Connection, Not Perfection
On cooking with our two hands, and where it may lead
You probably have all the recipes you need for the most cooking-est day of the year. If not, holler and I’m happy to help, even at this eleventh hour. You can also check out the chat transcript from last week. May we all have a place at the table every day, not just on Thursday.
Connection, not perfection. That’s what Mel said before we sat for meditation.
She was talking about Thanksgiving and all the prep and running around and the performance anxiety of putting on a big feast. Even this seasoned cook still gets worked up, my to-do list glowering, my arm pits like a stovetop burner set on medium-high. I’m fretting about presenting my pie crust to my friend who has written not one, but two books on pie. Will it be up to snuff, I wonder. And then I remember what Mel said.
It just doesn’t matter.
The food is the reason, or is it?
Over the past few years, I have been digging deep into a memoir project. I have been exploring why cooking is my oxygen. There are lots of reasons, which I hope to share in coming weeks and months, but I’ll share one for consideration.
Cooking is my way in. My entry into a new place, like when we landed on the moon, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania four years ago. A cross-cultural path, a spiritual path. A conversation starter when words do not yet exist, like when six-month-old Ethan got his first taste of my lentils. Or when Loren learned to shape masa into sopes and put them on the griddle. An icebreaker for the glacier that is my mother. A language and a lens.
I’m reminded of this bit from the intro to my 2012 cookbook “Meat Lover’s Meatless Celebrations.”
Cooking is an opportunity to step away from the worries of the day and focus on the creation of something that stimulates all five physical senses. The snap of a bean, the hiss of a hot skillet, the perfume of a pie, the crunch of a carrot. In the 2007 documentary How to Cook Your Life, Zen priest and cookbook author Edward Espe Brown says, “With cooking, your hands get to be hands. They get to actually do something [rather] than sitting around entertaining yourself with your iPod and your Internet. Our hands don’t get to do much anymore.”
So let your hands be hands. Heart on sleeve. Tomorrow and for as long as you have each other.
Cooking is a way in.
It's funny, but there's cooking and then there's entertaining. At Fine Cooking, we discovered that a lot of our readers loved the art and technique of cooking - for themselves - like any craft, like woodworking, etc. But entertaining? Not so much. There's a whole group of people who adore entertaining, but there's also this group that would be perfectly happy to make the food and have someone else deal with the entertaining part (if at all!). I always think of that at Thanksgiving time. Thank you for this lovely piece - the hands-on aspect is my favorite. But I love how you talk about cooking being your passport to new places as well.