Why Culinary School
Jul 12 2018A staple of my mis-en-place in the kitchen has always been Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking.
I grew up with the unique luxury of homecooked meals - both my parents were excellent cooks, whether pulling together a weeknight meal from whatever was in the pantry, or creating a complete Thanksgiving feast. My first practical cooking skills I learned from my father - he taught me to grill, to carve a turkey, to cook a bolognese. But above all he taught me the true joy of cooking - putting your heart and soul into a meal for other people to enjoy.
Our kitchen was always stacked with cookbooks. I fatefully extracted The Joy of Cooking from my parents’ cramped bookshelf and it became my first culinary textbook.
Its corners are now fraying at the edges, its pages tell stories through the smudges and stains of hundreds of meals and experiments past. It is dated in the best possible way - with crafted instructions, quaint sketches, and commentaries on cuisine - hearkening to a simpler time of homecooking, untainted by the visual demands of an Instagrammed world.
Its recipes are simple and quick to reproduce, its language casual and approachable - in stark contrast to the much more formal and complex recipes common in other cookbooks of its day.
But at the heart of The Joy of Cooking lies tragedy.
It was first published in 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression. Rombauer’s husband had just committed suicide, leaving her with two children and dwindling savings.
The Joy of Cooking was not just a cookbook - it was a treatise on self-reliance and transcendence through creation, of finding peace and meaning through food.
Where Joy of Cooking brought me into the light, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential was my introduction to the equally-captivating dark side of the craft.
Kitchen Confidential was a no-holds-barred look into the real restaurant industry. It was an insider’s guide to how restaurants actually ran - that orders for “well-done” meat would get the worst cuts, that fish on a Monday would often be specimens from the previous week’s deliveries.
And it was a study of the people behind the stove. Bourdain’s kitchens were pirate ships, staffed with misfits and bandits, wildly intense, often cruel, slightly masochistic, but relentlessly obsessive about good cooking.
Kitchen Confidential made cooking cool. It was after reading Kitchen Confidential in high school that I decided I wanted to go to culinary school. I applied to attend Le Cordon Bleu at the same time as applying to “typical” American universities. I ended up abandoning the cooking dream, substituting my knives for a keyboard and studying computer science instead of culinary arts. But I never let go of my cooking passion, and finally this summer found my chance to check Le Cordon Bleu off my bucket list.
The day I landed in Paris to start culinary school, I found out Anthony Bourdain had committed suicide in France.
It is easy to romanticize cooking.
Cooking is the power, if just for a moment, to make people happy.
It is a science, rewarding an understanding of ingredient chemistry, melting qualities, and boiling points - and an art, blending color and form, texture and composition to convey something that is greater than the sum of its parts. A good meal requires patience, planning, occasionally quick thinking in disaster mitigation, and of course, great company.
Preparing, enjoying, and understanding food - and its partner, wine - is an intellectual pursuit of dissecting and carefully planning a creation, and a visceral, hedonistic appreciation for the creation itself.
Cooking lets you travel the world, from the curries of India to the paellas of Spain, all in your own kitchen, and share your travels with others.
Cooking lets you wander through time, from the traditional French recipes passed down through generations, to the cutting edge of molecular gastronomy and sous vide. I’ve met Vatel, Escoffier, and Childs through the pages of their books and their recipes.
But I don’t think any of this is why chefs cook. Chefs cook to fill a void - and not just in the stomach.
Cooking is one of our last remaining connections to the real.
We live increasingly detached lives in an increasingly abstract world, unrecognizable from our chimpanzee past for which our bodies and minds are still adapted. We buy, we don’t make. We communicate through glass.
But three times a day we still have to shove food into a hole in our face.
Even this we have abstracted away. We’ve created Pop Tarts. Soylent. The Chicken Nugget.
Cooking is one of the few acts we have left that is real, that is raw. It is one of our last points of connection - with the earth, with each other. It is one of the last things we do from scratch.
Holding meat over fire set us apart from our primate cousins. Cooking reminds us of this first act of human agency - that we have power to manipulate a cold, indifferent world, to make it just a little bit better.
Cooking is also fundamentally impermanent. Where other art forms are designed to last, meals are made to be consumed. Implicit in cooking is an acceptance of our own transience - that we can enjoy something in the moment and then allow it to cease to exist.
Rombauer and Bourdain shared a passion for cuisine. But they also shared a darkness. Their passion is not without struggle, not without pain.
In the face of great tragedy, of personal strife, or just of first-world ennui, cooking lets us return to our base human instinct: the drive to make our survival just a little bit more pleasant. What else is there.