Layers
Among the many fascinating and clever things Samin Nosrat writes about in her amazing book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is the idea of using those four elements at different times during the preparation of a single dish. She uses the term “layering” to describe the approach of building complex and satisfying flavors this way: layering salt by using it not only to brine, but also to season and finish. Layering acids by using one to marinade and a different one later to drizzle. These layers add depth and dimension to food.
Physical layers create interest and satisfaction as well. Croissants and baklava are famous for their delicate layers. Pizza can be thought of as a large, round, layered dish. And sandwiches aren’t just convenient to make: by stacking ingredients on top of each other they provide contrast in texture and mouthfeel. A sandwich presents with a certain amount of order that we can investigate not only with our eyes but with our mouths: we know a sandwich by the biting and chewing of it.
But the finest example of layering, both in terms of preparation and assembly is the taco. The preparation of the meat involves seasoning with acid from a few tomatoes, salt and of course the heat of the pan sizzling the fat. A bit more fat in the form of cheese or avocado toppings, and likewise a bit more acid in the pico de gallo. Maybe a little more salt in the Tajin sprinkled on top or on a hard taco shell. The physical layers of ingredients, themselves layered with flavors, create one of the most fun and satisfying meals of the week: taco night—or as we like to call it, taco fiesta.
Reheat
I’ve taken to smelling my plate of food when I take it out of the microwave. This isn’t merely to enjoy the aroma (although frequently that’s part of it), or to elicit smart-ass comments (although somehow they arise from this) but to sense how thoroughly and evenly the food has been heated.
I can’t smell heat (and neither can you), but our noses are sensitive to differences in air temperature. Just like you notice the difference when when you step outside into a chilly morning, you can sense the difference between warm, moist air rising from hot food and the cooler, drier air above cold food as you breathe in through your nose. Briefly nosing around the plate can give an indication of whether or not it needs a little more time in the microwave.
Meals, Stories and Recipes
A meal can tell a story. A meal has a beginning, a middle and an end. An appetizer: something to capture the interest and develop the appetite. The main course: to satisfy that hunger, to explore the setting and characters further. Dessert: to cleanse the palate, to resolve the tension introduced earlier. A play in three acts. And sometimes it’s just one big act: a single setting with everything rising and falling in a continuous sequence of action all over the stage.
(Which doesn’t take into account the epilogue: the putting away of left-overs, the washing of dishes, the last cup of coffee or tea or whiskey or wine while we talk some more and dry the dishes with a tea towel.)
And there are stories about other times those dishes were made: the people it was shared with, the weather that night, the little (or big) things that went wrong or miraculously right, the last-minute trips to the store. There are stories behind recipes about where they came from and how they’ve been modified over the years. There are stories behind other dinners, like the time pizza dough shot across the kitchen because it got tossed up into the ceiling fan. Some of the best stories told over dinner are about other dinners.
A recipe is a story we are told—a story we tell ourselves—about how something is made and what the result should be. But if a meal can tell a story, then cooking is the writing of it and a recipe is merely the setting. The players provide the action and the dialog. The real story plays out in the hours before, during and after dinner.
Out to Eat
I think you could do worse than to learn a foreign language by spending nearly all of your time on food, drink and cooking. After all, you’ll need to eat if you visit a foreign country, and you may as well figure out how to ask for things you like or want to try. There are plenty of opportunities, too: you’ll get 2-3 chances a day to practice in that context; not counting afternoon coffee and tea, of course.
If you can ask for directions to good places to eat, make reservations and pay for a meal, you’ve actually covered a lot of ground, linguistically speaking. And if you can talk a little bit about or at least understand the preparations of various foods—kitchen tools and techniques—you’ll have even more verbs and prepositional phrases at your disposal.
Stories and food go together like peanut butter & jelly; everybody has fun and meaningful stories about food. You can learn how to tell one or two of yours in your target language, so that you have something you’ve rehearsed that you can use in conversation. People that you meet will have their own fun stories about food—you can listen to them and laugh over dinner and drinks. You can also just chat with your server or bartender and pick up new bits and pieces of the language, as well as recommendations for the next place to eat.
