Sippers Writing Circle: Cooking Well: Directed Passion

Cooking is a discipline. At the end of the day, there are no shortcuts to chopping vegetables, butchering meat, or kneading dough. You simply have to do it.

But therein lies the passion. Cooking well is a labor of love, a true salute that hard work is more important than talent. Cooking well means taking fewer shortcuts and doing things the long way because your dish might come out 1% better. You throw out the bottles of minced garlic and start chopping because your guests deserve the real thing. You haggle at the farmer’s market and make your own stock because your loved ones deserve the freshest ingredients you can find.

Cooking well is like playing the piano. A six year old is being creative and original when they bang their hands on the keys, but that doesn’t make them budding concert pianists. It’s only through years of training and learning the basics that the piano goes from a box with 88 keys to a beautiful instrument.

Society has spent the last few decades learning to eat well, and we are all better for it. We no longer eschew sushi as merely raw fish and we can tell the difference between hamburger meat and steaks. But cooking well has been left behind. People have lost the ability to speak through their own hands, conveying a message with words like passion, culture, and memory. We’ve been slightly ashamed to dare ourselves to roll up our sleeves and take pride in our home cooked meals, providing for our families at the most visceral level.

But there is hope. Cooking is finding fresh interest as people who eat well have decided that maybe they’d like a crack at taking their own chances. This recession has taken away our budgets for fancy restaurants and forced us to learn the tough virtues: hard work, finding your calling, and family. Cooking well takes a whole new meaning now.