Is cooking an art, or what is it?
Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin, the overquoted prince of gourmets whom I am, naturally, about to quote myself, insisted that Gasterea, muse of Gastronomy (his name for her, not mine) should take her rightful place beside Terpsichore and Calliope and the rest. The muses are, certainly, an odd lot already – I once thought they all presided over tidily-divided subjects, one for dance, one for music, et cetera, but of course that’s much too straightforward for goddesses, and about six of them were in fact muses of some sort of poetry, with a little agriculture, pantomime, and of course astronomy logically sprinkled in – so why not? Cooking is an art, after all. Except very often when it isn’t.
What is art? is a question that can be either delightful or maddening to discuss, depending on whether it is being asked by, let’s say, a lot of congenial artistic friends who have recently finished a leisurely and ample dinner and are just starting in on the roasted walnuts and the second bottle of wine, or a New York Times art critic or a curator at the MoMA, or a bunch of hungover 19-year-olds in a second-year photography seminar. It is a question I used to ask much more frequently, when I was younger and it seemed to matter for some reason. Now I’m not so sure. It seems to me that generally people tend to ask it most frequently it order to exclude things from the category, and thenceforth from consideration, and then almost as frequently when they want to include things in the category that no one else can comprehend, like a heap of trash or a banana. As with so many definitions, art is hard to define except by what it’s not, because what it is is inconveniently so many things that it’s difficult to compass all of them without drawing a circle so broad as to be meaningless.
Almost anything, after all, can be art but is not necessarily art. Painting, for example. Oh, of course painting is art…but is painting a billboard art, or the walls of a building, or a chest of drawers? Writing is an art, but what about the technical explanations for a textbook, or the campaign speeches of a fundraising politician, or the text inside the egg carton that gushes forth pastoral hymns to the happiness of the hens, or the pages of blither I write in my journal? Is the design of a block of condos or a giant silly mansion with gold toilets really an expression of the noble art of architecture? I don’t think so, myself; but the trouble is that I could, if I was inclined to be annoying, argue (if somewhat disingenuously) for the inclusion of any of these things in the category of art – or just as passionately argue for their exclusion.
Now that I am no longer a hungover 19-year-old art student who has to show up to a 9am workshop and critique seventeen closeups of somebody’s door, I can admit freely that I don’t really know what is and isn’t art. I can’t even say something clever about how it’s like the old saw about pornography – I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it – because I don’t know it when I see it. There’s quite a lot of beautiful stuff in this world that I consider art without question, like a lot of graffiti, which is actively scraped off the hallowed marble walls of Places of Art; and, conversely, the hallowed marble walls of Places of Art are quite often filled with what looks to me like somebody’s lazy idea they hit upon two hours before class started to explain why this brown bag holding yesterday’s lunch, which was all they could find to bring to class that day, is actually a commentary on poverty and the loss of innocence.
If I gave up asking this question, you may be thinking, and I don’t have an answer to it even if I hadn’t, why am I spending all these words on it now? This is a good question, and the answer is: because I have, only lately, begun to ask myself whether my fiendish love of cooking is perhaps after all an artistic practice. This is not an interesting question to me because I want to elevate the culinary arts, which don’t need my help, or because it is important to me to call myself an artist, particularly. I know perfectly well that I’m an artist, because I make weird things out of paper like tiny collages and giant papier mâché forests, for whatever reasons anyone has for making things like that – mainly, apparently, because I am moved to do so for some reason I can’t really explain in words, which is probably the best working definition of what “art” is that I’ve got.
No, it is precisely because I have always automatically and unthinkingly excluded cooking from my definition of myself as an artist that I am interested in it now.
I have loved to eat since I was very small, and loved to cook for almost as long as that; but I have always firmly denied the assertion that cooking, mine or anyone else’s, is art, unless you’re talking about the kind of abstract concept food they serve at places like El Bulli, where the dishes are not so much cooked as constructed, and you don’t eat them in order to feel full but in order to have an Experience. I don’t do that; ergo my cooking is not art. I don’t cook in order to invent, or express myself, or explore ideas, or even experiment with materials – at least, I don’t do any of those things consciously, the way I do with words or bits of paper. I do go to the market and look at the beautiful gleaming glossy piles of greens, and pick out whatever looks especially jewel-like or interesting and think of what to make with it; but I do not, for example, make dishes in order to express the deepest qualities of a turnip, or because I want my dinner guests to really think about rainbow chard. I just like rainbow chard. (Turnips I’m not so sure about.)