There’s a case to be made that human language only developed because we were able to grow big enough brains—brains which were a result of increased nutrition from learning how to cook food. If the very first language was developed as a result of food and cooking, then it only seems right to learn new languages with them.
Seasonings
We pruned the trees in our yard last weekend. It was warm and sunny and eventually we shed our coats to stay cool as we worked, cutting limbs and branches overhead and then stooping to gather them up. It is a different thing to work overhead: to grasp and use a tool at the limits of your reach above head height. Even just to study the structures overhead, looking for problems to be solved by a pruner or a saw.
It was warm and sunny, but there was still over a foot of snow covering the entire yard. Walking back and forth between the backyard and the driveway was an effort all its own. At some point I realized I was actually thirsty, which can sneak up on you sometimes in cold weather.
We wrapped up late that afternoon and then went for a walk with a friend, making the most out of the pleasant weather. It was dark when we got back home. We had leftovers for dinner, but they tasted better than they did a couple of nights ago. They were perhaps even better than some freshly prepared meals I’ve had.
There are many ways to prepare food, but that’s only one part of a meal. How we come to the meal is just as important: the dinner and the one who dines both benefit from preparation. It wasn’t that I simply worked up an appetite and was hungrier than usual. I think that food simply tastes better somehow after being active outside most of the day. Perhaps our senses are sharpened or our blood flow is increased or we are simply more alive…
Activity, exertion and adventure are methods of slow-cooking our perceptiveness and appreciation. They are seasonings we add to ourselves that improve our ability to savor.
Avocado, Bagel, Cutting Board
Some of the most common hand injuries admitted to the ER are cuts from preparing avocados and bagels. I don’t have the statistics on the reasons people give to doctors and nurses as they’re getting their wounds cleaned and bandaged, but I can make some pretty good guesses:
“I was in a hurry”, “I wasn’t being careful enough”, “My knife just slipped.”
I can sympathize: I’ve had my fair share of near misses.
The problem with this particular situation isn’t necessarily just underestimating what can go wrong—it’s what happens when you actually succeed. Or, more precisely, what happens right after you succeed.
We tend to look at some tools and technologies as the entire solution to the problem. In the case of cutting an avocado in two, we grab the part of the knife that fits our hand and vigorously apply force to the avocado-problem with the part of the knife that fits the avocado. At this point, however, the line between success and failure is razor-thin if our other hand happens to be supporting the avocado-problem.
Cutting boards are boring. They’re one more thing to get out, clean and put away. But boring things like cutting boards (and parking brakes and hard drive backups) are highly underrated, and it might make a lot of sense to consider a knife and cutting board as forming a system that can gracefully withstand your successes as well as your failures.
Seasoned
My understanding of cooking has changed a lot in the past year since reading Samin Nosrat’s remarkable book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. In particular, I’ve gained an appreciation for how salt and seasonings are used effectively: ideally, at more than one step in the cooking process.
Salt especially can be added long before the oven is even turned on; in a brine or marinade or just applied directly to the surface of meat. There might be two or three more steps when salt or seasonings are added, depending on the heat being used to cook and how delicate the herbs are. When you think the dish is finished, it always pays to taste it and consider if maybe you need to add a little more of the seasonings called for in the recipe—or even some that aren’t. And many dishes recommend a garnish of an herb like parsley or cilantro, or a final sprinkle of fancy sea salt to complete the dish and give it an added flavor or texture.
Samin refers to this process as “layering”: using different herbs and spices and salts at different times to bring out and create the best flavors. But I also find myself thinking about it as iterating: getting closer and closer to the final product by paying attention to the feedback the food is providing through flavor and appearance at several different times, and then making adjustments.
The word “season” in the sense of flavoring food comes from the French assaisoner (to do something during the proper season) which brings with it the sense of the right time for tilling the soil, planting for the harvest and ripening. When we re-season food as we cook, we stir, taste and add more herbs and spices—and then we wait a while and repeat to see if we’ve arrived: miniature seasons within the process of seasoning.
I’m better in the kitchen now than I when I started, but I could use more time, more tasting, more experience for the food to do the work of seasoning me into a better cook.
Dinner Conversations
Two areas in which humans have advanced far beyond any other species are food and communication. We prepare food like no other animal not only by cooking, but by using an elaborate set of tools and techniques. And, of course, our language abilities have developed to an almost inconceivable level when you consider the range of complex and abstract concepts we can efficiently discuss; like what to make for dinner tonight.
