My Cooking Philosophy April 14, 2008

I got home about an hour ago from a Sunday dinner get-together. I brought pie. Yeah, you’re shocked. This week was time to do the raspberry chiffon pie. I had planned to do the recipe in the America’s Test Kitchen “Best of 2008″ but I was warned against it, so I did half Lee Bailey’s raspberry pie (my favorite) and half the Betty Crocker raspberry chiffon, topped with whipped cream. And if you are mocking me for turning to Betty Crocker instead of a celeb chef, then all I can say is, you’ve obviously never turned to those red plaid cookbooks yourself. They are handy!

I also made another orange cream. I am inserting a picture here so I can soothe my ego by showing you that yes, I am capable of making a decent meringue. AND I made a meringue pie today that didn’t weep one bit. I would have been more pleased with myself, though, if the orange cream had set properly, which it didn’t. So it wouldn’t have mattered if the meringue had wept, since it was all soup beneath anyway. Please be impressed, regardless? Making a meringue pie that doesn’t weep is huge. Trust me.

Now it might seem kind of dumb or embarrassing to make a mistake like not having the orange cream set in front of this huge group of people. My response is, I don’t really care, especially since I am figuring out that I am usually the only person in the room capable of making any kind of pie, soupy or perfectly set. There’s something I’ve started thinking about lately and it needs to be articulated as a step towards figuring it out. I am going to try to start spelling out for myself what my cooking is actually all about.

1. Taste trumps looks.
2. On a day to day basis, I would rather have something simple perfectly done than a complicated and expensive dish.
3. I like clean flavours.
4. Everything should be accompanied by vegetables or fruit.
5. Texture is nearly as important as taste.
6. Voluntarily feeding someone is an emotional gesture of liking, affection, and sometimes love. If I repeatedly cook for you and try to anticipate your favorites tastes and textures (or, say, let you stick a finger in the cookie dough–ugh), you know I love you a lot.
7. I only want to cook what I myself would like to eat, which is usually pretty basic stuff a la Nigel Slater.
8. It’s OK to make mistakes in cooking. Even in front of other people, who I know must have their own mistakes in their kitchens. Even when I am being emotional about them, there is still a place inside me that finds my mistakes funny. It’s too bad that graduate school has made me so aware of copyright law, otherwise I could put up pictures of what I am trying to cook side by side with what I actually do cook, and we could all have a laugh.
9. Sometimes weird things have to be tried, just to explore what can be done, even though their making might be followed by a tin can being opened.
10. Cooking is relaxing, and I like to do it.

Well, ten seems like a good round place to stop. I am still trying to figure out the basic building blocks of my favorite food and why some things ’speak’ to me and others don’t. If I ever do get it nailed down I will tell you all about it. If you look at the picture of the raspberry chiffon pie being eaten at the top, this sums up a lot of what my list is about. Raspberry chiffon is kind of weird, in a 1950’s housewife sort of way. The techniques for making it were totally new to me, and I wasn’t sure it was going to turn out. I had fun making these pies this afternoon (I am at the point where I’ve broken through the wall and now find pie making fun). I was happy to make these pies for the people I was with tonight. And finally, I think my cooking is about home and comfort and nurturing feelings being evoked. It’s domestic cookery, not restaurant or gourmet cookery. And I like that.