I usually think of cooking as ingredients + techniques. Recipes are supplements. It’s a little dishonest, because I often start with recipes, even if I don’t follow them. Recipes are how I first started cooking. But logically I think of them as secondary phenomena.
When I’m thinking this way, I think that no quality – not daring, not experience, not knowledge, not equipment, certainly not instructions – is more important in the kitchen than humility. Because no matter what I do, how many steps I follow, or how accurately I measure the stupid flour, I am never, ever going to make anything that is anywhere near as complex, as nuanced, or as delicious as a (good) peach. Or, you know, a fruit you actually like.
That’s the recurring theme of many of my household gods – Elizabeth David, Alice Waters – whose wisdom has become so conventional as to be annoying. Great food is all about great ingredients. Everything else is secondary.
But it leaves out another obvious truth (besides the fact of my laziness): there is wonderful, sometimes rather complicated, food that is made without wonderful ingredients. And that’s what most poor people – i.e. most people – eat when they eat well. Because “simple” “peasant” food is freaking expensive, but expertise can be cheap.
There was an eloquent column about this in the New York Times a couple years ago. I think it must have been a response to Michael Pollan’s magnum opus magazinium and the frenzy of snack-time virtue that ensued.
The article — which I can’t find now, so please comment if you remember the author’s name! — wasn’t dissing the wonders of fresh, local food. But it defended as excellent, and worthy of the greatest respect, the marvelous dishes that people make every day using cheap ingredients from the grocery store like dried beans, canned tomatoes, oil, cheap cuts of cheap meat, and bottled spices.
This is the ancient chowhound vs foodie divide, from the point of view of the home kitchen.
Obviously “cheap” depends on your point of view. Cheap meat is incredibly expensive to the planet, to the animals, eventually to billions world wide. But if you don’t have much money, whose point of view are you going to look at your dinner from? If you do have money, whose point of view should you consider before that of people who don’t? And if you are lucky enough to eat a delicious meal, inexpensively but expertly made, from what point of view should you judge it?
ETA: WordPress suggests that this post is connected to articles about “intelligent design” and Glenn Beck. Welcome to blogging, me!