We are not unique in either eating communal meals or our ability to communicate. We do stand out, however, near the edge of a certain precipice with another trait: the danger we face by talking during dinner.
The anatomy of most animals’ throats are such that an extremely important flap of tissue—the epiglottis—is directly on top of the windpipe (larynx) and closes it off completely from the rest of the throat throughout the entire act of swallowing. We humans, however, have a longer-than-usual passage above the epiglottis and the air that we breathe can carry with it the food and drink that we’re swallowing. Where animals have a railroad-type switching apparatus to keep food moving along the right track, we have more of an on-ramp/merge/off-ramp highway traffic arrangement; there are chances for both collisions and missing an exit, so to speak. In other words, if we attempt to both inhale and swallow simultaneously we may actually succeed at both—and immediately choke on our food.
Humans develop this “low larynx” after we are born, which creates a physiological hazard but also enormous acoustic and linguistic advantages. Other primates and human babies simply cannot make the same kinds of robust vowel sounds that adult humans can; vowel sounds which are found in almost all languages and are thought to be important for being clearly understood: the /i/ in “heed”, /u/ in “mood” and the /a/ in “palm”. Despite the fact that even today in the United States, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death, evolution has apparently gathered more than enough benefit from human speech to offset the losses.
The simple, yet profound pleasures of cooking and sharing a meal with friends and family—talking and laughing in the kitchen and around the table—are quintessentially human. And, uniquely, they encourage a certain discipline: the subtle refinement in behavior of making a separation between taking a bite and taking a breath to compensate for an anatomy that no longer does.
Combinations
Combining ingredients is one of the foundations of cooking and a hallmark of the human diet. It is second in importance only to the technique of using heat to prepare food and is unparalleled in its ability to provide variety and innovation. Animals tend to eat whatever plants or animals they can find in the order that they find them, but humans are unique in gathering together multiple ingredients in order to combine them into a final product that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I will now suggest a hierarchy that illustrates a range of possibilities, from basic to sophisticated:
1. Foraging or Grazing: eating things in the order that you find them in the cupboards or refrigerator. This is the approach taken by animals, teenagers (if they are different), unsupervised children and hangry adults. Any edible item is, of course, a candidate for this approach, whether is it cold or room temperature. Feel free to consider this a fancy, multiple course meal if fruits or vegetables make up one of the selections, e.g. leftover pizza followed by an apple.
2. Assembling: combining 2 or more ingredients together into a single food item, such as when making a salad or a sandwich. This is an excellent technique when there aren’t leftovers readily available because they have all been consumed during a Grazing meal.
3. Actual Cooking: combining 2 or more ingredients, plus 1 or more forms of non-microwave heat. Examples include soups or stews, hot dish, stir fry or a complicated sandwich. (A peanut butter and jelly sandwich counts if you toast the bread first.) Almost any breakfast item is an excellent candidate for this approach, at any time of day.
Adjustments
When you’re cutting up vegetables or meat and you need to adjust to get a different angle or position, you can move three things:
the knife
the food
your body
The knife moves, of course, as you make the series of cuts along a piece of food. Some small adjustments can be made, but mostly you want the knife to stay in the same area—where your grip is sure and your hand and wrist are comfortable. Where you can confidently control the knife; where you can make smooth and efficient strokes. Think of working your way down a carrot.
Moving the food instead of the knife is necessary when you’re finished with one piece and grab another (duh), or when the cut requires a knife angle that you can’t easily or safely accommodate. Think of dicing a potato or an onion.
Moving your body is usually reserved for big or awkward tasks that don’t lend themselves well to moving the food. But it’s not because you need to change the grip on the knife, necessarily. It’s more likely because you need to see the food better and it might be simpler to move yourself than move the food. Think of moving around to cut up a pork shoulder or getting yourself over the top of a large squash to slice it in half.
Knife, food, eye. Put another way: tool, problem, perspective.
Open Invitations
Moving the pen across paper—just doodling—or typing a few words is an invitation to sketch or write. A little light stretching or walking is an invitation to exercise. Cutting up one raw fruit or vegetable is an invitation to cook.
