When cooking, I often use no recipe. I rarely can tell quantities. I can more or less explain what I am doing, but it is just a way to rationalize and make sense of movements and gestures that I have internalized. Both the embodied and the rational aspects of my culinary knowledge seem equally necessary to successfully prepare a dish, even if at times they do not seem to agree. Maybe that’s why I cannot bake to save my life…
The Food Studies Graduate Society – one of the student organizations at the NYU Nutrition and Food Studies Department, where I teach – recently invited me to give a cooking demonstration about gnocchi, one of my favorite dishes. The organizers had seen a video I had shot in Poland with Jarosław Dumanowski, a history professor at the University of Toruń, and Jarek Walczyk from the Chef Club of Poland. The goal was to prepare material that could be used in culinary education to teach students specific dishes or techniques while transmitting some cultural and historical notions. As that experience had been quite fun, I accepted my students’ invitation. Needless to say, this time around was quite different.
First of all, some performance anxiety was creeping in me, as I knew that many of the participants are experienced chefs. So I started by underlying that I am not a culinary professional but only a home cook. As a matter of fact, when I post pictures of the dishes I make at home on Instagram, I use the hashtag #homecook to remind whoever stumbles over them that food cooked at home is not supposed to look like restaurant fare. Sometimes it look goods, sometimes it doesn’t. It does not have the same function as restaurant food either, as it is prepared outside a business environment with the goal of providing sustenance to oneself or other human beings, as a form of care giving and, at times, emotional work, whether we enjoy it or not.
The interaction with my students was interesting in many ways. From a cultural point of view, I experienced a perverse pleasure in debunking some romantic ideas commonly held about Italian food. We don’t always use fresh ingredients. We don’t always have farmers’ markets next doors. We do go to supermarkets and hypermarkets. We do have recourse to packaged, canned, or frozen products. On purpose, I chose to season the gnocchi with a sauce made from canned tomatoes. I also did one from fresh tomatoes and a pesto sauce, in winter, just to remind everybody of the role of long distance transportation and global trade in our food system. I explained how canning has been a mainstay in Italy for decades, even if it started later than in other countries due to a certain economic underdevelopment, and how tomatoes have been grown in monoculture, especially for canning, in many parts of Italy. We don’t always have access to san Marzano or other high-end varieties, and we like our tomato sauce all year round.
Picture by Yoriko Okamoto
Despite my attempts at wit and irony, I could not refrain myself from delving into childhood recollections, back to when we used to make tomato sauce for the winter. In August, when tomatoes were at their peak, ripe, abundant, and for that reason cheap, people would buy them by the hundreds of pounds, gather friends, neighbors, and family, and spend a whole day squeezing tomatoes and pouring their juice in recycled beer bottles closed with metal crown caps (at risk of dating myself, I do remember when we still used corks and twine). We would then put the bottles in large used oil drums, being careful to place cloth rags in between them so they would not break. We would apply high heat and wait till the whole thing boiled and then completely cooled off, lest the bottles exploded when you tried to pick them up. It required a lot of know-how, mostly implicit. The whole event carried very intense sensory memories: the smell and taste of fresh tomato juice, the August heat, the flames under the drums, the chats, the laughter, the fights. Those fragments of sensations are still so strong that when a couple of summers ago a dear friend in Warsaw sliced a perfect malinowy tomato (an excellent local variety) for me I had to fight tears back, especially because somehow the smell reminded me of my deceased father involvement in the whole tomato processing operation.
During the cooking demonstration, even while trying to be informative, I could not hold those memories back. As I already discussed in a previous post, the centrality of the body came to the fore also while I was explaining how to make gnocchi. As much as the students asked, I could not tell them the potato/flour ratio to obtain a dough with the necessary texture. All I could do was make it and have them touch it. I could not tell them how much cheese or pine nut was necessary for the pesto: I just grabbed a couple of handfuls and showed them that. I had no recipe, no quantities.I realized I did not have words to describe many of my gestures, which I had learned by watching and cooking together with family members and friends. My students were much better at breaking down the process in steps, as they demonstrated in their posts on social media.
I could more or less explain what I was doing, but I was above all rationalizing and making sense of movements that I had internalized and was repeating almost automatically: how I knead the dough in a certain manner, how I make an indentation in the gnocchi to better “catch the sauce,” how I let the gnocchi dry before boiling them, how I poured them in the water and stirred them with a specific motion so that they would not stick to each other. Both the embodied and the rational aspects of my culinary knowledge were emerging, even if at times they did not seem to agree. Inevitably, there were some downsides to cooking based on habits: the NYU FoodLab had a ricer that grated the potatoes more finely than I am used to, so I had to figure out on the fly how to deal with the different texture. Instinct and experience helped, and so did my hands knowing what dough consistency I was looking for.
Picture by Yoriko Okamoto
After seeing the pictures from the session, Majid Iqbal, a strategy and design advisor residing in the Netherlands, wrote to me, talking about somebody who learned to make bread: “The tacit knowledge was deeply embedded in the hand motions (muscle memory) and the ‘mise en place’. The only way to ‘know’ how to knead dough was to do it together, not just watch and learn. Thus the knowledge first goes from tacit to tacit (socialization), then tacit to explicit (externalization) when the product manager writes down the routines, and then explicit to explicit (combination) when designers and engineers incorporate the learning into the design of the machine.” I would also add a certain finger memory for textures and consistencies, the long-lasting impressions left in our brain by aromas and flavors, and the way things are supposed to look and sound like.
I was reminded how difficult it is to write recipes, at least for me, and why I do not like doing it. When I wrote my book Food Culture in Italy, the twenty recipes included in that volume took me almost as long as the rest to put in black and white, as I had to measure, test them, write them down, and revise them, making sure they worked. I had to separate ingredients from process, and divide the process in steps, even if in practice I tend to do several things at the same time.
What happens when you have not been exposed to cooking together with more experienced people? How do you learn? Can you learn? Clearly you can, so the question is: how does rational information get translated into embodied knowledge? Do we always interpret written recipes, inevitably adding elements of our experience and making them our own? How about learning from videos? And what happens in culinary schools, when students work both with recipes and under the direction of an instructor? There is no other way to end this post than leaving these questions open…