I recently entered Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw Challenge. The assignment? Five hundred words answering the question, “Why cook well?”
Below is my essay, “A Half-Assed Gourmet Reforms,” featuring a cameo appearance by the Junior League of Baton Rouge, and their classic River Road Recipes. Thanks to them, this Yankee gal learned to stop screwing around and make a proper biscuit.
Please take a minute and vote for me. The prize is $10,000 of Anthony Bourdain’s money, and publication in the paperback edition of Medium Raw. And I do so want that man’s money.
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A Half-Assed Gourmet Reforms
It started with a sifter.
Before the sifter, I took pride in my half-assed gourmet aesthetic. When I cooked from a recipe, I cut out all the annoying, “extra” steps, like toasting the almonds or pureeing the potato-leek soup. I scoffed at Anthony Bourdain’s misplaced disdain for those handy little jars of pre-minced garlic. Sifting the dry ingredients for biscuits also seemed like a sucker’s bet, so instead, I tossed them with a fork.
It’s easier and faster, I thought, and probably just as good.
And then one day, I decided to start following the instructions when I made the biscuits from my favorite Junior League cookbook, River Road Recipes. To this day, I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I had grown wise and mature in my 30s, and realized that I need not buck the authority of so venerated an organization as the Junior League of Baton Rouge. Or maybe I’d finally just realized that for someone who claimed to like cooking as much as I did, I certainly wasn’t very good at it.
So, I sifted the dry ingredients, and strike me dead if the biscuits did not rise to over two inches tall, as light and flaky and layered as if they’d sprung from the oven of Fannie Farmer herself.
Perhaps there was something to this sifting thing after all. And if I’d been wrong about that, it was conceivable that I’d also been wrong about garlic in a jar, and possibly other things.
As it turns out, smashing a clove of garlic with your fist and the flat of a chef’s knife has an inherent, undeniable punk rock swagger about it. No one has ever swaggered while spooning garlic out of a jar. Fact.
When I began to take pride in how I cooked and what I put on the table, I wondered why I’d ever thought that doing it half-assed was something to crow about.
If you make an effort to cook well, chances are, you are present in the moment, your mind is engaged, and you’re enjoying what you’re doing, daily, necessary task that it is. With cooking, as with most things in life, that effort is what separates us from the ones who have simply given up, who have chosen drudgery because it’s easier, faster, and probably just as good.
And we don’t want to be them.
Most people cite time as the thing that keeps them out of the kitchen, and I get that. Some nights, sadly, some weeks, I shrug my shoulders and heat up an oven pizza, or some of those cunning little ravioli from the freezer section. But when I have time to cook, I am resolved to try at it.
Start small. Make your own salad dressing. Mince your own garlic. Braise something. Sift your dry ingredients, and see where that takes you.
