Gazing into the Food-sphere
Thoughts I had while cooking
Recently, I had an encounter with a frying pan and a scrumptious homemade dinner. Apart from how quickly I devoured the meal, the whole process stirred varied thoughts in my mind. Cooking, as an act, is skill-driven. It’s an everyday skill based on efficiency, mixed with a privileged need to have a good home-cooked meal on the table. Based on my limited experience, it broadly functions on three thumb rules. The more you cook, the better you get. Your food tastes as good as your taste in food. Always follow the recipe. The rules increase as days pass by, and as you churn out more meals. You reach a point where whiffs from a pan smell just right. And you escape a salty disaster because you limit yourself to adding just a pinch. There’s more to it, however, more to the chemistry, efficiency and practice. And it’s the less practical, more mystifying aspects of cooking that intrigue me.
When a small tweak — chopping one particular ingredient differently — results in a dish with an entirely different historical background, it’s fascinating, to say the least. For starters, fresh independent ingredients result in meals that look wholly different from their initial raw state. Intense heat and the oil glistening in the pan further add to its creation. It’s a simple, logical process. Still, the complexities don’t stop there. When you use those same ingredients in different proportions or alter them in some way, it results in further variations, with each one possessing a unique historical and cultural background. Each dish becomes symbolic of its cultural evolution.
A classic example of this is an egg cooked in different ways, owing to its versatility. Almost every cuisine has its version of cooking an egg, be it Huevo Rancheros or Shakshouka. These are two different recipes. But even the same core recipe — scrambled eggs — when made with slightly different ingredients and spices, imbibes different cultural styles. Adding chorizos and paprika make it Spanish. Adding dates, parsley and Harissa makes it Egyptian. Adding fish sauce and lime juice make it Thai.
If cultural variations aren’t enough, cooking is so personalized that it further diversifies dishes without intending to do so. No matter how rigid the recipe maybe, a dish made by one person will taste at least minutely different from the same made by another. The cause could be the source of ingredients, cooking style, or taste difference, but it unknowingly becomes one-of-a-kind. Even though cooks replicate a universal recipe, it’s their own. Maybe that’s why home-cooked meals with the simplest recipes never taste the same anywhere else in the world. No meal ever tastes like your great grandmother’s recipe, safe-kept and preciously brought down through each generation. Nor does it taste like your neighbour’s desserts, with just the right amount of honey.
It’s no wonder that chefs and cooks create meals in eagerness and anticipation. Awaiting a response is natural, especially for an act where the primary goal is making something out of nothing. Who wouldn’t want to know whether their cooking has done a successful job in embodying something as large as a whole culture or street, or something as intimate as an occasion or a moment? A whole meal can represent one serene experience in a café, recreated through an arduous yet enjoyable few hours of cooking. An entire meal can bring back memories of how your ancestors cooked and ate the same food you’re eating at that moment. It brings out past experiences to the table to create new ones, all through dicing, mixing and cooking flavourful meals that seamlessly blend the personal with the universal.
