Cooking with Economy and Grace

"Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings.  They usually pick up where something else leaves off….Meal’s ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominoes. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on top; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness.  This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking.”—Tamar Adler

Tamar Adler is a woman after my own heart (and my mother’s heart and grandmother’s as well).  Although I don’t think she mentions the word “relationship” in her newest book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace: Tamar …, her entire subject matter is about bringing thoughtfulness, consideration and especially awareness to the way we approach food preparation.  Hence, to have an intimate relationship to a basic life activity.

I’ve always been a little self-protective, sometimes embarrassed at my own sense of economy in cooking.  I got this sensibility from my mother (a "Depression baby"), who got it from her mother (a puritan-minded ‘waste not want not’ Irish Catholic from Minnesota, oldest of 11).  However, for me, economizing with food was not based on saving money (entirely), it was more about respecting the life force of the food, the trouble it took to get to me for my benefit, and for this reason, not to discard any of its materiality wantonly.  In the times we live, waste is everywhere.  And I have relaxed my past vigilance somewhat in light of the passive forces that surround me (and which are reflected in me) at every turn, especially around food.  Adler’s book reinforces my previous more caring attitude in relation to food preparation.

“..cooking is an act of gathering in and meting out, a coherent story that starts with the lighting of a burner, the filling of a pot, and keeps going as long as we like.”

Adler’s love and respect for the raw ingredients she cooks and the process is apparent.  She speaks about the denser marrow in free range chicken legs, humanely treated animals (not necessarily the ones labeled ‘organic’, often an industrialized product) as opposed to  the factory farmed variety.  And though they might cost three times the amount of industrial-raised chickens, it makes more sense to purchase and prepare them.  They make heartier stock, are more nutritious; it’s worth the money.  Her viewpoint is not austere, but full of good common sense.  It is how every cook worth their salt has cooked through time.  This is because cooks through the ages love the (intuitive?) relationship they enter when they handle, consider and partner with the raw elements of a meal.  There is no unworthy aspect of anything born, raised and harvested for the benefit of our bodies.  What limits us is our common sense, imagination, patience and memory.  “… at the bottom of any pot of vegetables or beans or grains or meat are unrepeatable flavors themselves, all the alchemy of today’s cooking distilled into a liquid you can neatly pour into a glass jar.”  And use later (if you remember it is there!).

“…. We don’t need to be professionals to cook well… we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are—people who are hungry.”

The way we have become related (or unrelated) to the food we ingest is a mirror to the life we lead.  We often fall into the mire of one end of the spectrum or another: on one hand, uncaring where the raw product comes from, indifference to how one marries ingredients, unawareness to color, texture, harmony and balance. There frequently is an obsession with making a meal as time limited in its preparation as possible, as well as eating it equally as fast.  On the other hand, the bored and thrill-seeking turn to a fussy, fancy, over the top use of exotic ingredients and novel cuisine interpretations.  There are lots of ways we manifest our inner fragmentation:  this loss of relationship is a loss of interest in something very basic, a wholesome curiosity to what Is.  Our need to eat regularly is an honorable connection to nature, eclipsing the tendency to lean toward convenience. Adler's warm and witty appreciation of this connection is hearty nourishment to the soul.

“Catching one’s tail [the often ‘tail’ end of components used in a meal] is a curious business. We watch dogs in their constant, fruitless chases all the time.  Plato thought tail chasing not only practical but divine.  He wrote that the mystical symbol for infinity a snake swallowing its tail, was the perfect being; it made what it ate and ate what it made, needing nothing but its own existence for perpetual life.”