I recently re-discovered one of my old notebooks I used for cooking. I haven’t looked through these pages since my last entry dated July 21, 2006. It’s been three years now since I left the industry, and it feels like 30.
I don’t cook as much as I used to, and whenever I do cook, I notice that my skills have rusted from neglect. All my knives are dull; they haven’t been sharpened in years now. Sharpening my knives was like a ritual at one time, trying to achieve the sharpness of a katana on my chef’s knife. My knives were my tools, and I took care of them for they took care of me (and it annoyed the hell out of me to see other cooks mistreat them).
My notes about cooking in general (meat cookery, vegetables, etc.) are suprisingly insightful when I go back and read them. I looked at food through the microscope and asked what do I need to do to the basic food molecules–water, fats, carbs, and protienes–in order to achieve the dish I want. There is a method to the madness, I know there is. For as Harold McGee explains, “Foods, like everything on earth, are mixtures of idfferent chemicals, and the qualities we aim to influence in the kitchen–taste, armoa, texture, color, nutritiousness–are all manifestations of chemical properties,” (On Food and Cooking, but I don’t know the page number).
I know how to cook, but I never figured out the process behind it all. Maybe I should take the Escoffier path and write a cookbook that is technique-based and not quantity-based. Jean-Georges Vongeritchen told me to season with my senses, and that’s the best advice I can dispense to others when it comes to cooking. Alas, alas, alas… memory lane certainly has its shares of potholes.