The thing about food is that, like most worthwhile pursuits, the more you know, the more you realize there is to learn. But if you’re like me, that’s what intrigues you most…the seemingly endless opportunities for self-education.
I will certainly never learn how to cook everything I want to because every time I master one technique, it leads me to another and then another. Learning about one food, one cuisine, or one style of cooking only generates more questions. My obsession with Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking led me to spend weeks perfecting my homemade pasta and tomato sauce recipes (which in turn led my girlfriend to boycott pasta for a while). But I still have so much I want to experiment with…every week I think up a new combination to stuff inside ravioli or a new herb I want to use as the base for fettuccine. And that’s only a small subset of one regional cuisine!
Midway through a pasta-making binge
How could anyone get sick of pasta?
It doesn’t stop with cooking and eating either. In writing for this blog and for other websites, I’ve had to learn about search engine optimization, I’ve been trying to improve my photography, and that doesn’t even begin to cover how I’ve expanded my writing style. Just this week, I read all about common pests that may be causing the brown spots on my basil plant, I boned up on graphic design for the Dallas Farmers Market Friends newsletter, and I taught myself about video editing software for another project I hope to start soon.
The good news is that this obsessive-compulsive desire to always learn more seems to be quite common among the food crazed. On one episode of The Splendid Table with guest Emeril Legasse, host Lynne Rosetto Kasper tells the story of how, when she first met Emeril, he wanted to learn about hearts of palm and had actually brought a live palm tree into his restaurant to break it down and study it. Emeril recounts that “every night, at the restaurant, and still today, twenty years later, we have pre-meal where we talk about food, we talk about wine and the customer. And part of those days was a huge education process going on with the staff…and that particular week we were breaking down the entire palm tree to show the staff where the palm came from, then how to cure it, and then how to marinate it, using the different parts. And then we featured it the upcoming weekend on the menu.” http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/listings/101225/
If Emeril Legasse isn’t a credible enough witness on this unquenchable thirst for knowledge, none other than the Grand Dame of food, Julia Child, talks about it in her memoir, My Life in France.
“When I wasn’t at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and although no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating. When the weather turned cold, the mayo suddenly became a terrible struggle, because the emulsion kept separating, and it wouldn’t behave when there was a change in the olive oil or the room temperature. I finally got the upper hand by going back to the beginning of the process, studying each step scientifically, and writing it all down. By the end of the research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history. I made so much mayonnaise that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet. What a shame. But in this way I had finally discovered a foolproof recipe, which was a glory.”
While I admit to having experimented with a few mayonnaise recipes in my time, at least I haven’t quite reached that level yet and my main obsession continues to be in the Italian vein which is infinitely more versatile than mayo (or at least that’s what I tell myself).
But what about you, dear reader, what are your past, present and perennial food obsessions? What have you spent weeks or years trying to learn about? And did you ever feel like you had really mastered your subject?
