I Cook, and You Should, Too

Due to some inherent ambiguities in the act of cooking, macaroni and cheese was the first dish I ever cooked. I’d fumbled plenty of utensils before this, of course. I’d honed my Kraft, pouring measured milk and powdered cheese. Though that dish, in its permeating orange glow, never disappointed, I had not cooked it. I had prepared it- and that simple phrasing is all the difference. Moving the heat from 3 positions - off to high to off - hardly counts. If you have not grasped a knife in confidence or in doubt, then you are not cooking. If the box’s childish instructions have the final say, then you are not cooking. Not yet.

This new recipe demanded I prepare a “roux.” And, from browsing too many - and I sincerely mean far, far, far too many - websites, I learned that roux were best sniffed out. Oddly, and if you learned to prepare food the way I did, olfactory considerations had rarely mattered. I knew enough to understand that smell affects taste which affects my enjoyment of and engagement with the world, yet I had underestimated its importance in my kitchen. The prevailing smells of mac ‘n’ cheese, chemicals and 2% milk and Sriracha hot sauce, were not what I was seeking this time - a first. Instead, I was to stir and whiff until I felt the roux had become “nutty.”

I’ve made this recipe dozens of times, and I still have doubts about this moment. Such a full, overwhelming spectrum of the ordinary, the bland, occurs before you. Shifting hues of light, lightbrown, lightbrownlight, brownlight, and, if you’ve waited too long, brown. Placing the aromas seems impossible, still. What is the scent of a peanut? Or an almond? They share overlapping purposes, in trail mixes or spreads or desserts, but could you sort them? In their infancy, are they buried, or hoisted? Do you crack them, or squeeze? A humbling must occur each time I cook a roux. A reminder that such a comfort is built upon countless years of discovery and innovation and joy and stagnation. A recipe requiring technique  is a reaching out - a touch of the shoulder, a pat on the back, that I’ve learned not to dismiss. Our bright conveniences make me forget what we owe to those who took time to try, listen, and write. In this immeasurable way, demanding a sense I’d never honed, cooking reminded me to smell - to give my fullest attention.

Yet I’d heeded such a lesson before I began cooking. I was on a mountain carrying concrete.

Unless you trade in industrial amounts, concrete comes in a bag. It’s just dust, albeit a wily powder with messy proclivities. Either cut and open with caution, or prepare to be covered. I had a simple task, really: grab a 60 pound bag, carry the bag, open the bag, pour the bag, pour the water, watch the machine, and then deliver the now-mixed concrete. None of this work was technical. My uncle, a skilled craftsman, had already prepared and placed the rebar, after calculating the appropriate depth and width, after measuring the angles of the driveway, after deciding to build a concrete runoff for water in his driveway, after observing nature’s slow, seductive lull of destruction against his gravel. Each step, each consideration, his own. Each second guess simply a restart of his own reasoning. Alongside his command, I hauled bags of concrete - and bore witness.

I can’t resist the allusion, so here it is: We created from dust. Witnessing the birth of something, even something lifeless, something with a purpose you will later forget and maybe even ignore, was wondrous. Internally and alone, I complained about the work, sure, as sweat poured down my back and concrete crusted my pants, but while moving across the driveway with a new bag, I’d often glance at my uncle’s work. His simple tools swiveled, patted, swirled, perfecting the undefined moosh I’d just dumped out of our mixer. He would readjust some of the rebar, or push a little more gravel to the side, or widen the boundary planks. There was no box to consult, no instructions for comfort. We could not Google search the angle of his driveway, or the height of the ditch. Pouring and setting concrete, for all its heft and mundanities, demands you stay there, right there, alongside it.

It is not enough to say that, yes, of course concrete demands immediacy, for it will dry up soon enough. Either shape and form or neglect and observe as the lumps guide and settle themselves. But this is far from the only task that requires, and rewards, an active participant. The immediacy and attentiveness of creation was lost on me until the two summers I spent working alongside my uncle on that mountain. Looking back, though, it clearly stirred in the few factories where I sorted products or in the children’s library where I interned. The danger inherent in any form of abstract long-term work seems quite obvious, but modernity hustles us into forgetting it: You’re always here; it’s always right now. Analyzing a website’s clicks or a video’s views - is that action, or just reaction?

Many labors, like assessing a person’s personal finances or managing a schedule, impact and impart entirely differently than stacking pallets, or guiding a child to a book “just like Harry Potter - but better!”, or cooking. The former are absentee, actions done with intent and passed off as leaves in the wind. The shape, the task, is detectable and familiar, but its progress wanes, rises, and slides by forces which only science or statistics can comfortably describe. Resisting gales, concrete does not listen to the whims of the wind. A refusal to track a wandering leaf, to emotionally divest from flittering potential-driven labor, should not be confused with a now-popular denigration: “instant gratification.” Factories and warehouses are rarely gratifying. Hauling concrete was hardly fun. Rather, it’s a matter of registering a response from an indifferent world; it’s a reminder that things are mutable, that a hand, that a single finger, has influence. And potential.

My mountain time reminded me, crucially, that creation and work do not have to be original, though it can’t hurt. More critically, they must be active. And it certainly helps for them to be immediate. This realization became more acute after each time I’d leave my uncle and return to my job as a middle school teacher. Teaching is a profession of paradoxes - some of which are comedic and, appropriately, some of which are quite tragic. Set long term goals - teach in the moment; be strict - be nice; personalize your classroom - cover the Common Core State Standards. To perform, to be a great educator, requires astounding intellectual gymnastics. The minds which flex and bounce and vault around the profession effortlessly are to be envied; there are so few of them. And the event on which I eventually stumbled was one of the simplest of all: The students...How should we measure them?

