(Continued from part 1)

Serious Cooking

The minute you open one of the more serious technique books (like Pepin or Escoffier), you'll be stunned to find that some of these books tend to assume that you're either training to be a professional chef or you're independently wealthy and can devote all the time in the world to cooking. Glazing creme brulee with a blow torch? Carving flowers out of potatoes? Spending ten hours making demi-glaze out of beef and veal bones? Clarifying butter? Making mayonnaise? It's at this point that you probably head out to the book store for another cookbook — this time, "20 Minute Meals" or some such — because honestly, this is all over your head and you're not planning to cook a state dinner for fifty any time soon. In fact, you may conclude that any dish involving these techniques is probably too complex for anything but a serious dinner party.

Some day, you may throw such a party. But for now, you want to think about making some of these highly labor intensive things not for eating but for learning. No one — including the cookbook writers — has time to put together a serious five-course meal for the family after work (and before someone's piano lesson) on Tuesday night. But if you are serious about cooking, you may want to think about devoting a Saturday afternoon to making a souffle or some canapes for whoever happens to be around (everyone will love it if it works, and there's no shame in ordering a pizza if it doesn't). Go ahead and follow Pepin's instructions for carving frogs out of cucumber halves (you won't believe what that will do for your knife handling skills). Spend a couple of hours making hollandaise (a grand exercise in sauce making). Buy a couple of trout fish whole, fillet them yourself, and turn them into quenelles. You still want to heed the advice about focusing on techniques, but the recipes in the technique books tend to pair the recipes with the individual techniques. It's a very good idea.

What you will find is that the principles behind these grand projects will start filtering into the twenty-minute meals (which are much easier to make, now that you know how to chop, fry, roast, etc.). Having properly trussed a chicken, and having discovering the difference it makes, may inspire you to do it all the time. With some practice, you'll be doing it in fifteen seconds flat on a Friday night. Once you've learned how to make a true pan sauce, you may find that it's just too easy (and too good) to pass up for those pork chops you picked up on the way home from work. And so it goes.

Know Your Material

Most people's taste in food is conditioned by what they ate growing up, and in many cases, that experience leads to an appalling provincialism. Many people can walk around an ordinary grocery store and find vegetables or cuts of meat that they've never heard of, and since they've never heard of them, they conclude that they are somehow inedible (odd that they're in a grocery store!), require some kind of unusual preparation, or are only eaten by the poor.

This, of course, is nonsense. Sometimes you're seeing the staples of another cuisine that someone else is being brought up on. Sometimes you're seeing things that your mother just didn't know about. Sometimes you're seeing outright delicacies that some local group of gourmands insists upon. Whatever the reason, it pays to go find out what it is and how to cook it. A good food encyclopedia is, for this reason, a good thing to have in your cookbook collection.

Have you ever seen that chart showing the different cuts of meat? Take a good look some time. It's also good to know all about the different types of chili peppers, all the different types of mushrooms, all the varieties of fish and foul, and on and on and on. That might sound like work, but in a way, knowledge of these matters flows naturally from technique. There's a reason you don't make pot roast from fillet mignon, and that reason really has to do with both the nature of the material and the nature of the technique. You will find yourself knowing (and caring) about such differences in part because you understand the virtues and limitations of the various methods.

[As an aside, I'd like to mention just one particular example of this that I see all the time. Before I figured out how to cook, I would thoughtlessly buy the best cut of meat I could find, no matter what I was making. So, for example, I would (like most people) buy 90/10 sirloin to grill burgers. Because after all, it's better. It's more expensive, so it must be better. But when I read up on the matter, I discovered that this was quite wrong. 80/20 chuck is what you want for grilled burgers, because you actually want the fat. And we won't even mention the amazing habit people have of squeezing the juice out of hamburgers with a spatula while they're cooking (or flipping them endlessly). I thankfully never developed that habit, but much of what I was doing was dead wrong, and it was producing substandard hamburgers. But then, I thought, "Surely there isn't 'technique' involved with grilling burgers?" There is. Quite a bit, in fact, since it's not really that far from cooking steaks, and everyone has ideas about the proper way to do that. Most of which, by the way, are also wrong.]

Eating out is also a good time to be adventurous. Certainly, if you're in the presence of a great chef, order up some classic that you have tried to make (or would like to make). Otherwise, go for something unusual. Most people say they love to eat, but in general, people are very parochial when it comes to food and stick to a narrow group of known entities. A cook goes for the octopus. Ask a great cook if they've ever tried bison, or ostrich eggs, or alligator, and they'll either yes or "I'm dying to try it."

Today, I offer some meditations on cooking. It's an essay I wrote a few months ago to amuse myself and organize my thoughts, which I re-discovered a few moments ago on my hard drive. I'm undoubtedly not qualified to offer opinions on this matter, but really, what's the point of having a blog if you can't hold forth from time to time . . .

When my wife became became pregnant with our first child, I had all the usual anxieties. I worried about money, about being a good father, and about passing on all my personality quirks to another member of the human race. But I also worried about being useful. It's hard to stand by while your wife is going through all the difficulties of a pregnancy and do nothing. I wanted to contribute something to the overall project that wasn't just my unwavering love and support. Given that we were both in graduate school at the time and on a fairly tight budget, the solution seemed obvious. I was going to become the cook.

