Fear of Cooking

10 October 10

I’m here to tell you about things I am afraid of, and, weirdly, (at first glance), cooking comes to mind. Not cooking, really, but baking--cooking can always be salvaged, or maybe I’m so scared of cooking (note the completely unused Mediterranean cookbook from last Christmas) that it’s buried even deeper.

I am afraid to bake bread. Afraid to-- I don’t know-- make terrible lemon meringue. In an alternate life I could be a cake decorator yet I have used my frosting gun twice at most. I love it, I treasure it, I leave it in the drawer.

In my family, food is a big deal, and it can involve a lot of self-flagellation. The shortest explanation? My paternal grandmother is Belgian--actually-from-Belgium-Belgian. “Cheese, Wine, Food--the French have the best!” she exclaimed, waving a pointer finger in the air to punctuate each item.

When my husband met her for the first time we were at her home in England. She was in the kitchen making lunch for us when Jay suddenly leapt to his feet as if a fire alarm had gone off.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked. He started for the kitchen, “Shouldn’t we see if she’s ok?”

I just stared at him, trying to figure out what he was talking about--then I noticed it--vehement, pained mutterings in both French and English, something including, “Oh, God! I don’t know” with a heavy accent of self-criticism.

“What, that?” I asked. “She’s just cooking.”

Just cooking. My granny makes some of the best food I have ever eaten--she can’t help it. But there has never been a meal (that I know of) that has been prepared without anguish or eaten in joy, and that’s too bad, especially because it’s hereditary.

When she came to visit recently I was astounded to see my normally top-of-the-heap (and-in-a-nice-suit) dad waffling and supplicating about some store-bought rotisserie chicken. he is a fabulous cook--something I never knew as a kid--but even his pork chops with deglazed sauce and cream and mushrooms served with white wine cannot warrant praise. Say, “Thanks for supper, Dad, this is really good,” and he’ll lift his shoulders and eyebrows, tip his head side to side in a deflecting way that somehow communicates that it could be much better but isn’t too bad but nothing to feel good about oneself over and it will do for the moment.

This is not the same as the Midwestern oh-gosh-it-was-nothing response to praise. Midwesterners feel embarrassed to be put in the spotlight, especially for anything they made themselves. They are likely to demur to someone else’s recipe (found in the church cookbook) or to God Himself (“well, we just had such an amazing bumper crop of beans this year..”). I know how to deal with that. And anyway, they weren’t going for a blue ribbon in the first place--honorable mention is just fine with them. Is the food hot? Good. Is there enough for seconds? Yes. Is ever inner crevice filled in with the universal binding agent cream of mushroom soup, so much so that dessert and coffee require leaning back and stretching a bit? Then the meal was a success. There is no talk anticipated on the nuance of spices like nutmeg or paprika. Ketchup is a spice here. Vegetables and jello are an acceptable food combination. This is not High Art, this is Lake Wobegon, stick-to-your-bones in January food--there’s no pretense.

But the French--or in my case, the French-speaking Belgians. Though a simple dish of pasta, butter, salt and nutmeg may bring the eater more joy than edible poetry, there is also so much to fall short of. While Minnesotans don’t even think of striving for culinary perfection, my people can think of nothing else. Nothing else, that is, except the impossibility of such a goal--and the only possible response to this dichotomy is shame.

That is what the raised eyebrows, lifted shoulders, ducked and tipping head is--the acknowledgement of failure to be perfect--failure to do justice to the worthy fungus, the supple lamb, the elegant fettucine. The God/Lord of Belgium is clearly disappointed, but He, like us, has accepted this as his lot--a life of failure and disappointment.

So I am caught between two peoples--one who does not know of G______ chocolates in the shape of swirling sea shells, and the other who does but who can never fully enjoy them. The Minnesotans who know that nothing may be wasted, the Europeans who know that nothing may be mediocre.

So I have never made salt water taffy. I have never baked brioche but I feel shame at not having done so. I can bake an amazing pie and some killer gingersnap cookies, but rare is the moment when I eat my own meal and don’t tip my head and think, “next time...a little saffron.”

My beautiful color-photo cookbooks loom like Oscars--what I want more than anything and ridiculously out of reach--because how can I make bread (brioche, no less, and use eight eggs) and risk it falling flat? How can I ice a birthday cake when there is the chance it will look like a five-year-old was at the frosting gun? To make a mistake at food is the deepest embarrassment, far beyond that of a bad performance on stage where no leftovers will remain to taunt me. So I put my efforts into the short-lived and later-intangible opportunities for success.

But though I scorn the all-accepting hot-dish, at least I can make tea. My youngest sister is afraid to even boil water.

-R.