My father, who taught me to cook, also likes to vigorously deny that his food is in any way artistic. He makes good plain food, or so he claims, despite the fact that over the years he has served up everything from handmade kale-and-smoked-mozzarella calzones and pepper-crusted seared tuna on a bed of gently wilted spinach with shiitake mushrooms to marinated lamb shish kebab with saffron rice and hand-rolled mountains of sushi. Some people, I fear, would call this ‘fancy.’ Since this appellation is guaranteed to make him recoil in horror (sorry, Dad), I will stop short of making such an accusation myself, and note that although the dishes he concocts might seem lavish to the uninitiated, they are served without any kind of pretensions of grandeur. He makes them simply because he likes them. They are filling, nutritious, and delicious, which is all he asks. The fact that they wouldn’t be out of place on the laden table of King Solomon is entirely beside the point.
My parents, when they were young, both spent a lot of time in Jerusalem and then in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, two very good places in which to sample exactly this kind of food. I learned a great deal from my mother as well – for example, the fact that cabbage should be cooked in no water whatsoever, only stirred with butter and caraway seeds and a squeeze of lemon until it is caramelized, or the trick of piercing a leg of lamb all over and shoving bits of rosemary and slivers of garlic into the slits (a slow but worthwhile task), or how to start couscous by toasting the grains in the pan until they are very faintly gold, pouring over just enough boiling water to cover, slapping a lid on, and letting it stand precisely five minutes before fluffing with fork and adding butter and lemon. (This last is a source of argument with my father, who likes his couscous rather wetter, but it is one of the few points of bitter division in what is otherwise our fairly perfect gastronomic accordance.) These kitchen tricks are just the kind of thing that parents are supposed to pass down to their children, in the ideal world anyway, and I am lucky in my inheritance. But although these things are perhaps craftsman’s secrets, to me they are not art, any more than knowing how to mix oil paints is art. Knowledge of how to do things well is sometimes important to art, I think; but it isn’t what art is. Whatever art is, it is something to do with expression – or so it seems to me.
The food of my childhood was expressive, but not of ideas; what it expressed was mainly pleasure. In retrospect, this seems rather unusual. At home we ate together because we liked each other, and we ate good food because it made us happy, and I took this blithely and entirely for granted. I rarely ate meals at other people’s houses, because I was a relatively solitary child, and later, in high school, my best friend’s mother was dying of cancer and my boyfriend’s stepmother didn’t like me, so we all always ate at my house, and I only learned much later that many people either did not enjoy their family dinners or didn’t have family dinners. Almost every meal was homemade, because it was reliable and inexpensive, and my father loves reliable and inexpensive pleasures. Good food, and plenty of it, without any – I was going to write flounces, but certainly his habit of, say, occasionally bringing home baby squid to put in an ordinary pasta sauce might be considered to be a flounce. I might say “without fuss,” but I think making enough sushi for five hungry people is very definitely a fuss, so perhaps the point is that my father did things that were occasionally fancy or fussy purely because they were fun, and for no other reason. He was guided (it seems to me now) wholly by the question of what would be interesting and enjoyable for a single dad and his two hungry daughters and their assorted somewhat-underparented friends and hangers-on – and that was all.
That cooking might be an art, therefore, never really occurred to me. It was just something I liked. A lot. Increasingly. As I’ve grown older, a substantial portion of my time and energy have been given over to cooking. I lie in bed and plan menus. I read, for preference, books in which food is lavishly described. I spend hours in the kitchen because I am happy there, and the more time I spend the more I learn, so that now it is easy and not hard for me to get up on a Saturday and cure my own lox, knead and boil and bake a dozen bagels, turn out a batch of chai donuts and some ginger cake, and still have energy left over to think about whether I want to make a salmon chowder or a tart for dinner.
Why do I do this? I love eating, but I can’t possibly eat everything I cook. Mostly, I conclude, it is because I want the world to be full of good things. I am the kind of person who longs for a cupboard full of gleaming rows of jams and pickles, and a freezer full of herbs and broths, and crocks full of freshly-baked cookies, so that anyone who shows up will feel like they are stepping into a story about the Cauldron of Plenty. I like the way that cooking perfumes a house and flavors the hours of a day. I like to startle and delight guests who didn’t expect to be served quince paste from foraged quinces and olives we’ve cured ourselves – not (or so I tell myself) because I am a terrible show-off, but because I myself love the feeling of going to someone’s house and being served with something thoughtful and delicious. My friends could hoard all their pickled figs and hazelnut biscotti for themselves, but they’ve chosen to share them with me. This makes me feel that the world is abundant and full of love.