Small, easy movements are polite, warm gestures to even more engaging activities.
Arbitrary Formalities
Everybody speaks a little differently, but you can make generalizations and lump the way many people speak into one group—call it a dialect. And all dialects are able to convey the full range of human experiences among its speakers. Dialects are abundant, but if one particular dialect gets the right opportunities to be used for formal occasions, it might be called a language. There is a bit of linguistics humor that acknowledges this: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
All foodways are intertwined with culture and technique in a feedback loop: at once both influenced and influential. And all foodways have at their core the capacity to nourish human communities. I might suggest that a cuisine is a foodway with a cookbook and a PR manager.
New Recipes
Trying a new recipe is, ipso facto, doing something you haven’t done before. This may be a matter of degree, depending on your level of experience and how different the new recipe is from what you’re used to, but there’s something about it that is novel or unknown, which is where the uncertainty and the tension comes in.
It seems like “trying a new recipe” is a one-shot deal, but since most of us are fortunate enough to eat every day, it doesn’t have to be. We could try new recipes like artists begin a new piece of work, by doing a study—a series of sketches or rough outlines that approximate the intended work. We could plan on making a new dish two or three times to work out the mechanics, the timing or the seasonings. Doing everything right the first time, even when the instructions are correct (don’t get me started), seems unreasonable when you’re doing something new.
It might take some of the pressure off trying something new if we viewed it more like a new hobby than a single, high-stakes performance: do it a few times and see if it suits you.
Variety
Before humans figured out how to cook food, we basically had to spend all day finding and chewing whatever raw foods we could: roots, animals, berries, insects, plants, etc. By learning to cook, we traded some of the time and effort we used to spend chewing for time and effort spent cooking: working with wood, fire and raw plants and animals to make something to eat that didn’t require an entire damn afternoon of gnawing and chomping. Cooking introduced early humans to a new set of skills, a completely new set of activities.
It also increased the number of things we could eat, by making more things edible. (It also meant that we could sensibly talk about eating something besides a cold salad buffet.) It enabled the very idea of a cuisine.
One simple concept—applying heat to food—has replaced foraging and chewing with an abundance of different ways to spend our time and enjoy our meals.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Food In Motion
So much of cooking is preparation—mise en place—and so much of preparation is cutting up large pieces of food into smaller pieces. I think if I’ve become any faster or more efficient at cooking, I owe it to learning how to efficiently cut food.
Knowing how a piece of meat or fruit should be cut up is certainly part of it, and there are very helpful procedures for everything from a chicken to a mango. But what really matters is this: keeping the blade working. There is little forward progress whenever the blade is at rest.
Handedness plays a role in efficient cutting: the food is stabilized or repositioned with one hand and the knife is used with the other. (Any time I’m tempted to use both hands to grasp a knife, I’m quietly wondering to myself about my next close call.) Using either hand for any task would be interesting, but it suggests switching hands—an interruption in the flow—and it would also require developing some skill with both hands, which takes time and repetition. Handedness leads to asymmetry; a kind of specialization on a small scale. But handedness gives us an advantage by reducing time to proficiency.
Each hand is busy with a distinctly different, but related, task. They are coordinated. The “knife hand” can keep the knife busy because the “food hand” is doing its job anticipating what the knife hand needs next. It is a process, a workflow. Food moves from one side of the cutting board to the other, not unlike the way it moves from the cupboard to the mixing bowl to the pan to the oven. Food in motion; asymmetry as an engine.
New England Chowder
My wife and I try New England Chowder almost everywhere we go. If we see it on a menu somewhere—we aren’t “somewhere” so much lately as we are simply at home looking at a takeout menu online—we try it. Oftentimes it’s an accompaniment with Friday fish fry, sometimes it’s just a soup option with another entree.
It’s fun to note the variations across different restaurants: some add corn and some don’t, some use a little dill to season it and others use a lot. And, of course, some places offer a clam chowder and others a seafood chowder that might include fish, clams and perhaps even bits of lobster. Chowder is one of our very favorite items to have from a restaurant and we are rarely disappointed.
