Hello all, after a bit of a hiatus in July, Food in Practice is back.
Below you’ll find an essay more along the lines of “The Arc of History Bends Towards Risotto.” And, from now on, you’ll receive an essay like the one you’ll find below every Friday at 9 AM.
Over the next couple of months, I hope to begin adding more forms of content to this newsletter. But, if you miss me in the meantime, you can find more of my work over at Salt + Spine. There, you can listen to podcasts hosted by the wonderful Brian Hogan Stewart, cook from recipes written by published cookbook authors, and read various feature pieces and Q+A’s written by yours truly.
Here is to a new era of Food in Practice, with a little more consistency, stability, and growth. Until next Friday.
—Clea
A sterile kitchen, white countertops, a clean, shining pot, vivid green leaves, vibrant red chili oil; quick shots, smiles, heavy linen aprons. This is the kind of content I scroll by day in and day out.
I almost long to see a spill, something messy, something real, something I can imagine happening in my own kitchen. I almost miss the days when cookbooks didn’t feature a stunning photo alongside each recipe. When I could imagine the process for myself and I wasn’t concerned when the dish I served looked differently than the one I had tried to create. After all, until this last year, I’d never even seen a raw pie crust, only eaten it flaky and cooked through, so as I urged mine to come together, who was to say it wasn’t looking quite right?
I almost miss the days when cooking wasn’t about images, but about taste, experience, presence.
It isn’t fair, though, to say “I miss the days” partially because I’m only 24, so it’s definitely the case that this high-gloss, clean, polished home-cooking trend came long before I came into the kitchen (which was only 3 years ago). And because the real, messy, cosy kitchens still necessarily coexist alongside these chic, pristine nightmares.
I stay awake at night wondering how I can make my kitchen look like that. Or, how I could afford a staff to make my kitchen look like that. If I’m ever to make it in this big bad world of food media it seems like I have to surrender to Tik Tok, to marble countertops, to birds-eye views of butter being creamed. I have to let go of the mess, both in my writing, and at my cutting board.
But last week I stumbled across some videos and some writing that convinced me I deserve to be at the stove, whether it’s all beautiful and pristine, or there are crumbs around the pot and the words I find to describe the experience are not a eloquent as they might be.
I found some videos of innovative cooks doing what they do, which is making do, in their homes and I was reminded that the way it looks to cook is not what is important to me. It’s about the way it feels, and the way it tastes, and the way that from very little the possibility of comfort, nourishment, ease, and companionship is often born.
I daydream about the kitchen I will have someday, when I’m no longer a broke student. Of course, part of me believes that I will always be a broke student, and with that belief comes its own romanticization of the kitchen: Eating pasta because it’s all I can afford, cooking in old cast irons that I found hiding at a rummage sale and brought back to life with oil and heat. I imagine inexpensive, tasty wine poured into crystal glasses from the thrift store.
And then, when I pull myself out of the daydream, it is usually time to make dinner in the kitchen that is here, now. Often, it turns out wonderfully, even if I had to strategize about which ingredients could be cooked ahead due to a lack of pots. Or I accidentally cut things into funky shapes because the cutting board was so small; what is the beautiful julienne to the paper-thin, puke-green wafter I’m working with? Nothing.
“I love this kitchen despite itself,” wrote Alicia Kennedy in the latest edition of her newsletter.
It was refreshing to read: even Alicia Kennedy does not have the perfect kitchen. I am grateful that Kennedy has written about the quirks and irregularities that exist in her home kitchen. That she has shared photos and moments from the messy process. It feels like finally someone sane is at the wheel. Or one of the wheels in this big, media machine.
A little while ago I interviewed Cal Peternell for the podcast I produce. It was an exiting moment for many reasons, but I remember him saying, “I could cut onions all day,” and I nodded enthusiastically in agreement. At the time, I pictured cutting onions on a big, beautiful wooden board in the copper-hued kitchens of Chez Panisse, thinking Not bad, eh?
But today I am remembering learning the proper way to handle onions in the first kitchen that I learned to love, despite itself, as Kennedy says. I cut with a dull knife on a flimsy cutting board placed atop tile, surrounded by a gnarly grout that never seemed to stay clean.
