This morning I’m eating my oatmeal and contemplating brownies. I’m going to make Thomas Keller’s recipe from Ad Hoc at Home today. They’re proven rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy. As I went over the recipe again, I smiled at the moderately involved procedure necessary for something so seemingly simple—melting the butter, using the stand mixer to beat the sugar and eggs. Yesterday I’d been considering making vegan ones from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. The process there involves a blender, a bowl, a pan.
This difference is in tune with the most recent issue of Lucky Peach, which I’ve been reading this weekend: “The Cooks and Chefs Issue.” There are a couple of pieces on the Food Network and its shift from having chefs like Batali to cooks like Ina and Giada. Though Ad Hoc at Home is full of ostensibly simple recipes, Keller also can make you feel a bit foolish if you don’t have two bowls for your KitchenAid. You will never feel that way going through Isa Chandra and Terry Romero’s cookbooks; they will anticipate any blushes of foolishness and swipe at them with a witty parenthetical. (It helps that vegan baking never requires the folding of a delicate meringue into cake batter, but the principle stands.) There’s also the anticipation of labor after the fact: the chef’s recipes will be intense without an eye toward the towering pile of dishes, and the cook’s will recognize it and do its best to alleviate it.
Neither approach is better. Each has its place. It’s funny to me that every Legitimate Chef I’ve read talk about the Food Network has the utmost respect for Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, whose show was a fixture in my house growing up and whose cooking most closely resembles my mother’s. But that’s not how most people have lived.
And I’ve been lucky enough to have lived a good food life, even when everything else was shit. My grandma died when I was five, but I have vivid recollections of lamb chops and strawberries dipped in sugar. There is a picture of her sitting on the couch reading a cookbook that immediately came to my mind when I did the same a couple of months ago, connecting me back to something I had spent some time rejecting. My mother’s David Eyre pancakes and empanadas and everything defined happiness in a not-always-happy home. When my parents’ marriage began to truly fall apart, it was marked by the decline of dinner—mashed potatoes began coming from a box before they disappeared altogether. This is why I’ll often say it depresses me to eat some combination of food or at certain restaurants. I’m not being dramatic (maybe a little); I just want to eat food that feels real and cared for.
When I was a teenager I would say I’d secretly like to be a pastry chef, as though it were already determined I couldn’t be. Vocational school seemed out of the question. Of course I used the high-falutin term instead of shooting for “baker.” Now that’s all I care to be, though I’ll take influence and recipes from chefs and cooks alike, because the goal is just to get some rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy, stuff that makes happiness in the midst of misery, no matter how many dishes I need to do. (And of course, my boyfriend refuses to consume tofu.)