Just Taste
Tasting as a skill, a pleasure, or nothing more than what it is
My recipe for no-recipe Vegetable Fritters was featured in this Washington Post article about “Chaos Cooking” . This is a hint of what you can get through my No-Recipe cooking workshop, which has a new cohort launching January 18th. For three consecutive Wednesdays, we’ll meet up over Zoom to practice intentional improvisational cooking in our own kitchens. Here’s an idea: you can gift the workshop to someone who might like it!
While we’re here in the parenthetical, I wanted to make one brief push for a paid subscription. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, or want access to my whole library of recipes, consider clicking that button below. I think the recipes I share are pretty fun and deviate just enough from the classics to be interesting. You could assemble a cookie box, for example, made up of lemon ginger turmeric snickerdoodles, chocolate cherry poppyseed oatmeal cookies, almond jam dots, tahini tigernut cookies filled with surprises, and almond cardamom cookies.
Seven adults and one baby were completely zeroed in on the spoon in my hand as it zoomed towards the baby’s mouth. He’d been obsessed with anything we put into our own mouths for weeks now — staring accusingly at us during dinner and trying to grab potatoes off the plate my waitress handed me at brunch — so we decided it was finally time to let him try food. We made a big batch of congee and invited some friends over for the occasion. Sonali had told us about Annaprashana, which is a Hindu ceremony in which a baby’s first feeding includes a sample of all the major tastes, so we created our own version of the ritual by topping his spoonfuls of congee with a drop of soy sauce, a squeeze of lime, a smear of well-chopped gai lan. As the spoon touched his lips, he made a pained face that quickly transformed into something more like intense concentration. Like the dog that caught the car, he didn’t know what to do with the food being offered. His mouth opened and closed fish-like. His fingers got involved, awkwardly grabbing at the spoon to spread its contents onto his chest and then drifting into his mouth for a suck, which further hindered the food’s journey all the way in. Some of it got tasted, though. The lime seemed particularly exciting. His chorus of admirers gasped and laughed and sighed with every new bite. All of us were held by the drama of, What must it be like? To taste these tastes for the first time? When a moment ago you couldn’t conceive of this dimension of sensation? What an absolute trip.
“I didn't cook because the kitchen was my grandmother’s domain. No one cooked in her kitchen. I’d lay the table and I’d be her official taster.” “So what's funny about the whole Nonna thing is that I never learned any cooking from her. I learned through tasting her food.” The first quote is from Natasha, in her Secret Ingredient interview about cardamom, and the second comes from Paige, when she talked to me about eggplant. It struck me that I got almost the exact same quote from two of the best cooks I know. Neither cooked much until they were adults, but both spent their childhoods learning about it through tasting food made by a loving hand with many years of tradition and experience behind her. During our interviews, they described to me their parallel journeys of trying to recreate these tastes that were fundamental to them, painstakingly bringing to life something that would otherwise be gone from the world.
Where does this taste-knowledge reside inside us? It’s not explicit how-to knowledge. It’s not always embedded in a story: I was there, with those people, at that time. Tastes are often associated with people and places and emotions, but I would argue that our knowledge of the taste itself is something distinct, drawn from an accumulation of specific memories. A taste is not easy to translate into words, which is why I struggle in recipe writing to avoid repeating “savory” and “satisfying” over and over again. Taste is that ooey-gooey qualia stuff, that subjective-stuff that boggled my little mind when I was a kid (“How do you know that what you perceive as yellow is the same thing as what I perceive as yellow?” my dad used to ask us). It dwells inside us with such personal specificity that we feel a kind of fierce ownership of our taste-memories that I don’t think we extend to our other senses.
Taste is a sensation and a reward, but lately I’m thinking about it as a skill and practice as well. It has more to do with cooking than any knife skills or hours clocked at culinary school. It tells us when things are “right” —everything else is just an accumulation of techniques that might help us land there. I’m working these days teaching kids cooking and I’ve realized that part of my job is to help them practice tasting. I’ll start out a class handing out bits of ingredients, like dill or pumpkin seeds, and ask them to tell me what it tastes like. The other day I got a classroom to close their eyes while my kitchen assistant and I distributed cups of lemon and lime water, then I had everyone take a sip and guess which one they had. We talked about the slight differences between the two. Whenever they get the chance, the tastes they choose are overpowering — swimming in honey or salt or with so much lime juice their eyes crinkle up — and I don’t try to change that, but I do ask them to taste, often and attentively, and I hope it’s creating new nodes in their brain somewhere.
“Taste” is different from “tastes,” as in, tasting attentively doesn’t have to be about liking a food or even forming an opinion on it. One definition of flavor is: taste + aroma + expectations + memories. That implies that taste is something more primary: an experience detached from expectation, which is hard to imagine. The way Miro is tasting now is probably the most open a person can get in terms of entering into an experience. He’ll develop preferences soon enough (already, banana is Good) but for this brief moment he isn’t tasting in order to judge or compare. What if we could still taste like that? Like, the next time you take a bite of something, whether it’s an apple or a potato chip, to just taste it? The potato chip isn’t a guilty pleasure, the apple isn’t a Fuji or Pink Lady or Granny Smith. You don’t have to bother trying to describe it or make a decision about whether you want another bite. Just taste.
Just taste as you go into the holidays, especially if you have the opportunity to eat something that a friend or family member cooks for you. Just taste as you stand over the stove perfecting your own dish. Taste without judgement, for the ecstatic trip of pure sensation, and taste with judgement, to learn what you like.
Have a sweet, salty, vivid holiday, and I’ll see you back here in 2023.
What I’m Cooking
Chocolate Cherry Poppyseed Cookies (v)
These are the chewy oatmeal cookies of my dreams: tart and bitter from the cherry and dark chocolate, with an extra bit of texture from poppyseeds. Please sprinkle more salt on top than in this picture (I ran out of Maldon!). They’re also vegan, but that’s almost incidental; even butter-lovers will like them.
