Is There Magic In Food?

I've always thought a lot about food and what it means... how it carries messages between cultures and between people. Is there magic in food? How does it affect us so intimately? What do molecules and chemical reactions have to do with things and why does mom's food make you feel better than anything else? Why did people like my soup at first, when I really didn't know what I was doing? Did I imbue it with love? Is love transferable through matter, or is matter simply a placeholder and carrier of intentions? Are there love quarks that spin just so? Can you put them into food and have them received by the eater? Even further down that line of inquiry, perhaps a bit racier... are some foods aphrodisiac, or does the setting, the intention, the care, and the presentation make them so? And is it vital to cook with love? Why do we cook with love? I recently came across this passage from the highly recommended book Heat: "I suspect that cooking with love is an inversion of a different principle: cooking to be loved." Most of us don't really get the chance to witness and know chefs... just like any profession, there are varying motivations... I think of policemen as either pure public servants or those kids in high school who used to hang around wearing their varsity jackets too long after they graduated and finally decided to get a job where they could drive fast. With chefs, there are different types... the kind we have here at least are the kind that are driven by this desire to give and receive love, whether they'd admit it or not. We're generally isolated from chefs... most restaurants you never see them unless you happen to be wandering down the alley out back, hopping across the drainage oozing from the dumpsters. Thus the mystique, thus the Top Chef type shows on TV. There are plenty of livings to be made... being a chef is one of the toughest, so it's interesting to ponder what drives someone in that direction. I wrote two weeks ago about the uneasy mix of artisanship and management that so many restaurants have to balance, and there's a linguistic clue there, I think. Art has been defined by Random House as "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance". This extraordinary significance is the difference... it's the icing on the cake of our existence. Cooking is a shared perceptual experience for both the cook and the eater. When you cook for your loved one, you are cooking for them, trying to please them, trying to make them love you, then sharing the same joy. For a chef, it's a little more abstract... it's the public, there's commerce involved... it's love for pay, a twist on an older profession. The thing is, they never get to see you eat and enjoy, they're just painting their love all over the world, and it makes them a bit of the altruist. The school teacher never sees the ultimate manifestation of his work, the painter is separated from his works, etc.

I was discussing such matters with Pat Brown here at the shop on the heels of our conversation about this fellow he once met. This guy was a retired doctor who decided to make it his mission to airdrop breadmaking kits across the world to reproduce Essene bread, which is the biblical recipe for the original staff of life. He was looking for a hand-cranked grain mill which could conduct the user's kinetic life force into the grain, a specially- shaped flagon for water which would align its properties just so. The powers of thought and love that went into the making of the bread would be conveyed and healing powers would be harvested by the recipient. The world would be a better place.

I don't really know about all that. It has a beauty to it, the kind of utopic thought that I take pleasure in imagining but ultimately can't wrap my mind around. Another memory popped forward... I used to rent the kitchen to a couple of guys with pure intentions who made energy bars. They wrapped each one in a corn husk and said a prayer over each one. They organized the room's energy with a large resonating bowl. But lately I'm more the pragmatist. I believe the greatest benefit from our food, the greatest flavor enhancer (besides salt) comes from the sense of caring and security that the gesture of loving cooking and sharing brings. I don't think anyone who didn't know of their prayers and their care could really gain from it. And I don't know that the molecules have so much to do with it either. Of course, no amount of love in the world can overcome the battered molecular structure of a burnt roux for example, but you get the picture. You still have to be a decent cook.

Consistency Vs. Creativity

A little peek behind the curtain for you this week... like any business, we have our little internal debates and difficulties. Our business is fraught with its own set of little complexities. In so many ways, the blessings upon this business often reveal the face of a curse. Since we, not unlike many restaurants, sit on the fence which is described by the intersecting line between the spheres of art and commerce (ok, you nitpickers, I know the intersection of two spheres isn't a line, just bear with me), our kitchen is daily torn between two clashing motives: consistency and consistent improvement. Do Soupies want things exactly the same each time, or do they want us to work on improving things? Do we make things the way we think they ought to be, or do we make them the way we think they'll please the most people? What do the answers to these questions say about us as a business, and as artisans?

