One of my
favorite episodes of “
This American Life” begins with a conversation between
the host Ira Glass and the culinary griot and author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.
In the episode, Glass decides to test Smart-Grosvenor’s claim that she can tell
when chicken is done frying by simply listening to the oil. He plays recordings
of hot grease: the initial sizzles of battered chicken nestling into the pan, the
more vigorous bubbles as the oil heats back up, the final rumbles as the
chicken transforms.
اضافة اعلان
I recognized those distinct sounds immediately and
could envision the chicken’s color deepening from floury white to amber. As
Smart-Grosvenor listened, she was trusting her own senses — and what the
ingredients revealed to her. That honing of the senses, I know, is how you
become a great cook.
If cooking is the
tactile process of transforming ingredients, a good recipe is a path that
should lead anyone who follows it to the desired result. But the words on a
page are not the only signs that mark the way. Cooking is really an exercise in
pattern recognition, problem solving and, maybe most important, trusting our
senses.
Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà, a home cook and author of the
sensuous culinary autobiography “Longthroat Memoirs,” taps into the senses to
inform her everyday cooking. “For me, a lot happens here,” she said, pointing
to her nose. “I could catch a smell, and a whole scene of something happening
would play out in my mind’s eye. Like when I put cumin in a pan, I can smell
the gradients shift as it toasts. Nothing happens here in the kitchen without
me picking it up.”
Doris Hồ-Kane, an archivist, historian, and baker at Bạn Bè, her Vietnamese bakery in
Brooklyn, New York,
does not have any of the recipes for her menu items written down. “After
replicating it over and over, there is a recipe that lives in my head,” she
said. “It is so much about the way something feels in my arms, like hugging a
bowl of flour, or the way I mash up a certain grain, the way that agar bounces
or feels under my fingertip.”
It is so much about the way something feels in my arms, like hugging a bowl of flour, or the way I mash up a certain grain, the way that agar bounces or feels under my fingertip.
“It’s just by sight
and weight and feeling. It’s like a voice in my head telling me ‘It’s done.’”
The crème caramel I
learned to perfect as a young pastry cook is a great example of Hồ-Kane’s philosophy. It’s a simple recipe, a
combination of eggs, milk, sugar, and cream. But the techniques of crème
caramel require careful attention.
I make mine in a
water bath with an aluminum-foil cover so that the custard sets from the outside
in. When I first peel back the cover and give the pan a jiggle, I am observing
how far inward the custard has set by how uniformly it wiggles: pattern
recognition. Then I remove the cover entirely, which exposes the custard to the
oven’s dry, direct heat, and allows the center to firm up: problem-solving.
Even before the
custard goes into the oven, I am drawing on all of my senses: I am leaning over
the saucepan of toasting spices, ensuring the gentle heat releases their oils
and their aromas fill the air. For a moment, my eyes are on the dissolving
sugar as it transforms into a golden amber syrup; the taste of burned sugar is
overpowering, so I do everything to avoid taking the caramel too far. And when
it is time to whisk the custard base, I know that incorporating too much air
will deaden its silkiness, so I use as few turns as possible as I fold the
ingredients.
A single recipe is
never the one true version of a dish, and minding sensory cues when cooking
allows you to explore the boundaries of a recipe. It is only by following your
senses that you can personalize the experience by determining how far from that
structure you would like to go.
These sensory cues, and the ease that eventually comes to
the process when you pay attention to them, are where the real satisfaction of
cooking lies.
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