You have not lived until you’ve heard Meryl Streep narrate how to make the perfect four-minute egg.
Let me make one thing clear: I do not cook food.
Gulp, inhale, savor, exalt? Sure. But cooking — oh how the word “cook” hits my ears like a four-lettered insult! — has always remained a talent just out of my reach. I merely prepare food. We’re talking basic, embarrassing, canned-spaghetti-sauce stuff. Sorry, Grandma. All of those (to use the term loosely) “recipes” for Two-Ingredient Cookies and Super Quick Slow-Cooker Dinners are my shameful thirtysomething secret.
Still, you’re supposed to confront that which makes you feel most insecure, right? Instead of simmering in self-loathing about being cooking dumb, I decided to sneak cooking inspiration into my life with the help of chefs, critics, and experts who know their way around a wok. While it would be impossible to read their books while walking through the farmer’s market or squeezing loaves of sourdough in the supermarket — or even fit a cracked-open cookbook on the counter in my tiny kitchen — I thought that listening to stories and encouragement in their own voices might help calm my anxieties and perhaps coax out my inner Julia Child. I was right.
I start with by Eric Ripert. (Speak French to me, Chef.) Ripert is the man behind Le Bernardin, long hailed as one of the best restaurants in the world, and I know from chapter one (titled “First, Dessert: Chocolate Mousse”) that we will be fast friends — albeit with one sugary-sweet hitch: I must first have that mousse.
As he details life growing up in France as a precocious kid gourmand, it’s not hard to see how knowing a chef’s life story, how he literally grew to love the food that later informs his career, can make you appreciate that chef even more. I wonder, then, how much our relationship with food is frozen in place during childhood. If Ripert hadn’t spent his pre-pubescent years eating escargot at Michelin-starred restaurants, or turning to food as a salve for his unhappy childhood after his parent’s divorce and father’s death when he was 11, where would he be now?
I ponder this as he shares one of the highlights of his youth: le goûter, the French midday snack time apparently beloved by children. He makes them count; baguette and Nutella was a favorite. Incorporating small yet delicious moments throughout the day is a genius idea. Is my grocery store open 24 hours? My appetite is.
No one wants to get schooled by someone who thinks their schnitzel don’t stink.
The next course is by Kathleen Flinn. Now that I’ve set the gastronomic tone for myself, I’m ready to become fearless. The author, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate, emphasizes that her tips are practical and simple: “As long as an approach yields good, nourishing food, it isn’t wrong,” she says. Amen, Kathleen. As she rifles through the kitchens of the adopted students to whom she’s determined to teach proper food techniques, I feel less embarrassed about being a tenderfoot — and, fine, slightly smug that I don’t have Stouffer’s lasagna in my freezer. (Mine’s from Trader Joe’s.)
