Trying to Command a Kitchen On Fire
Why I Like to Cook
I slice the onion with the precision of a neurosurgeon. My knife slices once, cleanly through its center, cutting through the root, as that prevents the vegetable from making you cry. I trim the tips off either hemisphere, pruning away where the fruit once connected to its stem. I peel away the paper, revealing a smooth, purple bisected sphere, its color and shape like that of a planet strung to a child’s nursery mobile. I make horizontal, length-wise incisions and then slice perpendicular to the slits, the knife rocking, producing perfect miniature onion cubes. The plastic green cutting board is stained and worn, peppered with tiny cuts this way and that from years of use. My hands are stained violet. The knife is big and sharp, I’m careful to move my fingers out of its way. Even though I feel in control, the knife wields much of the power.
I didn’t have as much of an interest in food production as a kid as I did in food consumption. I wasn’t a Masterchef Junior prodigy or much of a helper at Thanksgiving but could always be found seated at the kitchen island when I heard the sound of my mom slicing bread and pouring oil for dipping. I was the first to be seated for dinner and the first to jump up for seconds, savoring the casseroles, stews, and pastas (especially the pastas) that magically appeared in the kitchen without much thought into how they materialized. Today, like many adults, my day feels incomplete if I haven’t chopped onions.
Many feel encumbered by the task of cooking and I see why they feel that way. Cooking - much like cleaning - can play a taxing role in one’s life due to its obligatory nature. “What should I eat today?” can be uttered with elation and curiosity, or with a tone of agitation and dread. It’s not like one can simply be fed and then not have to worry about it for a year, like changing a lightbulb or fixing a leaky faucet. As with dust, hunger accumulates and needs to be satiated by oneself and oneself alone, repeatedly.
I, more often than not, have found food to be one of the greatest joys life has to offer. I don’t just ask myself what I want to eat, I relish in precisely planning my days around my meals. I enjoy puzzling over how many ways I can stretch the head of romaine I picked up on Monday or how to incorporate the cherry tomatoes that have gone wrinkly in the back of my fridge. The recommended page on my YouTube app features little else but cooking tutorials. I scour my favorite food blogs and cookbooks gifted for birthdays for new dishes to try, delighted when I find a recipe in which all of the ingredients are in my possession. I bookmark and dog-ear more complicated dishes for the weekend when I can spend my evenings burning a candle and following a step-by-step guide to bolognese, letting it simmer for three hours, splashing tomato on the cookbook’s page.
I first became obsessed with cooking when I more or less had to be: during the COVID-19 lockdown. Holed up with my family, I knew I ought to relieve my mother from preparing yet another meal for a household of five. And so I decided to try out one of the recipes from the many YouTube cooking tutorials I had viewed in my pastime. Settling on a stew, I was nervous - I hadn’t cooked for my family before. What if I didn’t let the onions caramelize enough? How did I know if the stew had reduced enough? What if I didn’t wash the kale thoroughly and poisoned my whole family? My anxious mind spun an infinite number of potential outcomes in which my cooking ended terribly, resulting in disasters more calamitous than the last.
Nonetheless, I began with the recipe’s first step, reading and acting carefully and accordingly. Adjusting the heat on the stove to medium-high then reducing to medium-low to simmer. Checking that the onions were an appropriate shade of brown before adding the stock. All of it was right there, the recipe spelled out exactly what was needed and all I needed to do was read and obey. That I could do. The dinner was a triumph and cooking for my family became a weekly occurrence, and then a thrice-a-day occurrence for myself when I moved out.
I think I’m drawn to ballet for the same reasons that I’m drawn to cooking. Each ballet class contains, more or less, the same structure - the teacher demonstrates a combination that students must replicate, starting with movements as simple as pliés at the barre to great leaps across the floor. Of course, like cooking, ballet doesn’t always turn out as expected. I can know that my feet should turn out to a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle in first position, legs rotating outwards in their sockets. But just because I know something mentally doesn’t mean it will unfold physically; there are bodily limitations, both in the human body generally and in my own specifically. However, the essence of what is supposed to happen is there. Much like a recipe, the correct procedures are laid out before you, all you have to do is conjure them. Cooking and dancing are special kinds of alchemy.
I find a lot of comfort in the paint-by-numbers quality that following a recipe has. If I just follow directions closely enough, I can create something beautiful and delicious, something that nourishes and charms myself and those I love. I long for this kind of staunchness, this forthright nature elsewhere.
