I'm glad, somehow, to discover that somebody else reads cookbooks in bed. Adam Gopnik's meandering exploration of the meaning of cookbooks and the role of cooking instruction in our lives is well worth reading. This passage, which caps an appreciative discussion of Mark Bittman's cookbooks, jumped out at me:
Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman's approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book--item by item, and by rote--really learning how to cook? Doesn't it miss the social context--the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe--that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It's as if someone had written a book called "How to Play Catch." ("Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.") What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all'Amatriciana the next; it isn't about anything except having learned how it's done. Your grandmother's pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott's much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.
...we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all'Amatriciana the next; it isn't about anything except having learned how it's done. Hey! I resemble that remark! But what is the alternative? I mean, given that young people learning how to cook today are doing so in a culture in which nearly all the things that bound us organically to tradition -- in cooking, and in everything else -- have been severed. Severed by migration and the melting pot, severed by the industrialization of cooking and the disruption of labor patterns (e.g., frozen food and fast food displacing traditional home cooking, partly because of women entering the work force), severed by the evolution of culture away from authoritative orthodoxies (e.g., This Is How We Do It Here) toward ever-expanding choice and variety (e.g., You May Do As You Like).
We can complain about this, or celebrate this, or, illogically, both (that's my paradoxical stance), but it simply is, and we are left to figure out what to do with what we have, where we are, both in terms of time and place. Which is a highfalutin way of saying, "What do I, an amateur cook in Dallas, Texas, in the year 2009, with a heretofore unthinkable array of ingredients available to me, and a virtually infinite number of recipes near to hand, cook for dinner tonight?"
What we're left to do, if we're serious, is to try to cobble together our own traditions by grafting older ones onto our own culinary repertoires. It never would have occurred to my mother, for example, to open up an Italian cookbook and attempt smothered cabbage in the Italian style (e.g., shredded, and cooking down in olive oil and its own juices). We ate cabbage chopped and boiled to mush in salty water -- which for me, meant I didn't eat cabbage, because it tasted like glop; it was discovering that there are other, better ways to prepare cabbage that taught me to love cabbage. And I'm supposed to complain about this? As someone who loves to cook and loves to eat, I'm grateful for the variety available to me. And yet, I do my best to keep alive a repertoire of dishes from Louisiana and the Deep South -- but Gopnik's point about the importance of living tradition, one tied to place, becomes clearest to me when I make turnip or mustard greens in my Dallas kitchen. Nobody else in my family will eat them, and anyway, they taste odd when eaten away from my mother's table. Though greens may not be in your family's culinary tradition, you can probably think of a certain food that's so tied to region that the experience of it is strange outside the context of place.
This, I think, is what the Armenian Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian was getting at a few years ago when, in a session at the Russell Kirk Center, he expressed disdain for the crunchy con project of recovering the past. He was speaking about Orthodoxy in particular, which, if memory serves, he was arguing depends on traditions handed down unbroken from generation to generation. You can't simply sign up and lay claim to what never was yours. I disputed him at the time, because plainly Christianity is a universal religion ("neither Jew nor Greek..."), but I think now what he was trying to say is that the project of becoming an Orthodox Christian (that is, this kind of Christian and not that kind of Christian), insofar as Orthodoxy is a highly articulated and distinct form of Christian worship, is not something one can put on like a new suit of clothes. In that, I think he's right, in the same sense that one can learn how to make a perfect boeuf bourguignon, but absent the cultural context that gave rise to that particular combination of meat, liquid, vegetables and spices, one misses something important. If I serve turnip greens to my dinner guests, they may well enjoy the taste of greens stewed in pork fat, salt and pepper, but they bring something different to the table than older Southerners. I can't eat the things without thinking about how my grandmother's kitchen smelled when she was cooking them, and my grandfather, and how he for years would plant a giant patch of greens over on Mena's Hill, and opened it to anybody who wanted to come pick their own, and how he had a lockbox on a post at the edge of the field that said VOLUNTARY EXPENSE KITTY, for people who wanted to donate something for the greens they harvested, and how as a small boy I would stare at that box stored in my grandfather's old barn during the off-season, trying to figure out what kind of cat a voluntary expense kitty was, and appreciating the smell of dust and grease as my dad worked on the tractor nearby, and ... you see? A bowl of greens is, for me, not just a bowl of greens; it's a bowl of history. Even if my kids learn to eat and to love greens, they can never have those associations, because they didn't grow up with them.
It's also true with religion, and religious tradition. And politics as well.
And yet, the point I keep coming back to is: what else is there? Most of us, through no fault of our own, have had tradition taken from us. There are good things and bad things about this, but there's no getting around it. The only things left to us are to try to figure out how to capture as much of the past and particular traditions that seem true, beautiful and useful as we can manage, and to make them our own. So I read cookbooks, all kinds of cookbooks, trying to learn recipes for food that sounds good to me, and that I think my family will like. Given my catholic tastes, the recipes could come from just about anywhere. But this is what it means to be a home cook in this time, and in this place. It's postmodern cooking, the attempt to figure out what to do with yourself after modernism all but exterminated tradition in cooking and everything else. There's nothing left to do but to pick up the pieces from shattered cultures, and try to repurpose the detritus of the past into a usable and pleasing present
Look, it's a good thing that home cooks today can get everything they need to make cassoulet nearby, and that they would have the curiosity and the nerve to try to make cassoulet at home. Wouldn't you rather have cassoulet than tuna casserole? Speaking as the survivor of many a tuna casserole night in my youth, I say: hooray! Still, it's a special thing, indeed an singular thing, to pick up and go to France and eat cassoulet in the place where it was born, and people know in their bones what it is, and what it's supposed to be. I could boil a kettle of crawfish in Zatarain's seasonings, and my Texas friends would enjoy the flavor, but they won't bring with them to the table the same deep sense of south Louisiana-ness that the particular aroma of Zatarain's (pronounced "ZAT-uh-rans") evokes from people who grew up with it in Louisiana. That's a shame, but what are you supposed to do about it?
Anyway, read Gopnik's whole essay. It will explain to you by inference why liberal democracy doesn't work in Iraq ... and why, if it ever does, it will of necessity be a different kind of democracy than what we have, because it will have been nourished (or not) by local culture.
UPDATE: Kansas state Rep. Lance Kinzer imagines how re-articulating old stories that come down to us from our particular traditions might renew and revive exhausted political worldviews. Another way to put this: might the eating of cabbage at dinnertime be revived by learning how to prepare it in a way that tastes good to us today, even if it tastes different from what we grew up with?
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