Ruminations

Cooking is an activity outside the bounds of pleasure for me. I cook daily whether my disposition is sunny or sad. Simple or grand, each meal is a personal accomplishment. And I do it in a small kitchen on a vintage gas stove, with basic amenities such as running water and electricity and a view of downtown that is in the summer obscured by an opportunistic tree. Will someone rid me of that insolent tree? I cook. I bake bread. I make wine. I hand wash my dishes.

Cooking stimulates thought and feeling outside of its bounds and enhances the flavors of other activities in my life. I enjoy dining out but I most often prefer the results of the alchemy that goes on in this little room, tiled and antique, in what was once silent era studio housing. It's true that I only cook seriously when I can share the results since it seems a waste to feed oneself only. I consider myself financially poor but when I sit before a salad of belgian endive with blanched, seeded tomato, dressed with shallots and fresh sage grown in my own pots, the walnut oil and white wine vinegar catching the light, then, then, I am truly rich.

I began to cook at Oxford when I moved out into the country in my last year and realized that I would starve if I didn't. One gets only so much nutrition from a bottle of Bollinger or Pol Roger. On my first foray into that small kitchen I made fresh cream of chicken soup from a recipe in my mother's own first cookbook and although I started with a fresh chicken and the best cream, I ended up with a soup that was not unlike Campbell's product. I was disappointed.

A brief job after university took me into the kitchens at a small seaside hotel where I learned to make quick decisions on when to waste or not since everything depended on timing. I began to appreciate my mother's grand feasts and how she could deliver them up to three hungry boys, daily, and also maintain a career. In London I learned rudiments of forming my own palette from my landlord who dined from time to time at Paul Bocuse. I also kept one eye on the kitchens in a stint working at Brown's Hotel as a night porter. Later, when I owned my first home in Indiana I realized that the local restaurant fare of steak and potatoes could get boring and on a trip to Indianapolis picked up Larousse Gastronomique at the local Border's Bookstore. And then I was hooked. I now own a nice, compact library of books on the topic. I mostly dip into them when I am stuck or just want a good read. I prefer the vagueness of a recipe by Elizabeth David or Apicius where using instinct and constant tasting determines the quantity of ingredients. When baking this is not true. I try never to read a cook book when I am hungry.

Here, in the polyglot that is Los Angeles, we are blessed with wonderful produce and a wealth of ethnic markets to boot. I cook with on-hand ingredients but mostly my fridge is bare as I prefer to buy ingredients the day they are to be cooked. My pantry is stocked with limited dried herbs and oils, various salts from England and New Zealand, and three kinds of rice. I buy meat in bulk from Costco and freeze it, coffee too. Vegetables are usually from Trader Joe's or Whole Foods and parsley and garlic from Gelson's market. Jon's Market is a wonderful resource for hard to find seasonal vegetables such as fresh fava beans in the spring, and Mexican limes. I buy spices at the Indian market in Atwater Village, and a trek to the Chinese market in Alhambra brings home wonderful random items. I prefer to cook with ingredients that are in season and always try to buy organically grown produce.

There is a passage in Fitzgerald's ˆTender Is The Nightˆ which I have loved since I was young. Nicole Diver walks through the garden pathways to her house on the cliffs at Tarmes. This takes a veritable biscuit for stunning prose. It is pure perfume and evokes pictures, memories and dreams. Evoking the senses is what cooking does for me, texture, aroma and taste all play a part but above all, the results of cooking, for oneself and others, makes the necessary chore of eating a spectacular event.