My wife and I weren't bad eaters, and neither of us were completely incompetent in the kitchen, but we opted for take out with a fair amount of regularity, and when we did cook, it tended to be graduate school fare: cheap and uncomplicated. I wouldn't have described myself as a cook, at any rate. I was just someone who had a basic understanding of how to keep from starving while getting a Ph.D.

The decision to have children suddenly made me view that as woefully inadequate. My own mother had spent a lot of time in the kitchen while raising three children, which meant roasted meats, carefully prepared vegetables, soups and sauces, and homemade bread. Even I understood that little kids — and pregnant mothers — couldn't thrive on pizza and Ramen noodles. So, by learning to cook, I would be taking over a critical household duty and also providing my young family with good food.

It's been about seven years since I made that decision, and while I have much to learn, no one would be able to deny me the title. I'm a cook. And most nights, I'm a pretty good one. What follows is my brief list of things I wish someone had told me when I started out.

Learn the craft

Everyone loves to describe cooking as an art (e.g. Mastering the Art of French Cooking), but that term is misleading, because it implies that cooking is some sort of mysterious, possibly innate talent that some people have and others don't. I wouldn't want to deny that there's such a thing as talent in cooking, but cooking is mostly a matter of craft, and that's an important distinction.

Cooking — like woodworking, bookbinding, sewing, metalworking, and glass blowing — are all difficult crafts to master, but the pattern of mastery is very different from that of oil painting, sculpture, or architectural design. The "practical arts" require mastery of a broad set of individual techniques. It is instructive to recall that every one of these trades developed the notion of apprenticeship, and every master can recall the frustrations of starting out. "I came to study woodworking, and that guy had me sharpening chisels for a year!" "The master tailor wouldn't even let me take in a hem when I started!" And in cooking, "I spent ages chopping carrots before I was allowed to approach the stove." It might sound like hazing, but you'll rarely hear someone say that they regret the experience, and in fact, most of them are sure to subject their underlings to the same treatment.

There is great wisdom in all of this for one learning to cook. We identify a great cook as someone who "makes their own crust" or "can make a souffle" or "made duck l'orange for that dinner party," and we assume that the trick to becoming a great cook is learning to make these things. So, we head out to the bookstore to buy yet another cookbook.

But if you've had a great meal at the hand of a great cook (and it doesn't matter whether it was in a restaurant or in someone's home), what you're witnessing is the end result of someone who has painstakingly learned — through many hours of study and practice — the basic techniques of cooking. He or she might "know how to make bechamel sauce," but what they really know how to do is build any sauce, and that's because they've practiced making sauces with their attention focused where it belongs: on the techniques. If you've ever had the experience of following a recipe exactly only to have it fail, you've come in to contact with this principle. You did what it said, but you don't actually understand what happens when you add flour to butter, or whisk some cream, or reduce a liquid, or heat meat.

So the first thing one has to do when learning to cook is stop thinking in terms of particular dishes, and start thinking in terms of particular techniques. This doesn't mean that one stops using recipes, but it does mean that your choice of recipes should be viewed as an opportunity to study a particular technique. The goal is to learn to roast, deglaze, fry, reduce, saute, slice, boil, braise, steam, julienne, debone, carve, season, fold, whip, cut, and chop. A complicated recipe that involves half a dozen of these techniques (and there are dozens more) is not a good beginner recipe, but that doesn't mean that you are confined only to simple things. A very fancy dish that mainly involves frying might be just the thing, and some simple things are transcendental when cooked properly.

Realize that there is no matter too small in this world of technique. Next time you're watching some TV chef (only a few of whom teach technique), notice the way they chop and cut vegetables. They do it swiftly, accurately, adroitly, and without thinking. This is because someone spent an unbelievable amount of time explaining how to hold a knife, how to angle it for different jobs, how to guide the blade, how to avoid injuring oneself, and the proper technique for dealing with dozens and dozens of meats and vegetables. And then they practiced that over and over every day for years.

"Yes," you say, "but I'm not apprenticing as a professional chef! I'm just trying to put food on the table! I don't have time!" But if you cook every day (and surely you're going to, if the goal is to learn to cook) you will have daily opportunities to practice. The trick is to know what it is that you're practicing and why. You might be tempted to say, "I don't know how to make French Onion Soup, but I know how to chop onions and put things in a pot." But if you're a beginner, you don't know how to do either; or rather, you don't know how to do the former because (contrary to what you may think) you don't know how to do the latter. And the latter — the chopping, the roux making, the simmering — is the important part.

So, before you pick up that cookbook that focuses on the cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean, go buy one of the less thrilling titles on technique. There are far fewer of those, but there are plenty out there and most of them constitute the hidden classics of professional cooking. Among the books that focus on technique, James Peterson's Essentials of Cooking, Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, and Madeline Kaman's The Making of a Cook are fairly standard. I own all three (and all three are excellent), but there are many others.

What should you cook? French cuisine is a good place to start, since it is one of the world's greatest food traditions, has dominated cooking in the West for centuries, and has produced the broadest variety of meditations on technique. But every great cuisine has its own set of techniques (and its own distinct pleasures both for the cook and the guest). If you want to try Indian, Chinese, or Italian, the advice is the same: figure out the fundamental techniques and master them.

(part 2)