I could happily cut onions there all day, too. In, fact I may even prefer it to the shine and celebrity of the restaurant.
Kitchens are magical places. Sometimes the magic comes from the spectacle of it all, as you’ll find in the kitchens at the restaurants you read about. Sometimes the magic comes from the people that spend their time there. Most times, for me, the magic comes from the necessity and the beauty born of that necessity. And even more often, it comes from some combination of all of these things.
When I am cooking, I think about the way that I become the kitchen, and the kitchen becomes me. The space I occupy, and labor within, day in and day out becomes a sort of vessel for my dreams and aspirations. I begin to tailor what I eat and how I move to better accommodate the imperfections of the kitchen I cook within. But it is more than the present moment.
The present kitchen is always and will always be the future kitchen and the past kitchen. For me, it is an imaginative space where I track my development as a person. The dream kitchen correlates to the dream me: the one whose fridge is stocked with leafy greens, and who cooks calmly and coolly. The one whose table is graced by friends and family, whose dishes inspire intimate conversation and a feeling of closeness. The crappy electric stove I cook on today correlates to 24-year-old me, who is looking forward to enough counter space and moving away from chunky sauces blitzed in a knock-off nutri-bullet smoothie cup. In the future, I do not fight with my kitchen, but love it as it is. And it loves me, too. Accepting my spills and rushed movements. We accomodate each other. We are each other, in a way.
Eating and cooking are activities that alert us to our own fragility and permeability. As Annemarie Mol describes in the recent, brilliant work, Eating in Theory, “…my hunger and shakiness vividly reminded me that bodies are always fragile… without nourishment, I would fall apart, not in a few days, maybe, but still surprisingly fast.”
As living beings, we are required to eat or to die. We are required to die whether we eat or not, but it seems that the act of eating can delay this consequence of being born.
I’ve always said the kitchen can be morbid in a certain way. Maybe that’s why we see so much trauma there, so many tattoos, cigarettes and fuck-you’s amongst cooks. We get it. Existence moves fast, things are always changing, and just as easily as the softening onions burned to a crisp, we will all die. It can happen quickly or slowly and what we ingest and thereby become, can make a big difference in our environment and in ourselves. We are linked.
Our cooking and eating, but mostly our eating, implicate us in the fate of our ingredients and we become implicated in their fate, too. The climate crisis brings this to the frightening fore, but it has always been true. It is true in big ways, and in small ways.
Today, the small ways are standing out to me. I’ve just transplanted by body across an ocean. My ears are hearing new noises, the sound of the German language, the screech of an S-bahn stop a few kilometers away. Today, on my commute to language class, I blasted Wagner, as if the everything else changing wasn’t rattling me enough.
But I’m still cooking tomatoes and feeling excitement over ripe strawberries and somehow these small consistencies are enough to keep my body feeling like itself and in turn, the environment feels a little more like one I can recognize and love. After all, I am inviting it to become a part of me with each bite.
I feel grateful for the skills I have picked up these last few years: the capacity to turn my surroundings into little pieces of myself and turn myself into little pieces of my surroundings. Again, Mol says it better than I can:
“In eating, then, I am a semipermeable, internally differentiated being, getting enmeshed in intricate ways with pieces of my surroundings,”
But somehow the words that resonate more closely as I serve myself the spaghetti dish I’ve been plating time and time again since I rented my very first stove, are Edith Wharton’s.
It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.*
Cooking has become a nest of sorts, and luckily, for now it is not the grim edge of poverty that I am hanging over, but perhaps a grim edge of homesickness and loneliness. I my nest remains tucked to the cliff, and here at this table we eat in a way that nourishes us and I cook in a way that nourishes me.
Until I can no longer imagine a meal out of whatever it is that I happen to find around me, I will continue to make do. It will not always be pristine, nor glossy, but I am certain it will always pull me closer to a sense of belonging here, now.
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What are the quirks in your kitchen? How have you overcome them/learned to love them or solved the problem? Let me know in the comments below!