The crafting of a meal

When we talk about food, we often talk about taste, but that is overlooking so many of the other senses and sensations that make up food, flavor, and overall, gastronomic experience.

I was asked recently to help out a fellow gastronomy student by responding to a survey about how we use our senses to learn to cook. Taste’s role, again, seems simple to identify in the cooking/learning process, especially since I’ve spent the better part of the week griping about how much cream sauce I’ve ingested in the name of taste, or taste-testing, to be precise, to check for perfect seasoning. Smell too comes quickly to mind, as does sight when plating is every bit as important tableside as the first bite. And then there is touch when pushing into the center of a medallion of meat to tell if it’s finished cooking—still spongy when rare, springy at medium, and nearly firm to the touch when well done. There is the texture of al dente pasta, the creaminess of the stone-ground grits on the tongue, and the sinewy chew of a stewing meat that’s not quite fully stewed. Sound too is important—the meat’s dulling sizzle that signals it’s ready for flipping in the pan, or the steadying whir of the blender suggesting the emulsion is nearly complete. Even Jacques Pépin famously discusses the singing chicken that hums and whistles from the oven, calling out to the chef in a sputtering song to say that the bird is browned and ready.

Touch is actually a new food sense to me. Because I struggled for so long with severe skin allergies, touching food, I mean really touching it, was often problematic. Yeast, acid, salt, oil, all brought out hives on my hands. My mother kindly stretched the pizza dough for me to fit the rounded pans for Sunday night dinners; my father diligently dismembered the lobster for me tableside. We were the sort of family who ate dinner together every night; who sat down across from one another at the end of the day, for better or for worse, looked each other in the eye, and ate, collectively. I have no siblings. For other individuals of similar households, I don’t think I need to explain that this particular parent to child ratio has its pros and cons, with a whole lot of parental focus and attention settling in around this proverbial dinner table. Still, I tried to feel perpetually grateful that I had not one parent, but two, staring at me, and only me, intently, searching for signs of teenage rebellion and always willing to squeeze a wedge of lemon over the swordfish steak set in front of me.

Satiety and hunger are, in a way, also servants to our senses, though perhaps more easily manipulated by our brains than our tactile motions. We can question an intangible hunger more readily than the texture of an overcooked steak. The emerging field of neurogastronomy suggests a dichotomy of hunger—from the gut and from the brain. Which one should we trust? Which one do our senses influence more readily? Jon Reiner’s memoir about living with Chrohn’s Disease questions this formation of hunger without sensory stimulation or reward. Forced to forgo food in lieu of mechanically pumped, flavorless, nutrients, he becomes detached from the senses we so closely associate with eating, but his hunger doesn't diminish, even when going unfulfilled for so long. Reiner’s taste receptors dull from lack of use but his desire for taste never abates. Except it isn't a real hunger, or at least not one emanating from the gut because his stomach has been technically, medically, shutdown. This hunger is something bigger, beginning in the brain and pulsing through his body in the form of pure, gustatory craving. In a radio interview, Reiner describes the moment when his wife walked in on him in the kitchen, his arms mashed elbow deep into the center of a chocolate bundt cake. He describes his feelings of guilt as synonymous to having been caught in the act of some other, more embarrassing, act of self-indulgence. Reiner was merely feeling the cake, looking for a connection to the food as close as the relationship we form with what we ingest. How do you experience food in a fully meaningful way if you aren’t allowed to taste it?

As much as all of our senses go into our cooking, and eating, there is another sense, a larger, more general one that develops too—a sort of sense of rhythm that drives the heat and determines what kind of cook you are, and how the dish will come out in the end. In a way, it’s strange to be going to culinary school now when I’ve cooked for so long. I chose to go because I was craving something more technical, and a way to demonstrate these skills on my resume (heart and soul and spunk are rarely as convincing on paper as an accredited degree). Still, the recipe for risotto we make in class seems sometimes pedantic compared to the one that I make at home. It’s not because I think my flavors are superior, or that I know better than the instructing chef, but in class I am at the mercy of my classmates, and measurements, and there is a certain distance between me and the meal. I only ever make risotto at home when it’s been a particularly bad day—when I want to stand at the stove forever, and just stir, and slowly mull things over, and likely drink half the cooking wine before it makes its way into the pot. I don’t time my risotto; it tells me when it’s ready, or rather, when I’m ready to forgive and forget and sit down with a more welcoming attitude over a welcomed bowl of the rice. I develop a rhythm to my stirring, and for each addition of stock, and wine, and cheese, until I know, I just know, that it’s done. In class, that rhythm is removed. Instead, I must rely on my other senses—taste, smell, touch—and they seem, somehow, less sure than that gut feeling that simply whispers that I'm hungry and the risotto is ready.

My mother believes that my love of food grew from my time working in a French bakery in Saratoga Springs, New York; that my time behind the boulangerie counter was when my senses first awoke, fully, to the pleasures of food. I’ll admit the constant smells of fresh pastry dough, bits of cookies, and grilled sandwiches (croque monsieurs, oozing with hot bechamel) were enough to forgive the 5am starts to my morning shifts, the lack of heat in the building that forced me to warm my hands over the soup tureens, and the fact that my paycheck rarely cashed. But she’s wrong. I learned to love food long before the bakery job, and even before settling into my first apartment when I swore off college dining hall food forever in lieu of dinners derived from mounds of produce from the farmers market, and a cold beer, and maybe some local cheese too. I didn’t learn on the job, or from a book, but rather  I learned to cook, and to love to cook, from her, my mother, who never realized she’d taught me how because I actually learned to cook several yards outside of the kitchen, in my mother’s ceramics studio, where I spent most of my childhood life.

The moments of continuity between clay and food are remarkable; it’s only the smell that differs so substantially. I learned my rolling pin technique not by laying out piecrusts, but by rolling out slabs for my mother that had to be the perfect, even thicknesses so all the ornaments stamped from the slab would be a consistent size. My mother’s method for making ropes to wind into pots is the same technique I use now to coil out the gnocchi dough before dividing it up into little pillows of potato pasta and boiling them in salted water. I learned to knead dough by watching my mother wedge clay to prepare it for the potter's wheel. Clay, a more solid mass than airy bread dough, folds onto itself leaving a solid history—creases of earth trace each pass of her hands. And I assume the rhythm of the potter’s wheel has imprinted my head and heart with a hum that now drives my own kitchen rhythm; the speed at which I stir the pot, and make my meals.

Taste is something that develops slowly, absorbed through the environment and each new thing that we eat, but my technique for cooking, and my desire to create a meal, came, originally, from a mound of clay, and the women who turned it into a dinner plate.