"The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then - a specific moment - the colours being to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything beings to mottle, blend from raw to cooked. The chestnuts, if you're doing chestnuts, turn a little damp, a little weepy. That's what they do; everything weeps.
The passage from stuff to things, the moment when the vegetables weep, is a meditative moment and has no point, really, except the purely ephemeral one of seeing it happen. You cook for yourself, or I do anyway. Martha picks through things, New York girl with a New York appetite. Luke, like an astronaut, would prefer to live on a diet of milkshakes and nutrient pellets. Cooking, for middle-class, end-of-the-century people, is our only direct, not entirely debased line with the hermetic life, with Zen sitting, with just doing things without a thought.
No wonder monks make good cheese."
Adam Gopnik, "Lessons from Things" from Paris to the Moon
All pictures by Rachel Kara. Isn't she a talented thing?We had been building up to this afternoon for a long time. Maybe since we first made the plan the week before, maybe since we first bonded over lamb sandwiches and lemon tarts, maybe since we first commented on each others blogs saying "what is this mysterious Youeni place and where can I attend?". We had been building up to this afternoon the whole of our friendship, really. The reality was, as it so often is, so much better. Some toasted sandwiches pregnant with cheese and tomato and basil and all of that good stuff, some gingerbread dough, sly and short, a cake with great aspirations of cinnamon glory. So, we burnt it a little. So it didn't rise as much as we hoped, so instead of slicing it in two and filling it with cream and raspberries we ended up slathering the whole whipped-up, rich rosewater-y mess over the top and around the sides like a
Cake Boss. So, by the time we finished it was dark outside and Masterchef had begun and we had spoiled whatever plans we had of dinner with cake and cream and cookies and cheese on toast. Okay, I lied. It was cheese and butter on toast. Delicious tubes of Lescure butter with flecks of real salt peppered throughout like rough-hewn crystals.
I once read somewhere, I think it was the OG domestic goddess - Nigella herself - who said it, that baking is an activity imbued with an uncanny sense of magic. Unlike any other kind of cooking, which is less about transformation than it is about a kind of relentless onslaught against a thing's natural state, baking is a work of alchemy. How many times have I failed in the kitchen because i haven't followed recipes to the letter? Leveled cups of flour. Leveled tablespoons of baking powder. Leveled jugs of golden syrup or canola oil (rose bakery carrot cake, I'm looking at you). Baking in my kitchen wearing track pants and a sweater is the closest I have ever come to feeling like I was in Harry Potter. That moment, that wonderful, awe-inspiring moment, when the gooey wet mess that you poured into the cake tin and placed, somewhat doubtfully into the warm confines of the oven, swells with such magnificence and pride, and bronzes and crackles along the top, and turns into something that it wasn't and now is. How did it go from that to
this? How did it, to use Adam Gopnik's term, go from
stuff to
things?
I don't think I'll ever get to the bottom of this mystery, and I don't particularly want to. That sense of wonder is what allows me - even when things don't turn out quite right - to still be overjoyed at what I have produced. I cook hopefully, and so does
Rachel. I think that's what makes us suited to working together, and that's what makes us able to hatch grand plans of world food domination, one Sydney cafe at a time, and that's what made this afternoon so much fun. The first of many - the next will be a picnic in
my garden in warmer climes, we'll be taking menu suggestions or invite requests shortly - this baking day was warm and joyous and long and delicious, as all baking days ought to be if they possibly can. It signalled at something we already knew - stuff into things, Gopnik there you go again - things it can be easy to overlook. That Rachel can make a mean toasted sandwich, that our food collaborations are going to continue long into the future, that this kind of stuff - photos and words and hopes and dreams and not just numbers and stuff and a rating out of ten, because what's the fun in that? - is what people really want to hear and read about when they look at food, and if it isn't then explain the whole Masterchef phenomenon, hmm? And that it really is better to travel hopefully than it is to arrive.
For more pictures of this eventful afternoon,
see Rachel's blog. And if you love us like we love baking, then
check out our first ever collaboration, a review of Sydney's coffee-providore du jour, The Grounds. There's something in this whole food thing. Rachel and I are still working our heads around it, but when we do, you can be sure that we'll be all over it. Stay tuned!
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