They do not need to serve me fancy food for this feeling to come over me. It’s just that food made and served at home often feels fancier than it really is, because it is an expression of time and care. In a society that pressures us to give up almost everything that makes us human in exchange for more convenience and efficiency in order to maximize the extraction of profit, making something by hand (even if it’s just mac and cheese) is a kind of sacrifice.
Taking time for someone is often a bigger gesture than it seems to be at the time. A few years ago I was having dinner with a friend, and we were talking about food, and she said to me, “Of course, I’ve never forgotten that ramen you made for me when I came to visit you” – four years previously. This surprised me greatly. Someone was so moved by soup that it still meant something to them years later? Yes, I knew she had been feeling fairly blue at the time, and I made soup for her because I wanted her to feel warmed and nourished and loved; and yes, I thought about what would be soothing for her rather wind-stripped soul, and settled on ramen as being the kind of fortifying fare that I would want in that condition; and yes, we had had a lovely evening together, which left us both feeling happier and more secure in spirit…but it had not occurred to me that the soup might have mattered.
Now I am inclined to believe that taking the time to make something that conveys the way you feel is part of what constitutes art. Food as love can be a stereotype or a cliché, especially in Jewish families (“Eat, eat! You’re so thin!”) but I saw how people blossomed at my father’s table – especially people who didn’t get served big lavish dinners at home. I learned subtly, and later much more explicitly, that giving people good things to eat makes them feel temporarily, at least, like the world is a less hostile and more beneficent place.
And what is art, if not the attempt, conscious or unconscious, to convey certain very deep feelings about the world? Although I still tend to default to thinking that art is a thing you produce, not a way of making, I have known for years (theoretically, anyway) that it’s the other way around. In my first semester of college I took one of those unobtrusively life-altering classes which often mark a good liberal arts education; this one was called “The Walking Arts” and it was taught by the late, great artist Robert Seydel, who asked us to explore walking as an act of art. We read Wanderlust, and Indian Tales, and bits of The Arcades Project, and watched strange Peter Greenaway films, and learned about some very quiet British artists whose entire practice consisted of walking through damp grass in a field at dawn. The question of what is art came up a good deal, and whatever the answer was, it was clear that a physical record was not a necessary factor. Of course I know this about things like live dance or theater performances, which often exist only as a shared memory of a moment in time: you taste them together and they’re gone. But for years I have persisted in excluding meals from this definition.
One reason for this has been pure utility: we have to eat every day, and I cook plenty of meals simply because I am hungry. But every photographer, surely, takes blurry photos of their cat sometimes; every dancer has to practice technique. Though we fetishize Leonardo da Vinci’s marginalia, or insist on posthumously publishing what are very clearly unfinished and awkward drafts of books by people like Harper Lee and Terry Pratchett, in fact drafts and sketches are interesting not because they are wonderful artworks in themselves but because they show the practice and process of making.
I know perfectly well that everything an artist makes is not art. I sincerely believe that it is very important to any artistic practice to make lots and lots of stuff that isn’t art but only the approach to it – clunky things, unfinished, rough, stupid, boring, dull things, uninspired, failed, frustrating things that don’t turn out and feel all wrong and don’t live up to your ideas at all. After all, if you want to grow flowers, you need a lot of dirt, and dirt is made of all kinds of crap: worm-castings, and decaying matter, and spores and nematodes and dead flowers and rotted leaves. Flowers (or fruits or trees or what-have-you) emerge from detritus, so you need detritus, and lots of it. If I feel silly, therefore, about how much I cook, it helps to think of it as artistic practice: sketching, stretching, so that occasionally I can produce something that conveys something profound.
Recently I have concluded that the things I cook become art more or less exactly how and when a painting becomes art, or a dance, or a piece of music: when it turns from material into meaning. Sometimes it’s just dinner. And yet sometimes what I cook matters to someone. Sometimes a dish really does manage to convey a piece of my heart into the world. Sometimes the Someone it matters to is only me; sometimes I’m the one who needs to be loved and nourished and laid down. Sometimes it’s the world I want to say things to. Sometimes it’s people – not everyone alive, but certain people, the people I love.
