Nella Cucina

A short Rhapsody on cooking

Elga Cappellari, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I wrote this last night and then I fell asleep without sending it. So, apologies but you’ll get two emails from me today, this and the LINKS.

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I’ve been working on a couple essays for the last few weeks. I don’t think either of them are ready for publication. I’ve tried to publish at least one essay every two weeks, although what I’m really aiming for is one each week. Maybe that’s too ambitious given I have an actual full time job and my penchant for choosing large, complex subjects that could fill entire books. 

I struggle to write at night. I have a morning routine and part of that routine is chugging 100 cups of coffee and writing like a maniac. After about 7 p.m., I don’t have the energy or willpower to do anything strenuous. At that point I just want to cook, and then maybe read or watch something. Maybe play video games. 

Anyways, today I was moping around because I thought my essay wasn’t good enough to publish yet, and I also didn’t have the energy to fix it, or more precisely, to think about how to fix it. So I just started making spaghetti.

Before the pandemic I didn’t really know how to cook much. I wasn’t totally useless in the kitchen because I’d worked at a pizza place growing up, but that’s a limited skill set. I didn’t think learning much beyond the basics was that valuable. Cooking wasn’t a fun thing to do, just something that had to be done.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a lunatic “food is fuel, just hand me a Soylent” guy. I love food, and I love eating. I had just resigned myself to the fact that the good meals in my life would be prepared by someone else while I made sandwiches.

I did want to learn how to make spaghetti sauce though. I felt like if I didn’t know how to make sauce, I wasn’t really Italian. It was the pandemic and I had all the time in the world, and so I decided it was time. I’d seen my mom make sauce about 800 million times and so I had an idea of what to do, but not really. Our family sauce is a bit unique because it’s loaded up with parmesan cheese, which gives it a tangy thickness. But my mom was in Cleveland and I was in New York. I didn’t think I could really pull it off because my mom doesn’t have a recipe or anything, she knows what to do by looking at it.  So I just found a basic tomato sauce recipe online and then modified it to my liking, i.e I made it a diavolo sauce by adding a shit ton of diced chili pepper. 

I wrapped that spaghetti around my fork for the first time and I felt like I had conquered the world. I felt so fucking proud of myself. I just wanted to dance around to the tarantella and chug red wine and sing “C’è La Luna.”

The satisfaction I got from making sauce that one time sent me on a whole journey, and now I cook all kinds of stuff. Yes, it’s mostly Italian but not exclusively. My absolute favorite thing I’ve ever made is chicken scarpariello, which is kind of like sausage and peppers but with chicken. 

See the thing is, cooking checks all the psychological need boxes. It gives you a sense of competence when you set out to make something, and then you do it. Creating something yourself, of your own choosing, when you want to make it—what could be more autonomous than that? And cooking for other people and hearing them say it was good and they enjoyed it, there’s just absolutely nothing better than that. 

A problem I had growing up was I was so focused on outcomes. Specifically lasting outcomes. Cooking seemed like building castles in the sand. I just didn’t get it. But now I see cooking as a perfect metaphor for life. Everything is impermanent to some degree, everything we build deteriorates on some time horizon. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth building and enjoying while you can.

So today while I was frustrated that I couldn’t get my essay to the place I wanted, I went to the kitchen where I felt at home and comfortable. I made spaghetti aio e oio, which is just spaghetti with garlic and oil. The grocery store was against me today and it seemed like they were out of everything I needed (how can you not have any basil?) but we always—24/7/365—have extra-virgin olive oil, garlic and chili pepper. And as I made it, I realized, Joe, that’s the essay. Write about that. So I did. 

Buon appetito i miei amici.