Skill building isn’t simple and certainly not straightforward. Learning to cook will show you this immediately. Let me set the recent scenario, I attempted making a bisque-style sauce, which is a simple with 5 ingredients and only twenty minutes start to finish. It was the first time I made this but I immediately recognized one thing I’d change; the onion. I’m not sure if it was out of haste or poor cutting but I diced it too large and every few bites I hit a distinct piece of onion where I wanted a smooth sauce all the way. Nobody else at the table said anything but that tells you something about the stakes here1.
The funny thing about cutting my onions too large is that it is indicative to almost everything I’ve learned about cooking, self-improvement is within the distance between “it was good” and “next time, smaller onions.” It took me years to see that, though. Before I realized this, I was searching for better-sounding theories about what makes a good cook, and every one of them was wrong.
The first theory was that good cooks know more recipes and great ones know even more. Collect them all like Pokémon and boom, you’ve evolved into a good cook. But, alas, this is the same silly logic as collecting enough facts might make you educated. Yet this theory fails in a specific way, the substitution or wrong ingredient often becomes a blind spot. A recipe tells you what to do but it can’t tell you your onion was too large, because it wasn’t there. Only you were there, and only if you were paying more attention would you notice it.
Once I understood that, I jumped to my second theory. The obvious follow-up from recipes that don’t substitute is that good cooks deviate. The recipe stops being instructions and becomes a draft or a suggestion. I’m in full freestyle mode, just adding garlic, tossing in spices, and drizzling extra olive oil to a written recipe with no regard. Earlier in my cooking journey, that would have been unthinkable but this newfound freedom feels like a new unlock. Surely this free-wheeling behavior was expertise; I would be on my way to MasterChef.
This was great until I wanted to be fast and loose with authentic carbonara. In the span of a few minutes, carbonara destroyed this theory so quickly. Done the Roman way it is incredibly simple and has almost nothing in it2.
The dish only works if I trust it enough to add nothing. You render the guanciale slow, until the fat runs clear. Then off the heat, egg and cheese are mixed and then tempered with a ladle of pasta water, working the pan until it goes glossy instead of scrambling into breakfast. Ninety seconds of restraint, more or less, and a heavy hand has nowhere to hide in it which is the real skill. Restraint and reading the dish in front of you. My second theory had confused the courage to change things with the judgment about whether you should.
The third theory was about range because, naively, I assumed a more advanced cook ranged wider. More cuisines, more ambitious plates, ingredients that require a special trip (which with my Boston accent would never allow me to pronounce), techniques with French names. And yet, I found the exact opposite. What actually made me better was going backward, into my own heritage and family’s food. Basic dishes like carote in agrodolce, pasta alla gricia, carbonara, braciole, risotto, these kinds of things. Recipes from people with time and not much money. That constraint is exactly why these dishes teach so much patience. None of the ingredients costs much money, so the whole transformation has to come from technique. One time, I seared slices from a tube of precooked polenta, the kind you walk right past at the store3, and served them crisp under sausage and mushrooms, it was like we were eating at a high end restaurant but everything was inexpensive with “lower quality” ingredients.
The lesson I did learn though is that expensive ingredients are usually a way of buying your way around a technique you haven’t bothered to learn. The people who invented these dishes couldn’t afford the expensive ingredients. I had been chasing novelty when the most valuable training material was already mine, patience and technique.
After all this, one theory remains, and it’s something I still argue with myself about while cooking daily: that time spent standing at a stove is a cost. I saw this with the patience needed to debunk theory 3 but despite all the different dishes I make, risotto was the one that fully broke this theory. The version I make is a mushroom risotto the traditional northern Italian way, and every shortcut (and every mistake) shows up on the plate. The recipe is slow and purposeful; a simple rushed step like hitting it with a big splash of cold stock and you stop the cooking dead and left with an unpleasant chalky center with a gluey outside. Then mortal sin I would sometimes commit was sometimes forgetting the butter. At the end, the technique called mantecatura, which is cold butter and parmigiano, is beaten into the rice, off the heat, until the pot goes creamy and loose. Every time I’ve hurried a risotto, the risotto has provided me with a less than ideal experience. I originally treated the twenty minutes of stirring as the price of admission but now I’ve noticed the stirring is what I came for.
And that’s where all the dead theories turn out to be the same corpse. Every wrong theory I’ve had was an attempt to locate the skill somewhere other than in paying attention and patience. Both are the inputs you can’t download, so improvement was the reward for refusing to be time efficient.
With all that I have learned, the next improvement is to dice my onions smaller, and hopefully after that, the sauce will find something new to teach me.
Announcing the flaws in a meal you’ve just served people is a different hobby, with fewer repeat guests. Sometimes the flaws are just for you.
Absolutely no cream. That’s an American add on which tracks.
It comes shrink-wrapped in a tube and looks like something you’d buy to caulk a bathtub. Not appetizing when described like that.