I rather fancy that this has been done, but alas, the midnight brings out no better words or thoughts than these.
Cooking, in the years that I have actively practiced it, has become nothing less than an art: delicate balancing of chemical leavening such that the desired rise is achieved sans metallic taste, improvised spice-to-dish ratios to create the desired full body of flavour (my mother once made a soup out of apples, of all things, which tasted almost remarkably like chicken [ignore, kindly, the fact that I haven't eaten chicken for six years and wouldn't know it if it smacked me upside the head], but for a jarring, lilting tinniness that sang above a rootless tenor that pulled it off course. A dish, like a choir, demands all voices), and that questioning painting of taste, texture, and yes, even colour, that combines to some sort of perfection unachievable by something less necessary and inherently desired than food. There are failures aplenty, as in any art form, which manifest in anything from excesses of aniseed extract in an otherwise delicate and snowily-crumbed cake to a simple misjudgement of time allotment, resulting in fallen souffle or limply soggy vegetables. I stamp my foot at those and move on, but every now and then there is that singular beauty, a masterpiece that soothes the irritation of the sorry waste with the reassurance of radiance in something so primal. Recipes can only guide you so far, as they are written by different people with different tastes, different families and life experiences, even simply different equipment or location—which is to say that really, cooking is nothing if not cleverly reducible to a complex, unimaginable series of biochemical reactions (but oh, goodness, what isn't?), and simple things such as changes in air pressure or slightly higher British Thermal Unit per hour output are inherently applicable. But like so many things, no Ph.D in biochemistry will be worthwhile in the kitchen if you use it to disregard the necessary subjectiveness of that elusive flawlessness.
Every so often, though, I feel this entitlement keenly. It is more often now, now that I have been just exposed enough to realise what I am myself, and suddenly, everything that I work for, everything that I strive for, long for, becomes abhorrent, even vile. Music and art, at their cores nothing more than longings for something lovely, and well, even food, that symbol upon which we base everything, by the virtue of their being aspired to, are repellent. It's not even so rarely anymore that I quite despise eating, and for someone as enamoured with cooking as myself, perhaps this is a strange thing, even an unnatural thing to say. I feel this unnaturalness even now, still shivering off the effects of yesterday's (er—well, poorly handled and unfortunate, to say the least) long-broken fast, but there is something beautiful and engaging in the preparation of food that inevitably fades come time for consumption. This, too, reviles me when I ask myself if I even have a reason anymore and can't come up with anything better than a paltry, “Why not?”. It used to be that “even the privileged need respite from gluttony”. No longer, not really. Nor can it be out of any pretentiously altruistic desire to “understand” something that I can't understand because for me, it has always been a choice to abstain. But no matter how far you draw it out, it all too often seems that there can never be a way to do anything. So I pull myself back to normalcy, retaining my rampant adoration for such things as opera and art museums, clothbound second-hand novels, and, yes, saffron and cave-aged gruyere. But I say “second-hand” because there is a well-loved, well-read attractiveness to a slightly weathered, yellow-paged Middlemarch or Crime and Punishment. If you are not too shy to look around the darkened hall at Carmen or Madama Butterfly, turn, ever so slightly, because there are few things in public so peaceful and comforting as another, blissfully engaged in music that they adore. So it is with food—beauty in a dish seems wasted on even a single person, let alone the cook. Tired and satiated from a day of the sweating kitchen, I cannot feel a hunger beyond that to observe the momentary bliss of one engaging fully with something so mundane and necessary as food. And beyond that, fasting has become a sort of necessary, integral ritual—not to be undertaken too often, it must be said, to maintain personal physical health as well as parental mental health, but the few quiet days that it's allowed are a thought-provoking transition from the weak, shaky beginning to a tranquility unparalleled.
Absent the mind-numbing stupor of satiation, the world is at once frighteningly clear and impressionistically blurred. Birdsong is never so cleanly bright as during a fast, and the shades of life around never so vivid. I wonder now, curled in a blanket and warm against the winding evening, if sublimity exists above a meandering, pre-dawn walk into perhaps a world as unblemished by civilisation as the body itself is lightened by fasting. In the summer midnights, I ran wild into forests lining cornfields, wading through pebbled streams and benevolent, star-studded velvet skies. The world beyond the body is too much to take in, perhaps, that to keep from going mad from it all, one detaches from that physical world of necessities and the soft, sweet complaining of deprivation. It is an incomprehensible joy, a satisfaction that cuts deeply into a reality separate from that which demands material satiation and only then, as you sit sated and calm, softly unaware, your experiences ferment into memories and linger there, reminding you, when you attach yourself just a little too much to a certain frame of mind, of that which glitters beyond the visual world. It is strange. Perhaps it is no different than a slowed-down repeat of those skittering moments of breathlessness before blackness, string pulled taut, though I have never been capable of thinking of breathlessness as anything other than frightening and terrible.