This week's iteration of the debate was a conversation about last week's gumbo. Those of you who have been following our gumbo over the years have seen it change subtly in different directions. When I personally used to make the gumbo, I would make as dark a roux as I personally had the nerve to do. Sometimes I hit the mark and sometimes missed it. However, the darker the roux, the less body the soup had. Over the next few versions, our chef Justin fixed the issue by making two rouxs... one dark one for flavoring and one lighter one for thickening. This week, Adam aimed for the middle, more like our seafood gumbo roux... he used a different technique for the roux and kept it lighter. It was really good gumbo, and I was proud to serve it... but was it our gumbo? Was it Adam's gumbo? Was it more broadly appealing than a darker roux? Should we take the roux to its limit, put our foot down and say, "this is what we think gumbo is?" But who are we to say what real gumbo is? Is there a real gumbo to the exclusion of others? Is there even an objective reality independent of our observation of the universe?

Sorry about that last one. Kitchen conversations can get a little deep. I decided to read a passage to the culinary staff from Bill Buford's Heat, which is an excellent book detailing his internship at Mario Batali's Babbo Restaurant near NYU. Mario was giving a pep talk to his staff and said, "If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don't serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you're a ____." You may fill in the blank with your current favorite vilifying profanity. I don't think we'd rate very highly in the eyes of Mario, according to that metric. But that's the never-ending battle between chefs and management. Management is concerned with meeting customer expectations and true chefs are constantly self-motivated to exceed customer expectations. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Managers don't like to play dice with a customer's experience, so there's the rub. Control systems versus artistic license.

That's our management challenge, and I guess it's not peculiar to our business. We are all personally here because we don't want a life full of control systems. But somehow we need to reach agreement on what's best for the business... after all, it's incredibly annoying when a business becomes more about the employees than the customers. I guess it's a balancing act that we'll have to continue to embrace. It seems a metaphor for parenting as well... it can't be all control systems (Draconian), but it can't be free reign for the kids (chaotic).

Another Back to School Story

In last week's missive, you suffered along with me on a stroll down the memory lane of the various indignities suffered in my childhood schooltime experiences. This week, as a means of exposing the pathetic irony of my complaint, we honor the 50th anniversary of the battle won my our nation's most courageous schoolchildren: The Little Rock Nine.

A lot can happen in fifty years, and a lot can stay the same. If you ask The Jena Six, we haven't really traveled so far. But if we retain focus on the heroic topic of this essay, perhaps we can keep an optimistic eye upon the present and future. On September 4, 1957, nine African-American students were escorted by police and area black and white ministers towards Little Rock's Central High School. Actually, only eight. One girl, Elizabeth Eckford, was not aware of the escort for her first day of school in the white world. She walked to the school herself, in her new black and white dress. She walked with grace towards the school and was unperturbed by the angry mob, since the Arkansas National Guard was there to protect her. Until they raised their bayonets to bar her from entering the school, at the orders of the governor. The mob drew closer and angrier, and Eckford was lucky to escape with her life.

The rest of America saw this brutal footage through the magic of a glowing box that had recently begun tying the world closer together. What might have been a footnote in a remote class struggle was brought to the shocked eyes and ears of an entire country by a young John Chancellor, who himself risked life and limb, along with many other reporters, on the 'race beat'. Eventually Eisenhower, somewhat tardily sent in the 101st Airborne to protect those nine students and escort them to school. It was a slow but finally reasonably effective response to a situation that unfolded with unexpected horror so many miles from Washington. Of course, that year for the Little Rock Nine was a continual horror, one that they suffered as knowing young martyrs for the future of their race. Time takes its time, and some twenty years later schoolchildren, this time in South Africa, would again rise up against iniquity. The Soweto Uprising was led by children, most notably Hector Pieterson, a literal martyr for the cause. I visited Pieterson's memorial when I was in Soweto. It was a moving, powerful place... much like the steps of the unassuming facade of Little Rock's Central High School. An homage to the power of youth, strength, and journalism.

These are the stories that I will tell my children when they groan about another year in Mrs. So-and-so's class. Along with the requisite "five miles uphill both ways in knee-deep snow" tales of my own daily walk to school. Truly, though, aside from the normal ruminations we all have for the Labor Day holiday, this year is a special opportunity to reflect on the school year and the special gift that it is.