We've been cooking. We've been cooking a lot. We made a one-day-a-week restaurant in a pizza joint. We went down to California and cooked food for 2,000 at Phelp's Winery. We've taught cooking classes. I taught a class on dim sum. I've served, I've cooked, I've chefed, I've bussed. I've marveled at my husband's ability to remain cool and charming through equipment breakdowns, food shortages and my unwaivering inability to wait tables.
Now we're opening a restaurant.
From when I started this weblog until now, my perspective on food has changed quite a bit. Life on the other side of the apron is a laborious one. Food, as it goes out the kitchen door, isn't as interesting as when it arrives at your plate. Cooking for reals is hard. In reading other weblogs about food, I have found a severe and passionate hate for most food writing. From the New York Times to the lady who insists on calling herself girl, I have learned to roll my eyes away from the pages upon pages of food drivel.
It is no compliment to call someone a foodie. Indeed, should you be called a foodie by someone wearing a white apron, you are being sneered at.
So, how does one write about food without turning the subject into a precious little princess never to be treated like the dirty little commodity that she is?
This, my friends, is something that I have wondered about for nearly a year.
In reading My Years in France, by Julia Child, I was struck by the fact that she was, in many ways, the first famous foodie. Where she was once completely ignorant about food, she wormed her way into the kitchen and into chefdom. She was, however, not a chef of the people.
She didn't have to work along side crass cooks who can only pronounce the unlatin names for genitalia. She didn't have food return to the kitchen because the salad didn't display enough feta. She never saw the scowl of over-entitled diners who consider themselves experts in something they've never done. Julia Child never poured half a pitcher of beer down a woman's back (on accident - really). I love what she did for our country, but she was a home cook and a home cook she will remain.
I've come to dislike food television for all of it's cake making contests and pedestrian shows put on by pedestrian hosts with perky smiles and no skill. Anthony Bourdain? Predictable, snot-nosed brat (but at least he's cut himself while working). Andrew Zimmer? How many gross things can that man eat and why can't he learn the appropriate etiquette for eating them? In the end, food has stopped being entertaining to me.
My mother, who died in April, used to consider cooking as her form of prayer. I've come to agree with her. True cooking, true creation is not nearly as exciting as tantrums and flailing about. It's quiet and it's sacred. Even, as I've come to learn from my husband, in the restaurant kitchen.
Still it remains – the question – how do you write about food without the trite goo that sticks to your fingers as you type?
I don't know. I will keep trying.
