Cooking at Home
Occasionally, people ask me if cooking professionally has made me tired of cooking at home, and the answer is absolutely not. The best thing about my extra days off from the restaurant right now is that I have enough time to cook. I’ve got barely enough energy to lift myself up off the couch but that tiny spark is enough to propel me to the kitchen to bake a dense, nutty banana bread that warms and energizes me like nothing I can buy at a store (recipe below) or to make dal full of garlic, ginger, spices, and lots of ghee. I’ve got powerful nesting impulses lately — fall and pregnancy double whammy — and the only places I want to spend time are on the couch or in the kitchen.
The most pleasurable cooking feels like painting to me, or at least what I imagine painting to be. It’s this synthesis of circumstances and ingredients and a lot of prior experience and memories, punctuated by a stroke of insight: a vision of the food that guides you to exactly what to do. A perfect moment that leads to perfect food. What a restaurant attempts to do is freeze that perfect moment, which presumably occurred at some point during the executive chef’s testing, and then replicate it over and over. It gets broken down into steps, each of which comes with a margin of error, and then made as efficient as possible so that it can be churned out at the typical breakneck speed. I get the feeling now when I go to a restaurant that what I’m eating is a copy of a copy of a copy of a perfect thing.
In a restaurant, you have to work your way up to the esteemed position of being the originator of anything. That’s the distant reward of years of pot-slinging and deep-frying, followed by years of managing other cooks, until eventually you’re opening your own restaurant or carry almost all the responsibility of someone else’s. It’s enough to make you appreciate home cooking even more. It’s such an admired accomplishment in a restaurant — I don’t know how she comes up with it! She’s a genius — to create a new remarkable dish, that it’s kind of amazing that you can do that at home too, no team or title required.
Cooking at home is everything there is to love about cooking, without the prestige. There have been geniuses perfecting their crafts in our homes for years and years, most of them women, mostly unrecognized — except for those adulations by famous chefs about their mother’s or grandmother’s cooking, in which the mother or grandmother is treated more like a muse, for some reason, than a teacher or mentor. In a society that values scale above all else, perfect food shared by a few people in a home is barely noteworthy. Luckily there are different rewards than reviews and stars.
The work I’ve been doing so far is very different from what drew me to it, but I don’t regret my decision to start cooking professionally. I still love feeding people more than just about anything. I think there are ways I’ll be able to transition my career closer towards the creative work I find at home, probably by starting my own small enterprise of some sort. I have no need for the work I do to be replicated endlessly the way it is in a restaurant. But I like to imagine that the stuff I make, for a pop-up or catered event, will be a few iterations closer to that moment of its origination.