My Life As a Cook

I grew up at the feet of a fabulous cook. My mother was a natural, able to make something delicious out of almost nothing. She was not recipe dependent, although she had taken classes in French cooking and had a thick notebook of recipes. Accordingly, I ate very well as a boy.

Every night, while growing up, we were served a full dinner. Salad, a main course, side dishes, and dessert. Some nights it was lamb chops, sometimes sliced leg of lamb, sautéed chicken, shrimp with rice, Osso Buco, pasta, roast beef, and so forth. Acorn squash, peas in cream sauce, zucchini, green beans, baked potato, sautéed carrots, artichokes; we were exposed to them all.

I learned to cook in front of a Wolf range restaurant stove. It had a flat top grill, and broiler, next to six burners. all above two enormous ovens. This was well before commercial grade kitchen equipment was made available for domestic use. That stove was so heavy the floor had to be shored up from below with wooden pillars.

It was there I started making breakfast for my brother and sister. So began a lifetime of preparing meals, and by now at the age of 76 I figure I’ve prepared something well over 15,000 meals. And I still enjoy cooking.

Some of the knives and pans I use have been in my hands for 50 years. And when my mother died, I inherited pans that had been in her hands for that long. I’ve also carried 50 years of cooking habits with me, having a well-stocked larder for example, and a wide range of spices.

For a while, my wife and I owned a bed-and-breakfast inn, and we served breakfast daily to a dozen strangers. There is something oddly satisfying about placing a good looking plate of food in front of someone you’ve just met and watching their reaction. Our bed-and-breakfast had the highest occupancy rate of any lodging in Sonoma in the year 2000; I credit the food with that.

For me, the experience of cooking is a creative act, an art. When I sometimes have difficulty falling asleep, I calm myself by envisioning ingredients and flavors I will combine and compose. For a busy mind like mine cooking is meditation in action; mindfulness is essential, for my knives are too sharp to be casually handled. When I slice an onion, I’m careful; 1/8 inch, 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch chunks, prepared deliberately but also intuitively.

So too the use of spices, of which I have over 100. Spices were among the first goods traded when civilization was still young. They still are a great treasure, and for a cook the key to satisfying flavor. Preparation techniques may vary, but what really separates Indian, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican food from each other are spices.

Nowadays, I cook for two old people, my wife and I. We really only eat one main meal each day; breakfast and dinner are mere snacks, and lunch is our main meal. I could have kept a record of every meal I’ve cooked, but never did. Composing a meal and eating it is an ongoing enterprise, the daily fulfillment of a biological necessity, at least the eating part is. And yes, perhaps just as primal is the gathering of ingredients and their preparation; someone has always had to do it, or in my case, always wanted to.