3 Good Things

A Sharp Knife

A well made knife epitomizes integrity.  There are few sensations quite as satisfying as cutting through the crisp flesh of an autumn apple, transforming a shallot into diaphanous ribbons, slicing through the skin of a fresh fish to remove the delicate skeleton. Any good tool is responsive, it becomes an extension of your body, or rather your intention.  A good knife is dangerous enough to require presence, skill and respect in its use.  Likewise, the sharper the person holding the instrument, the more specific its purpose becomes.

Knives, fashioned as weapons, as gizmos for the manipulation of electric sockets, screwdrivers.  A sharp edge can make smooth the face of scruffy work, de-bone ducks, make sculptural characters out of the woody stalks of fallen branches.  Knife cousins till soil, sew clothing, clean teeth, modify the body for decorative hangings.  This machine, in its simplest form - the inclined plane - manipulates surface area and reorders mass.

Our Hands

I didn't cook much when I first started babysitting, so we often enjoyed pancake dinners.  Straight from the box.   "All you need is water!"  I would say to the children, "And a few secret ingredients."  Plopping a generous scoop of the stuff into my bowl, followed by a splash of liquid (nothing was ever measured) I instructed them to mix.  They squished the edible mud between tiny fingers and we sang while heating up the pan. 

Four bowls of batter mix, to which each was added several drops of food coloring.  Our hands were rainbow colored for days following the feast.  Initially I was reprimanded by the parents, but when they saw how excited the children were about the activity (I include myself as one of the children) they made concessions.  We'd make dinosaur pancakes, bug pancakes, pancake people with polka dot pants and giant heads.  Always, always we ate with our fingers. 

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Our hands are mixers, dippers, washers, feelers.  We massage our food, touch it as we would our lovers, handle ingredients with confidence and care.  Opposable thumbs have done for cuisine (and the anthropological trajectory that followed) what volcanic eruptions have done for Hawaii. 

Eating and cooking with hands is a way of engaging the entire body.  The more we bring awareness to these dextrous avatars of intention, the more sensual each step becomes.

Fire

Somewhere along the ongoing affair between necessity and curiosity, we learned how to use it. 

Our guts are famously simple.  The cecum has truncated itself to a measly appendix, a gentle reminder of our pre-cooking meals.  There are of course, arguments touting the health benefits of a raw diet, but fire was undeniably an important component in our development.

The addition of heat to any culinary repertoire opens possibilities.  The very chemistry is shifted.  Anthropological theories speculate the utilization of fire in our gastronomic evolution decreased exposure to parasites, increased the digestibility of certain foodstuffs, and made certain essential nutrients bioavailable. 

Regardless of the initial reason for using it, it works.  Just look at the millions of applications of heat, the difference between smoking and steaming, the countless implements we have invented to mediate the way fire relates to our food, the maddening genius that has lent itself to the developments in baking.  These shine light on the breadth of human ingenuity and the wondrous products of hunger.  Not necessarily the kind of hunger that demands nourishment, but the kind that is forever curious about how to make experience more beautiful.