In Sicily, for the feast day of San Giuseppe, they make a soup, a very plain soup of chickpeas, fava beans and wheat grains, all soaked and cooked separately before being combined with bitter wild greens and perhaps some broken pasta. It is a celebration not of poverty but in poverty. The richness of the meal comes from the time it takes, the hours of soaking and boiling, of picking leaves in muddy fields. The feast day of the patron saint of workers (and the stepfather of God) falls on the 19th March, full spring in the Sicilian countryside with the almond trees in blossom. San Giuseppe’s soup marks the last use of the previous year’s harvest, the last pulses and grains to be taken from the store which the summer’s baking heat and the rains of autumn had provided for the coming winter. It is both a soup and a celebration, but it is also a sacrifice – a sacrifice of time against an uncertain future, time given freely as a kind of guarantee.
Cooking of any kind – but especially the lengthy processes of preserving, drying, pickling and curing – is really an act of optimism, an assertion that there will be a future in which to eat. And the more time and care you put into such a process, the more value you get out. For example, the longer a cure or a pickle takes, the longer, in general, it will last. In providing food for the future, this sacrifice also makes it much more likely that the future it was made for will indeed occur. A practical optimism, you could say. A spending of time, not just because you have little else to spend, but because it is prudent to do so.
For much of the world now, of course, the situation is reversed: we can buy almost anything we want at any time we please and have it delivered almost immediately. And we seem to be encouraged to spend less time doing things like cooking. Time is a commodity, and rather than sacrifice our time, we’re encouraged to sacrifice time itself, to take shortcuts. Time is listed in any given recipe, along with the rest of the ingredients and equipment: two onions, one stick of celery, one carrot, 15 minutes preparation and two hours cooking time, but it is almost always consequently manipulated. Everybody knows – once they have followed a few recipes – that enough time is never given to cook an onion. ‘Sauté until soft and golden, about two minutes,’ writes the chef (or the editor insists so the recipe can fall into the category of ‘quick and easy weeknight suppers’ or ‘fifteen-minute meals’ or whatever it is they are currently trying to sell). The fact that nobody ever sautéed an onion until soft and golden in less than 10 minutes is elided, sacrificed to the promise that this dish, now, will not cost too much of your time. Even recipes which can never be made quickly – soups, stews, cures – are touted as demanding just a little of your time and even less of your attention, your active time. The slow braise allows the cook to focus not on cooking, but on other things. To me, this is a lost opportunity. Yes, it is nice to know that dinner is safely squared away, puttering merrily to itself in a low oven. It is exciting to think that a jar of cabbage is slowly transforming into sauerkraut at the back of a dark cupboard. But if all we see is the prepared ingredients and the end result, how much do we miss of the metamorphosis in-between?
Convenience is desirable, but over the last year, time has – for most of us – come at less of a premium. Even before that, though, I have always found a certain satisfaction in giving my complete attention to whatever I am cooking. This goes without saying for the quick and fast – for the doneness of a steak, or pasta, for deep-frying, or grilling delicate fish. However, it is also rewarding for the slower processes, for observing the slow changing of textures as liquids bubble and reduce.
If, for example, you are making marmalade, you could work out the setting temperature and, once the final boil has begun, insert a probe thermometer with an alarm set to sound when it reaches the precise temperature: all well and good. If, however, there isn’t a thermometer to hand – or, as is often the case, you only have one that is in sore need of calibration and therefore useless – you can fall back on the finger test your mother may or may not have taught you. Placing a stack of saucers in the fridge and – when you think the marmalade is nearly ready – spooning a little out onto a cold saucer, you prod the result with your finger to see if it wrinkles. What, then, if you don’t have a stack or even a single perfectly chilled saucer to hand? Then you have to watch the bubbles rise.
The point of making marmalade or jam is not simply that you are cooking a liquid until it reaches approximately 105˚C, but rather that you are cooking a liquid until it becomes capable (as water is not) of reaching that temperature – which means it has to become thicker, stronger. The bubbles it creates, at first double the liquid in volume (bringing the inevitable worry that your pan is too small) before settling and lowering into a dense boil that threatens to catch on the bottom. Once you’ve seen it, that transformation is unmistakable, and if you had just stuck a thermometer in the pan and got on with something else, you would never have noticed. This (admittedly useful and in a working kitchen, essential) piece of technology would have removed you from the process, from the facts of cooking. This is true of any kind of technology – it is, by and large, its purpose. I am not necessarily suggesting that you replace your oven with a wood-fired stove and monitor the temperature with a questing hand (if you can’t hold it in there, it’s hot enough) – although that would, I think, be fun. Certainly, anything which makes our lives easier is not to be dismissed out of hand, but isn’t it always worth wondering what, at any moment, you can afford to lose?
The point with cooking is that the time put in is not simply lost but rather spent or, invested – although sometimes you might not think it – wisely. A six-hour braise consumed in less than 30 minutes can seem hardly worth the effort, but only if you see the eating of food as the sole reason to cook it. When I think of meals I have cooked for other people, for birthdays or holidays or simply for the pleasure of company, it is rarely the eating of them – the few minutes of attacking a chicken or slurping up pasta or licking grease off fingers – which comes immediately to mind but rather their slow build-up. It’s the digging of the pit to build the fire that has to die before I bury the lamb, wrapped carefully in foil and sackcloth; the careful attendance to a boiling pan of stock, its bubbles changing in size and consistency as it gradually reduces into gravy; the oil slowly spitting out of a pot of ragù, its surface barely moving as it stews. These are the things I remember fondly, the nurturing process of bringing a meal together. And these moments aren’t solitary meditations – with any meal there is more to be done than just cooking something. There are salads to be made and dressings to be whipped, pasta to be rolled, tables to be set, cocktails to be mixed, and wine to be poured. The making of a meal is only a chore if you begin to do it wishing it were already over. If instead you begin to do it because you want to do it, with the end result of ‘something to eat’ as almost a by-product of a rewarding activity, then the pleasure you find in it changes.
Although for most of us, it’s no longer – as it was for the Sicilians celebrating San Giuseppe – a matter of life or death. This choice to involve yourself purposefully in the everyday act of cooking, and otherwise preparing food, still has an air of sacrifice, of time exchanged in the promise of something greater. It is, I suppose, literally a sacrifice, as the time you allot to cooking is time you could have made available for emails, or exercise, or simply to idly scroll through Netflix adding films you will probably never watch to your list. But, as is the way of all such propitiatory acts, it is a sacrifice which contains the seeds of its desired outcome. What you put in determines what you get out, in the straightforward terms of a meal you can eat – but it is also its own reward. You know, as you reverently chop, or soak, or simmer, that you are investing your time to create something better than good. That whatever you are making will have a special richness to it. The richness of chickpeas, or water or gold.
This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One
