This is an essay about cooking and all the shame and rage and frustration that can accompany this art. Writer Sarah Miller describes her desire to be loved and appreciated for her fig galettes, and her decision to quit cooking altogether.
Sarah is the author of the novels Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl, and she contributed to the bestseller The Bitch in the House. She has written for Details, Lucky, Marie Claire, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.
Also thanks to Ralph Henson of KVMR in Nevada City California for recording the story.
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The This American Life mockery is hilarious, and what’s scary is that it totally works here: no matter how overblown the musical swells are, I find my heart swelling along with them! Besides that, there is a lot in what Sarah Miller is saying to truly love and cringe over. Particularly that trying to prove yourself and your worth through cooking is not just contemporary artisanal gastronomy crap, but something far deeper, that started way before we were born. Someone should have told Sarah’s mother about Peg Bracken. When the whole world was going nuts for Julia Child and her insanely complicated recipes, Peg Bracken came along with the “I Hate to Cook” Cookbook, which basically was like: you’re drunk, you have friends over for 3 AM “dinner,” throw a can of this and a can of that into a pot, heat it up and there you go, problem solved.
I’m a pretty good cook. But I made dinner for some friends a couple weeks ago and it was just awful. I don’t know what happened. I made lamb and it was dry and tasteless and awful and the worst part was that no one could really say anything. I mean what are they going to say? And I didn’t want to talk smack about the lamb during dinner but it also seemed so awful NOT to acknowledge it during dinner. So we all just soldiered on through the meal. And then after everyone left I spent two hours cleaning the kitchen and weeping. Why does food make us feel like such FAILURES when it goes wrong? Well anyway. Thank you for this story. It made me feel a tiny bit better abotu my lamb debacle.
Galette us entertain you? You have.
I used to love to cook for others. And I was always good at it. It came from having to cook for myself much of my childhood, and loving to eat delicious indulgent food. Fast forward a few decades. I used to cook for my last girl friend, and she loved my cooking. She was always asking me to make something for her. She especially loved my omelets (I do make awesome omelets). Anyway, she left me, as these things go. And for the life of me, I cannot cook for other people, any more. I dread potlucks. I always manage to screw something up, like the time I made tabouleh (the very best tabouleh ever) and I screwed it up by bone-headedly putting in 3x too much white miso, which normally gives the tabouleh a wonderful subtle sweetness, but this time just made it way too salty.
It’s like the opposite of Like Water For Chocolate. Where instead of crying tears of unfulfilled passion into the food imbuing it with ambrosial fabulousness, I end up crying because all of my cooking efforts are fickly thwarted by the gods, for whom it pleases them to caress a few and molest everyone else (from a wonderfully wry quote by someone I can no longer remember)
I used to cook for the masses at Harvard, feeding 5000 people. The first thing I lost was my appetite. The next was a finger tip. The main kitchen was a day ahead of the five dorms, connected by underground tunnels. It was 1969 and I was 19 with no interest in food management, but there I was, cracking five gallons of eggs into a bucket,two hands at a time. Lots of shell fragments fell in but I never had a complaint. Onions were another thing, peeling fifty pound bags. The onion smell went into your skin and would not wash off. It had to wear off in the following days. Henry Kissinger was there and someone put a bomb in his desk drawer so that suddenly the place was crawling with guys with short hair and sunglasses. Most of the kitchen help were Portuguese from Portugal, brought over by Harvard and there were no union problems. We were told not to speak to the students unless spoken to first but this was no problem as the kitchen help did not peak English. I was let go for talking to my cousin who was going to Harvard in something like Renaissance Italian something or other. I spoke first, showing her my missing finger tip and so was kicked out of Harvard
paul – you kick some serious ass my friend