Cooking

I do not cook, which is certainly not to say that I cannot cook. Obviously, this statement does not signify either that I have never cooked or that, in future and under certain circumstances, I would not perform the tasks that result in nourishment-- or its minimum approximate, sustenance-- as fashioned of two or more ingredients and altered by heat. That is my definition of cooking, allowing for one caveat: water counts only as a half-ingredient. A potato and water alone do not make vichyssoise. Besides, all food contains water, at least in its chemical nature, even “dried” food like pasta or rice, so the addition of water does not really equal the addition of another ingredient but rather the restructuring by degree of a present element.

Why so complicated, one might ask? Why so many opinions about something in which I claim not to indulge? Clearly, I have lots of thoughts and judgments about food and cooking. Leaving aside these questions and the other obvious one of why or how it is that I do not starve to death, I should amend my leading statement: I do not cook in life, but I do cook, sometimes, in my mind. There is no rocket science, per se, involved, nor any special powers of mystic transmission: long ago for a brief while I cooked a great deal and thereby learned how some things complemented each other, or not, and what happened under particular circumstances.

Unfortunately, disaster was my most reliable dish. Practically everything I made was astoundingly terrible. This sad fact was the inevitable result of then being almost constitutionally incapable of following a recipe. A kind and generous observer might have said that I had a curious mind and that would have been entirely true, though not the entire truth. I would decide to halve the sugar in a given recipe, forgetting that the prescribed amount might constitute a necessary quotient regarding the interaction of other ingredients, something besides flavor; I would “forget” to execute what, for no reason at all, I considered an unnecessary step; I would toss in extra ingredients or extend processes (“whipping” comes to mind without the beneficial association of “fluffy”) which were bound to eventuate in food that was inedible or ugly or would render a texture so awful that despite being tasty (a rare occurrence), the dish was hopelessly unacceptable.

I made many discoveries by making a huge number of mistakes. My fearless or foolish bent for creativity and novelty at least ensured that I did not make the same mistake twice, so, in a sense, I was always learning something new, if only what not to do. Then, I stopped cooking altogether and became an armchair chef, which was different from a back seat driver only in that everyone, myself included, was spared having to eat my cooking. Several friends who enjoyed spending creative and productive time in the kitchen were valiant and durable enough to bear my opining about spices added or subtracted and even more bizarre hunches about “substitution”; to everyone’s surprise my ideas were often good, as long as I was not the one putting them into effect. Cuisine became for me an abstract enterprise. I mentally altered recipes I tore out of magazines and saved in looming stacks or used as bookmarkers, for a while, until I threw them away. Eventually, freed from any active relationship with the oven or stove, I turned to gardening, of a kind.

Last spring I scattered an entire envelope of miniscule sweet basil seeds-- hundreds, maybe thousands, each black dot barely the size of a speck of dust or a particle of mist-- into a narrow plastic box dangling from my fifth floor living room windowsill that I had filled with very dubious looking high-tech potting soil. Could anything really spring to life and grow in this wad of filthy lint that appeared chemically configured even to reject moisture?

I expected nothing, or, rather, I expected to go to the nursery a month or so later when it would be warmer and to buy basil plants for the barren and forlorn box. I did remember occasionally to water the dirt, though this was a gesture that quickly lost any relationship to cause and effect and took on the vague piety and artful rhythms of an atavistic ritual that was in itself pleasing to perform at random frequency. I had almost entirely forgotten about the seeds.

I was neither a faithful nor a consistent caretaker of my modest realm of nature. Despite (or perhaps, because of) my negligence, the little aerial garden flourished beyond imagining. Bushels of intensely fragrant basil characterized by a surprising and pleasing musky undertone of wild ginger perfumed the air throughout the apartment. Inspired, I began to cook, sort of. I thought of making Sweet Basil Iced Tea. Using the crop from my field, as it were, along with water, lemon juice and sugar, someone else followed my suggestions, as I must admit I probably would not have, and the result was delicious.