, vinegar, and soured dairy – have been invented to avoid just that. If all else fails, salt, hot spices, and the endlessness of human ingenuity might do the trick (although, of course, they cannot make toxic food safe). Preventing the miseries of hunger, of course, requires a different kind of hot and salty intervention.