Contextual Texture
Sometimes I try to break it down into its component elements. What do I miss? Pole and yoga, restaurants and bars, dinner parties, concerts. So I take a YouTube yoga class, recreate dishes from restaurants, eat dinner in front of the computer with a bunch of friends on Zoom. But what do I miss? Putting nuts into pretty bowls before dinner guests arrive. Biking through an unfamiliar part of Queens where I’m drawn into a bakery that smells good. Running into a friend I didn’t know was going to be at the show. The feeling of coming back home. It’s the whole thing. It’s the way the moment exists in relation to the ones before and after it. Food, drink, music, movement become meaningful in the context of their environment. The broken elements don’t add up to the whole.
I’m learning about bread this week. Flour, water, and salt. Utterly unbelievable how those few elements, combined in various ways with various temperatures and times, transform into the myriad of forms they do. I made thin, chewy Mandarin pancakes for moo shu vegetables by dropping boiling water into a small pile of flour and salt. I picked up the tiniest bit of sourdough starter from a bakery I love in Bushwick, and through regular feedings it’s grown into a fragrant bubbling behemoth over in its corner of the kitchen.
The book I’m reading (Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast - not to be confused with last week’s Book of Four Nouns) says to think of time and temperature as having an inverse relationship, or being on a seesaw, which I’ve found helpful. Warm doughs develop quickly, cooler doughs more slowly. When bread is rising, yeast is replicating and producing those gases which you can see in the bubbles, and it’s done rising when there’s no more oxygen in the dough so the yeast can’t keep replicating. Higher temperatures encourage yeast replication, which is why the dough rises faster. If you’ve made that No-Knead NYT bread that everybody has (me included) you’ll notice that it has very little yeast and a very long rise at room temperature. The small amount of starting yeast and low-ish temperature are what allow it to rise for so long, letting the flavor develop. The flavor mostly comes from fermentation during that time.
There’s actually a whole other thing going on when mixing boiling water with flour, which is a technique that shows up frequently in Chinese cooking, like those pancakes. The hot water blasts apart the starch molecules in a process called starch gelatinization that usually only occurs once the dough is in the oven. The starches absorb all the water and form long polysaccharide networks that are an alternative to gluten networks. This makes the dough very soft, which is why I could easily roll it out paper-thin, but actually not stretchy, in that if you pulled on it it wouldn’t snap back to its earlier shape.
It’s not magic the way breads form. It’s complex as hell, as evidenced by all the vocabulary to digest and the enormous difference between a mediocre and incredible piece of bread. Or, another way to look at it, is that everything is complex when you zoom in closely enough, but we’ve learned a lot about this particular region of complexity and we’re pretty good at manipulating it to get what we want. We’re so attuned to texture that we can tweak slight differences in gluten formation and create totally different experiences of the ingredients.
Returning to comparing my days in quarantine versus before, and I think the difference is one of texture. Similar elements of the day don’t feel the way they used to in our new context. Not really “broken,” though. Sometimes slower and more subtle. Each day is as much a part of our life as the days we had before. Maybe the metaphor here is a layer cake, or the Earth’s strata. Indelibly warped by the forces of the environment, but just a layer, with one beneath and one following.
What I’m reading
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Through alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere. This is quite different from merely using others as part of a life world — for example, in eating and being eaten. In that case, multispecies living spaces remain in place. Alienation obviates living-space entanglement.
Tsing is not, in fact, talking about the Internet here — although it would be easy to extend this concept to the way we’re carrying out our social and professional lives online. She’s on the topic of supply chain capitalism, and particularly the way agricultural goods and agricultural workers become commodities. We can eat things that have no relation to each other or to us in space and time, gathered by people who are so replaceable (to the system) that they could be slaves imported from Africa or migrant workers from Mexico, and it wouldn’t much impact the process. This section shows up in the book (more about the book in my earlier post) because matsutake don’t lend themselves to plantation-style farming, and are not as easily commoditized.
I saw one of those almost-too-cute quarantine stories the other day, about a Philadelphia restaurant owner who FaceTimes customers before and after their delivery, to guide them through the menu and then check up on how their food is. It’s a little much (I hope those customers are tipping very well) but raises the question of what you lose when ordering delivery from a favorite restaurant. The decor and music, the smell of the food being cooked, seeing what other people have ordered, the server who brings out your dishes and tells you about them. Even before the virus, we were already seeing the restaurant industry’s daunting turn toward “ghost kitchens,” where food is prepared in kitchens unattached to any customer-space, and subsist on delivery apps. The Japanese or Mexican food you order could come from the exact same place, but you’ll never have to see it. As in industrial agriculture, the food and food workers become completely interchangeable, and thus easy to scale for enterprising entrepreneurs.
I’m glad people are supporting the restaurants they love, but I hope this is an opportunity to notice why you love them. When you gingerly open takeout containers to throw them away and shovel the nachos onto your dinner plates, it becomes very clear that it was never just about the food. As others have alluded, this virus and its devastating effect on restaurants might come as something of a reset for an industry that already had a lot of problems. Will that reset look like retail or journalism, another wave of independent organizations swallowed by the venture capitalists, relying on big money and conglomeration for stability? Or, now that we know what it feels like to lose a sense of place connected to food, can a new set of businesses spring up that are centered on place and community and responsibility toward the people who serve us?