In high school, I obsessively Googled what GPA and test scores were needed to get into various universities. I yearned for some kind of instruction manual - but the best that Google could provide was the average GPAs and scores of the students accepted. What good was average going to do me? Even if my records surpassed the averages, who’s to say that my extracurricular activities were up to par? What was the exact level of rigor that my courseload needed to contain? There had to be some guidebook, some treasure map, that could lead me to gold.
Once I was eventually admitted to an institution of higher learning, the matter of figuring out what I wanted to study - and presumably, what I wanted to pursue as a career - came into question. I mulled this over while stirring oatmeal many weekday mornings, pouring the just-right ratio of milk to oats to prevent the porridge from being too watery or too stiff. I took Myers-Briggs tests, met with the career center, set actionable goals, and yet, “what I should do with my life” remained parbaked.
I have always been good at following rules. I was a model student as early as kindergarten, quiet when the teacher asked and an active participant when collaboration was encouraged. In ballet class, when the choreographer placed me in my spot in the recital formation, I stuck to that spot and restrained myself from wandering around and picking my nose like the other five-year-olds. I seldom rebelled as a teenager, never drank, never smoked. I did all this, in part, because I thought that it would guarantee me some kind of prize. If I was the perfect child - the perfect person - maybe it could wipe away every bad thing that had happened to me. Maybe it would prevent more bad things from happening. Why would I fall out of line, when certain rewards were promised to those who never wavered off it? I didn’t want to risk the universe revealing its grand truth to me and bestowing me with its keys.
I like to cook because I like to be in control. When I’m running around the kitchen - ingredients strewn across the counter, all burners in use - and someone asks if I need any help, I “shoo!” them away as politely as I can. Despite what they might see, I have a handle on everything. I have full mastery of the situation, don’t you see? I have the keys to the kitchen’s kingdom.
In reality, my control over the kitchen is part-legitimate, part-delusional. Yes, I’m commanding the stove and the whisk, reading the recipe word-for-word, and yet some factors are unwilling to bend to my whim. Like when I was slicing bread and my hand slipped, knicking a vein in my index finger, oozing blood onto my cutting board. Or when the temperature outside is so hot that it creeps into the kitchen, warming the counter and melting the butter in my pie crust. Or, of course, when I had the bright idea to drink red wine and cook, and opened the oven to see the garlic bread on fire.
I can try earnestly, hold the reins firmly. I can feel in control but have to admit that the knives and the flames wield a great deal of power, giving cooking a lawless and fickle nature. Some things are left to chance and chance alone.
My mind is not as spotless as I like to think, it has its blind bits. In life and in cooking, I don’t like to venture too far off course and risk failure. I recently read that artists don’t fear rejection, they know that it’s necessary to create and share their work and will submit to getting beaten down again and again. I seem disciplined, but I might just be afraid. And in trying to be flawless, I may be committing the cardinal sin of the doomed artist. When trying to curb failure, you ironically fail.
It’s just now dawned on me that the alternative to failing is also, in a sense, failing. You can push on and face obstacles or surrender before the race even begins - either way, the journey is rife with missteps. I like to think I’m picking the smoothest path, but even the easiest course has its unexpected gripes - even if it’s just the dull aching of mundanity. If I’m going to fail in life, I might as well fail in the direction of what I’m seeking.
Maybe I don’t just like to cook because I like control. Maybe I enjoy seeing that even the most seemingly under-control situations have their outliers. For every perfectly risen soufflé, another will deflate. Maybe cooking is the one environment where I can see when I’ve clearly exhausted my efforts - checked off each step and still failed. Where I can see that the keys to the universe will never be in my possession, even if it seems like they are. It’s humbling yet emboldening.
If there really is no prize for perfection, maybe I can afford to swing a little bigger and jump a little higher. When I burn my bread, I can always scrape off the char with a butter knife. It’s better to have risked burnt bread than to never have baked at all.
I really like the analogy of cooking to the way we live . I think there is resemblance to the approach we take to cooking and living !
I love this 🫶🏻 especially the part about how cooking gives a sense of control even though dangers like knives and fires can easily let the control slip and chaos ensue. I love how you connected this to creativity and the inevitability of failure as part of the process. Ugh I could go on. Great work!