The Histrionic Feast
Issue 207
The trick to cooking pasta that’s balanced and flavorful and rightly called al dente is to have someone else do it. Having a warm dish of pasta cooked for you does, curiously, come with a distinctive taste, even when you know the ingredients and watch the preparation. On your fork, it might appear no different—cooked to the proper consistency, coated with a rich, steamy sauce—but the taste in your mouth is always distinct when the meal is presented to you.
And if you do happen to linger around the kitchen and watch the preparation of the meal, you’ll probably argue about the recipe. You’ll prod or nudge or even badger the cook, asking to alter a step, or to recheck an ingredient. To turn down the boiling water. To add a bit more salt. To stir the sauce. Even if you don’t argue, if you avoid direct, strident words, you’ll probably make a few suggestions, your voice calm and casual and cautious. Perhaps turn down the fire? Does it need a bit more salt? Is it time to stir the sauce? Even if you do somehow sidestep arguments, and also repress the compulsion to offer suggestions, you’ll still judge the entire process inside your mind, silently assigning each step its necessary changes—your mouth closed, your smile as warm as the simmering meal, your thoughts overrun by demands to turn the water down, add a fistful of salt, and stir the sauce.
Although you probably won’t actually resist that impulse to speak when the subject is your next meal. The proper preparation of food is, in fact, humanity’s oldest argument, it is our oldest form of conversation, it is our oldest form of chitchat, it is where you find the battle lines for our very first debates, with contemporary advancements in gastronomy not too far removed from our earliest grunts around the fire. To disagree about an ingredient, a recipe, or a technique, in the kitchen, is to commune with centuries of salivating, finicky diners. Bickering about food is fundamentally human—you’ll feel the urge as soon as you leave the womb, and you’ll grip it tight until you reach the tomb—although that truth won’t necessarily ingratiate you with the chef.
And if the food on your plate requires a bit of preparation, then you’re almost certainly ingesting an ancient innovation, one that’s already been disputed and challenged and scrutinized in countless kitchens, regardless of whether the meal comes with modern flourishes. Nearly every dish that you can name results from centuries of cantankerous testing, the consequence of your most distant ancestors dealing with sparse ingredients, bland flavors, and food poisoning, in a deadly game of trial and error that’s produced our most classic dishes. Cuisine is living culture, forever adaptable and never stagnant, always responsive to soil and ingredients and climate and social constraints, so that every traditional dish that you savor was once a peculiar and mostly unwanted innovation. You’ve just happened to show up after all the risky research and development work has been perfected, though it is worth remembering that every dish that you relish is also a dish that has killed.
Thankfully, most of the troublesome work on cleanliness and seasonality and ripeness and refrigeration and toxicity has been figured out. Yet those timeworn lessons are still imprinted on some of the regional differences in contemporary food preparation, such as the general principle that meals get hotter as you nudge closer to the equator, both in temperature and in flavor, because our earliest cooks eventually noticed that hot meals in the heat somehow resulted in fewer dead diners. Eating beef tartar is perfectly fine in the snow, but you’ll probably want to pass your plate over a high flame when you’re in the desert. Those same cooks also noticed that spicy foods and hot drinks were an elixir that cooled our bodies in the heat. Although it is a peculiar development in our century that ice is added to hot drinks—in a slight contradiction, incidentally, to thousands of years of wisdom and every biology textbook—it confirms that geography is no longer decisive with food in the contemporary world: you can eat a delicious fish quite far from a port, just as you can slurp cold soup in the jungle. All the rules of cooking and culture, all the restraints of geography, have dropped away, leaving nothing more than personal preference as the question. And if you happen to have access to a salt shaker, you probably have the ability to eat much better than nearly every royal family from just a short time ago. Whenever you stroll through the grocery store and find yourself unsure about what’s most tasty, when you’re feeling a little indecisive, just picture one of your ancestors from a past century, who is surely deficient in vitamins and minerals, who is surely both exhausted and hungry, giving you a slap.
