A Dash of Laughter, A Pinch of Joy: Cooking with a Friend
July 14th, 2008I love the rituals and sharing that go into working with a cooking buddy. On the Sunday that my friend Julie came over to make gingerbread with me, I was deep into tradition long before she walked in the door. That morning, I reached for my recipe folder marked ‘family.’ That’s where I keep mom’s gingerbread recipe from all those years ago. What I found, scribbled on a yellowed index card, was a kind of culinary Morse code. If I hadn’t had the visual and muscle memory of making the recipe with ma, I would have trouble recreating this dish. In these cases, the story telling I share with my cooking buddy acts as a mental stretching exercise, stimulating my recall of how the gingerbread should look and smell and what steps I need to take with my ingredients to get there.
As it all comes together, I hear in my voice, and Julie’s, that same excitement shared by mother, and, in Julie’s case, her great aunt, over their gingerbread creations. Their joyful connection to the food is now ours, as if the alchemy of the creation is a greater force than all the years that stand between us and them. We become the keepers of their culinary lore and we recognize the gift for what it is. My best culinary learning experiences came from watching other cooks, young and old.
One of my most memorable culinary lessons was learning to make pasta the genuine Italian way, by having it hurled out a second-story window by a bona fide Calibrian signora yelling in Italian that it was forty seconds past al dente. In an operatic sort of way, I learned an important lesson: Never walk away from the pasta pot. Other culinary pointers have come to me in a more gentle fashion, like having the same Signora’s warm hands over mind, helping me imprint the rhythm and feeling of kneading pasta dough.
My cooking buddies inspire me to cook. They spark my creativity in the kitchen, with the creation of our own culinary lore. The more I cook with others, the more stories we create. These are the secret ingredients that add a deep sense of nourishment for those we share our culinary creations with around the table. And, oh yes, the gingerbread Julie and I made that day was to die for.
Wondering how to find a cooking buddy? Send your questions to Rebecca in the comments section below.
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”
–C.S. Lewis, British Writer and Scholar