After one settles the burning question of what is art, the next interesting questions is perhaps why. I don’t mean in the broad theoretical sense of what is the psychological-biological imperative behind the human drive to create, which is a question I frankly don’t care about very much; I mean why do I make art? What is it I feel called to express?
And of course the answer is that the thing I feel most often called to express is my very firm belief that the world, for all its grief and anguish, is also full of delight. Since the grief and anguish are more or less guaranteed, I tend to feel that delight is what makes the whole business of living worthwhile. We’ve got to make good things for each other; we’ve got to honor and uplift the joyous parts of our nature, for it’s those parts that tend and heal and help and share and mend. So it’s not surprising that my cooking might be an expression of that belief, or that occasionally, when stars and weather and schedules align, I manage to serve someone else a meal that helps them come to the same conclusion.
In Isak Dinesen’s story Babette’s Feast, which was made into one of the most beautiful films ever created about the magic of eating together, one woman tells another: “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: give me leave to do my utmost!” If my utmost lies in the way that I can make someone feel with a few handfuls of herbs and a little butter, that is simply how it is. You don’t choose your muse; she chooses you. Gasterea, bless her plump little heart, has apparently chosen me. Perhaps artistic fulfillment, in the end, is a matter of knowing which muse has called your name, and following after her with your lyre, or spraycan, or wooden spoon in your hand.
What recipe is a cry from the heart? This is a steep question to answer. I think it will have to be a soup, for when one is weary and heartsore and forlorn there is nothing like a soup to comfort and sustain the soul. I personally think a spiritually soothing soup is one with a lot of warm and savory broth, which you might as well drink from a large warmed mug as eat with a spoon. This one is simple and good, quite easy to make, and well-suited to a chilly spring night when your feet and heart can’t seem to warm up. The broth is savory and peppery, with a richness that is sort of surprising for how little actually goes into the soup.
Soothing Mushroom Barley Soup with Black Pepper & Thyme
INGREDIENTS
3 tablespoons good butter
1 small or ½ large yellow onion
Salt to taste
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves[1]
½ pound brown mushrooms (a little old and wilted is fine)
4 large cloves of garlic
Fresh-ground black pepper to taste
A generous dash (perhaps ½ teaspoon?) Worcestershire sauce
1 small fistful chopped parsley leaves
½ cup barley (pearl or hulled; hulled will take a bit longer, but I think it tastes better)
⅓ cup heavy cream
METHODIn a medium heavy-bottomed pot with a lid, melt the butter while you finely mince the onion. Add the onion and a good pinch of salt to the butter, stir well, and sweat – don’t brown! – the onion until it is translucent and tastes very nice. While the onions sweat, roughly chop the ½ pound of mushrooms; add them to the pot when the onions are soft, along with the tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves, stir well, and let bubble over medium heat.
While the mushrooms sauté (you want them to be gently releasing their juices) slice the 4 garlic cloves in half lengthwise, then slice them very thin, into little chips. Add to the pot with a very generous amount of black pepper and the generous dash of Worcestershire sauce. Add more salt as needed; everything should taste delicious but perhaps a bit strong. When the mushrooms have released lots of juice and the liquid in the pot is bubbling merrily, add the handful of chopped parsley and enough water to make everything look somewhat soupy – the mushrooms should float a little without looking drowned. (Think of the way the tofu and seaweed bobs about in a small bowl of miso soup and you’ll get the idea.) More salt and pepper should be added judiciously, so that a spoonful of the liquid tastes good to you. Toss the ½ cup of barley into the pot, stir well, pop the lid on, and allow to simmer gently 5-10 minutes.
After some minutes, taste the liquid, add a cup or two more water, a bit more salt & pepper, put the lid back on, and let simmer gently 40 minutes or longer, until the barley is chewy. Just before serving, stir in the ⅓ cup of heavy cream. Serve in heated bowls (I boil water in the kettle, pour it in the bowl to let them heat through, then pour off the water just before serving). Alternatively, serve in mugs, not bowls, and curl up under quilts to drink slowly.
[1] It is worth buying a large bunch of thyme sometime when you have half an hour to spend, and stripping all the little leaves carefully off the twigs and into a small jar which you keep in your freezer. You can simply reach in for a pinch any time you need it, without having to always remember to buy it or forgetting to use half the bunch and having it go moldy in the back of the fridge. If you do this, get the stouter, woodier thyme with smaller leaves and sturdy stems if you can – it’s much easier to strip the leaves.
Do you enjoy this kind of thing? Why not subscribe and get an email when there’s more?