If you do want to eat sushi in the desert and drink fresh mint tea in the Arctic, however, I wouldn't quite say that nobody will mind. Nothing, it seems, brings out the slobbering, vociferous shouts in contemporary life more than disagreements about diets, about what’s wholesome for our bodies and most aligned with the environment. As our oldest argument, it remains just like all family arguments—interminable, without resolution, a bit cruel, and endlessly repetitive. To swiftly bring animosity to a group—if you’re feeling inclined—just mention your food preferences. Whatever happens to tantalize your tongue, somebody in the group will claim that it is harmful and problematic and in fact deadly, although they'll be interrupted by someone who will claim that it is a panacea and portal to longevity. Once you mention food, there's no need to listen to the shouts, or to add your own thoughts. Not only can you predict every word in every argument about diets, but nobody will listen to your claims anyway—which makes not speaking indistinguishable from speaking.
I would suggest that we’re so particular about food and so passionate about food choices because that’s been an advantageous trait in our evolution. Decisions about food preparation both kept people alive and resulted in death, and that’s certainly imprinted on our nerves today. Those who hollered the loudest about food preparation had a survival advantage over those who didn’t mind the gumminess of raw meat. Caring for a child, too, puts decisions about food at the forefront, which likely prompted a cascade of effects that we all confront today. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that the impulse to ensure that a child eats a nutritious, safe, and balanced diet is adjacent to the impulse to badger adults about what’s proper and what’s improper for the plate.
Of course there’s not any agreement on what’s truly proper, beyond the cultural universal that you shouldn’t eat meat that’s been in the sun for a few months, or that fresh ingredients and ripe vegetables are the ideal. Once you dig below those surface lessons about cleanliness, you’ll spot a hodgepodge of standards, with French cooks pestering Italian cooks about insufficient butter, or Thai and Vietnamese cooks using similar ingredients but different methods. But it shouldn’t be thought of as incidental that Russian and Chinese and Moroccan and Brazilian dishes are composed with both precise and distinct steps. The food in Europe, for instance, is particular to Europe not just because of technique, as countless people have discovered when they’ve tried to recreate a traditional dish in a new location, abruptly learning that cuisine requires more than fresh ingredients: the soil and water and climate influence your meal in a way that you can’t adjust unless you plan on excavating nearby mountains and waiting for the right barometric pressure to heat up some soup. At least with wine there’s a loose understanding that the climate is a finicky part of fermentation, in that the slightest shift in altitude or temperature will impact the vine, so that every barrel, and every bottle, has its own character. The human lesson is that the evolutionary process that created all these diverse cuisines wasn’t a result of mere choice—constraints, experimentation, and economics, triggered most decisions in those long-ago kitchens, and shaped the dishes that we deem optimum today. And there’s something artful about this timeline. About the notion of a gradual, methodical staircase from raw ingredients thousands of generations ago to the precise recipe of your next meal.
Even the notion of a recipe, however, is a bit misleading, as it assumes that the heating of chemical elements—in more prosaic terms, the preparation of food—can come with laws rather than guidelines. A recipe takes generations of steps, haphazard, accidental, minuscule, and makes them look purposeful. At best, a recipe gives you some guardrails, a loose understanding of the basic idea, but no single dish is ever prepared twice. To make the same dish in the winter and the summer is to experience two different tastes; how the water boils, the freshness of your ingredients, the humidity in the air, an endless list of details that provides nuance to your tastebuds that only distracted eaters overlook.
Food is too alive, too entropic, too vibrant, for such simple math. To cook is to manipulate life: it is chemistry, as judged by the biology of your tongue. Which is why the best dishes always taste a tad different, with the state of the food and the state of your mind both pertinent to the process. You can even argue that every recipe is incorrect, because recipes capture a moment in time, a single circumstance of preparation that’s already passed, with the ripeness of your food and the details of your climate and the sensitivity of your palate too complicated for repetition. So you must use recipes as guidelines, tasting your soup as you go, checking whether the meat is done, adding a bit of your own flavor to the traditions that you’ve learned, creating each meal anew, while arguing with those around you—endlessly, smartly, meaningfully—about the precise steps.
‘Entropic” captures my attempts in the kitchen. I once took a knife skills class at Sur La Table, but alas, knife skills didn’t help my timing, food prep, and a dozen other skills necessary to craft amazing meals. My wife has the gift in the kitchen, but more often now, we simply venture to our favorite establishments and let the pros do their magic.
Loved very bit (and bite) of this!