Posts from the ‘foodie pseudery’ Category

Foodie Pseudery (44)

This foodie pseudery was spotted by my friend Lize-Marie, who came across an entirely nonsensical description of a burger at a branch of MacDonald’s in Sweden:

The text reads: ‘Sometimes the journey isn’t the goal, but the taste of something new and exciting. Join us during our taste explorations from spicy India to exotic South Africa via Greece, Mexico and Australia.’

Up to a point.

Foodie Pseudery (43)

The transcendence of onions – a discussion between Ruth Reichl and Michael Pollan:

R: In your new book, Cooked, you said, “There’s nothing ceremonial about chopping vegetables on a kitchen counter.” I have to tell you, I so don’t agree with you. For me, chopping onions, putting them in butter, the smells coming up, that’s all totally sensual, totally seductive. And truly ceremonial, in the best way. I built a kitchen so that people can stand around and watch me cook.

P: To me onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well and they fight you the whole way. But I worked at this for a long time, learned everything I could about onions—why they make us cry, how to prevent it, why they’re such a huge part of cuisine worldwide, and what they contribute to a dish. I finally learned this important spiritual truth, which is bigger than onions: “When chopping onions, just chop onions.” When I finally got into the zen of cutting onions, I passed over to another place. Part of the resistance to kitchen work like chopping is a macho thing. Men like the big public deal of the grill, the ceremonies involving animals and fire, where women gravitate toward the plants and pots inside.

R: Chopping is like a meditation.

P: A zen practice, I agree. I learned that from my cooking teacher Samin Nosrat, who is a serious student of yoga. She talked to me about patience, presence and practice. She thought they applied equally well to cooking and yoga. And they do.

Foodie Pseudery (41)

The lament of the woman with two kitchens…

I have two kitchens. For most of the year, I cook in an Upper West Side apartment, in Manhattan. It was designed in the eighteen-nineties and is probably best described as a landlord’s misguided attempt to lure tenants with horizontal evocations of the upstairs-downstairs life. The ‘public’ rooms, meant to be seen and admired, were large and well proportioned. The ‘private’ rooms, out of sight off a long back hall, were for the most part awkward and cramped, and perhaps the lowliest room on this totem pole of domestic status was the kitchen, where your cook, emerging each morning through the door of a tiny bedroom—in my apartment, it opened between the icebox and the sink—was expected to spend her waking hours.

… there was no way to expand my kitchen to accommodate my own moment …

… I am consoled, however, by my other kitchen. It is the ‘please come in’ room of the Umbrian farmhouse where I work, and cook, in the summer—a much more satisfying image of the way I like to live.