I spent the last two weeks traveling – a week in the U.S. Virgin Islands to attend a wedding, and a week in Santa Fe to attend the Glen Workshop.
Four years a New Yorker, I find that the food I eat while traveling in the United States rarely outshines what I can find in my own neighborhood (the major exception being the seafood available along the Massachusetts coast). There’s lots of good food everywhere else – I know that – and places like Seattle even outperform New York’s miserable coffee situation. It’s just that few cuisines are much more novel than what I can have anywhere at home.
Thankfully, the last two weeks’ culinary experiences were better than I’d expected. We drank local rum and ate West Indian food in the Islands (let me recommend Cuzzins and Gladys’s in Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas to you, and a little roadside shack called Hercules on St. John); the food in the cafeteria at St. John’s College was shockingly more than adequate (if you got to dinner early enough, you could even have your own personal stir fry prepared before your eyes); and we had several fabulous New Mexican and Italian meals in downtown Santa Fe (and sniffed one amazing French bakery).
But there was a delight drawing me toward home – not the restaurants, but the joy of home cooking. I work a little more than full-time and attend graduate school part time, and I live in the culinary mecca of the U.S., but I still prefer coming home after a long day, peering quizzically into the refrigerator, and figuring out what to do with all the extra squash. I relish warming some coconut oil with agave nectar, pouring it over a Le Creuset casserole dish filled with rolled oats, dried fruit, coconut, and nuts, and roasting it until our little apartment is fragrant with the sweetness.
Last winter my husband bought me a giant crockpot (you would have thought from my reaction that he’d given me diamonds), and I spent all winter fiddling with recipes for roasts and soups and other delicious concoctions. I am still working on getting my breadmaker to behave properly with whole wheat flour, but this summer I’ve made ice cream quite a few times (milk-based with black peppercorns, avocado-based with limes, greek-yogurt based with hardly anything else), and I’m about to tackle the adventures of making yogurt and cheese. I dip into Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in the way others read poetry.
Why am I going on about food so? Well, honestly, I do this regularly, when provoked (just ask my longsuffering friends and husband). But I was especially prompted this week by Nora Ephron’s newest, Julie & Julia, of which you’ve certainly heard, unless you’ve been too busy inhaling donuts and bad beer, Homer Simpson-style.
I won’t say too much about the film (though if you’re curious, check out my Paste review, which should post today). It’s not a cinematic miracle, but it’s not fluff, either. Rarely have marriages between grown-ups been portrayed with so much warmth, affection, and reality.
No: what I’ve considered the last few days is Julia Child’s impact, not just on culinary attitudes in the U.S., but on home cooking. Julia’s seminal book – Mastering the Art of French Cooking – along with her television show and general cheeriness, assured American housewives that with a little bit of practice and some gentle guidance, they, too, could become a “master” of their kitchen and feed their family some slightly exotic but still totally accessible food. (Julia marvels in the film while dining in Paris that the French eat French food all the time!)
In other words, good food made with fresh and tasty ingredients (and a lot of butter) didn’t solely belong in couture restaurants and Parisian kitchens. American women were intelligent enough to not need to resort to packages, mixes, and marshmallow fluff to serve their family good food. Vegetables do not grow in a can. Cooking from scratch is actually easy, and delicious.
This seemed particularly relevant to me this week, after having read Michael Pollan’s article about how home cooking has become a spectator sport. In some ways we’re more obsessed with cooking than ever – witness the popularity of Iron Chef and Kitchen Confidential, the growing interest in food issues, the entire existence of the Food Network – but apparently, we’re still not doing a whole lot of it. We have kitchens with fancy equipment and not a whole lot of idea what to do about it.
And so we resort to using mixes and frozen versions of things to approximate the real thing. Even Whole Foods, which is one of my favorite places in the whole world (she said somewhat shamefacedly), has attempted to corner the market on pre-made items. Not a bad thing: I have plenty of cans and boxes on my shelves, eliminating the need for me to always be making my own soup stocks and making it easier for my husband to make a quick box of mac-n-cheese if left to his own devices.
But something is lost – something that Julie & Julia touches on. I reveal no spoilers to say that Julie Powell finds some form of personal salvation for her and for her marriage by cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She confronts her personal demons: insecurity, self-absorption, boredom, and a complete lack of stick-to-it-ivity. Cooking (and blogging about it) is not just a way for her to indulge her love of good food. It’s a challenge that she can meet, and finish, and as she points out, it’s a way for her to learn to love her husband and her friends and even her own slightly grey-toned life.
In other words, cooking is the happy amalgamation of mathematic specificity and total creativity within boundaries. You’re limited by your know-how, your tools, and the ingredients you can afford and are in your pantry, or within easy reach. From that, you can comfort, inspire, arouse, make memories, and in doing so, both overcome the frustration of failure and feel the joy of success. Plus, you get to eat the results. What could be better?
Cooking at home isn’t hard, even for people who aren’t quite certain what good food is made of and can’t boil an egg. But it does require some gumption. And love. Because frankly, though people have been doing it for centuries, cooking for people you hate never turns out well – and I submit that the difference can be sensed on the palate.
Even when you’re too tired or harried to cook – and I certainly have been, this week – a dinner at home can be easily thrown together from no-cook ingredients. Again, the French instruct, with their patisseries and charcuterie and fresh produce in the streetside markets. And always, a bottle of wine.
Whatever the merits of the film, the merits of a dinner at home are more certain. But please excuse me. I’m shutting off the computer in favor of dinner: a bit of poached salmon, sausage and artisanal cheeses from our local grocery, a freshly baked baguette, assorted jams from the farmer’s market, stone fruit from the local CSA, a little dark chocolate we picked up at a chocolatier in Santa Fe, and a bottle of wine from the shop on the next block. Are you hungry yet?