Except when we’re in New England. There, it seems, they don’t like a thick, hearty stew filled with the rich flavors of cream and potatoes and butter and bacon to go with the seafood. They seem to prefer a watery broth that might have a little flavor imparted by a wedge of lemon on the side to accompany the subtle notes of fresh ocean-caught fish. They require an inordinate amount of salt and pepper to be added at the table. And perhaps they believe that the cute little packet of oyster crackers will somehow transform the bowl of thin liquid into something with the proper consistency: a viscous phase of matter almost between a liquid and a solid, like ivory lava, flowing with fat and flavor.
We are looking forward to a day when we can safely travel to New England again and try all sorts of seafood dishes that are best consumed by the sea that produced them, but chowders may no longer be among them. I don’t know how New England Chowder got it’s name, because it’s only made properly in the Midwest.
Near Misses
The kitchen is a place of excitement and danger. There are hot ovens, sharp knives, heavy pans which can also be quite hot: basically a lot of very hot, sharp metal things that may also be heavy. And, of course, food. And perhaps a little alcohol because, why not; we’re cooking.
Sometimes there are “near misses”: something hot or sharp or heavy comes very close to some part of you that you’d rather not have burned, cut or smooshed. Near misses aren’t quite accidents; they’re warnings.
They warn you of lack of attention, lack of control, lack of patience, lack of technique—anything you might be lacking except, perhaps, fiber. Near misses show you a glimpse of what could happen if you don’t address the area that is lacking.
They are gifts to be treasured.
The Mother of Invention
Sometimes when you need to solve a problem of organization or material handling, looking at the items you can get in a grocery store or a big box store is helpful. I’ve already extolled the virtues of trays, but there are more!
Need something cheap to hold a lot of little parts in a single layer? Try a rimmed baking sheet. Need to make sure all those little parts don’t slide around everywhere? Put a silicone baking mat on top of the baking sheet. Food storage containers excel at keeping cables and partially disassembled assemblies in one place without losing anything. (And they usually stack!) Need to run some experiments on how various materials respond to certain solvents? Throw them in some canning jars. (Well, there were canning jars last year…)
(This goes both ways, of course: the line between scientific equipment and cookware is completely blurred now as well, with sous vide machines, vacuum sealers, dehydrators and other gadgets.)
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but hospitality and food service are its midwives.
Food & Entropy
Some people say that they can’t bake, even if they’re good cooks. Other people (fewer in my experience) say that they’re really good bakers, but can’t really cook. There’s a big difference between the two activities.
First, entropy. Entropy is a physics concept that is essentially a measure of disorder. A neat stack of bricks is highly ordered: low entropy. Knocking over that stack of bricks results in something less ordered: high entropy. The less structure, the more smeared together and uniformly distributed, the higher the entropy.
Cooking increases entropy. Take a steak and put it on the grill: the highly ordered muscle tissue and marbled fat begins to break down so that we can better digest it. Burn that steak and you increase its entropy even more. Take a pile of vegetables and chop them up with your new laser knife into little cubes and you have greater disorder; higher entropy. Sauté those vegetables and you increase the entropy a bit more. Soup is very high entropy: all of those highly-ordered ingredients you started with are now swirling around in a pot all together, breaking down into delicious disorder.
This makes a certain amount of sense: plants and animals are highly ordered when they’re alive; less so after they die. In order for us to digest anything and use the nutrients, we have to break down food into smaller and simpler compounds: that’s cooking in a nutshell.
Contrast this with baking. Baking also involves mixing a bunch of separate ingredients together, but in very specific sequences. Dry ingredients can get mixed together, sure, but some recipes require you to fold in the egg whites separately from the yolks, or letting the yeast work with the sugar before adding the salt and flour. The precise amount of water used is a significant factor.
Baking ultimately creates structure and order where there wasn’t any before. Cookies, cakes, pies (especially crust!), a Mille-feuille or a Dobos torte are all highly ordered: they might have distinct layers or boundaries, they have a specific texture borne of the heat during baking, they may have intricate decorations or flourishes. This is what makes baking a careful and patient enterprise: to create something with an intricate structure requires that we push back against Nature’s tendency toward disorder.
I think it’s telling that baking is a relatively recent invention, long preceded by roasting and fermentation. Baking is almost an extravagance: building something up so that we can enjoy breaking it down.