Solidification in a middle-school-aged person is, if anything, a cause for concern. Students (at any age, probably) should present as social and cognitive sludge; young (perhaps naive) teachers attempt to shape, while experienced (perhaps cynical) teachers laugh at the unintelligible splatter patterns against their walls. I will admit to knowing both of those roles all too well. Although I enjoyed a Romanticized type of freedom during my five brief years - think Dead Poets Society without the heart or the sacrifice - the profession was enduring a corporate reckoning: more data, more personalization, more marketing. We were given tools for slicing and shaping, but our wheels spun and flailed impossibly; a montage made in fast motion, with no background track to mask the toil and pain and slop. My end of grade test scores - should I trust them? A day, a half closed window of time, measures a life’s progress? What about that time she was sick, or that time he was moved to foster care, or those lessons interrupted by fire drills or illnesses or farts?

Teaching, so I’ve been told by many outsiders and insiders, is about impact. About imparting something onto this world, onto its most profound creations: people. Yet I was not a psychologist, nor a mathematician, nor a philosopher, frankly. No person can calculate it all. There is no equation for a person’s growth. I felt the delusion of it each and every morning before I utilized every bit of my training to keep it all in by closing my classroom door. I felt I understood this matter pretty well at each and every professional development session, during which we discussed close reading or behavior management strategies. I felt it at failed parent-teacher conferences and on raucous returns from lunchtime. And when my feelings became cumbersome and shameful, I took them home - and began cooking.

I feel it important to assert, perhaps for my pride, that I myself am not immune, nor willfully ignorant. My resume is updated. I have printed reports, counted growth, and planned accordingly. But parts of me felt more complete on the final day of classes, when I’d have to stack and move the desks to the side of the room; when I’d spray the board with chemicals, hoist a paper towel, and struggle; when I’d remove posters and scrape off double-sided tape. Classrooms accumulate grime; some of it is visible, and some of it is not. Some of it is stubborn marker, yet some of it is a muttered curse word, an incomplete assignment, or a bag of Takis for breakfast at 8:42 AM. And to combat either requires vastly different thinking, different types of intelligence. The former drove me to cooking, but it has unquestionably helped me reconnect with the latter.

Life’s profound realizations and alterations seem to happen in this way, with the understated bluster of a “...fuck” as a bag of flour strikes the floor. I moved from Wisconsin to North Carolina, and from college to the workplace, and from Kraft to craft. I left my position as a succeeding student and became a failing teacher. And if I arrived home from a day’s work with enough energy to keep my pants on and my body upright, I was cooking. Or, at least, trying.

I began by adhering strictly to recipes, and, for the most part, I still do. It was risk mitigation, at first; now, it’s a nod of respect. I went through a phase in high school when I doused all of my meals - from turkey sandwiches to buttered noodles - in A1 steak sauce. My mom often patiently requested that I at least test the food before drenching it, and, though it’s been years since I abused A1, I still try to maintain this modicum of etiquette. Following recipes seems an homage, then. Usually, I try something 2-3 times before attempting deviation - to mixed results. I’ve dumped dill and parsley pasta directly into the trash, yet I’ve nearly perfected a personalized pulled pork spice blend. At times, I’ve doubted whether years of cookbook scavenging and furious, last-minute Googling is true “cooking.” I’ve arrived at my conclusion: Yes. Because though I am not the creator, per se, I impart the change. I perform, the world of my neon-lit kitchen responds.

There is hope, both tangible and tingly, in the state change of cooking. Yet, admittedly, my science is so outdated - is dicing considered a state change? A solid to a smaller, more usable solid? What about sauteing onions, or seasoning a steak, or reducing a sauce? Forgive me, Bill Nye, for though the terminology betrays the attention I diligently paid in middle school, I am content with this newly acquired definition of change, of atomic cause and effect. That such a minute attraction on a scale quite invisible can move me, can remind me of all the possibilities of the world, is a wonder. There was a time when I would have laughed at the term “culinary arts,” when the notion of having a dish move me to tears would have provoked only derision - not hope. Hope of finding such a dish, which I now assume it will be some type of chili, the earth’s finest food, seems so far from silly now.

We often bemoan that cooking is work. That it will take, that it will steal, our time. I, too, have silently denounced it. I’ve given flirtatious glances to the gluttony of restaurants on my commute home. I’ve slowed my steps near the Harris Teeter prepared food sections, taking in the salad bar and fried chicken and macaroni salad and persuading myself that it would be dishonorable, outright disgusting, not to indulge those hard-working chefs by taking the night off. But before surrendering to convenience, you should first listen to yourself - and remember your work. Conjure some concrete hauled up a mountain and its contrasts: a distracted child refusing to read, a spreadsheet about re-Tweets, or Microsoft Excel pages too numerous and baffling to be truly understood.

Perhaps your day was spent managing a social media account, or a finance project, or customer complaints. Have you made something today, or, like me, have you merely lost? For those of us who wonder what, if anything at all, we have added to the world today, I have found only one cure all, an antidote for life’s dazzling, immeasurable indifferences.

So, before you pick up your phone and pass on the work, spare a wondrance about what cooking could help you find again. And remember: The comfort in cooking is rarely about the result.