A personal meditation on cooking as a skill, and my journey towards becoming a cook.

One of the prime indicators of having acquired certain proficiency in a new skill is when you begin to have a “feel” for the activity. It is difficult to precisely describe what this quality of “feel” means. But one knows it when you have it. And make no mistake, this feeling is not innate or easy to come by, unless one is a prodigy or a natural in the domain in question. For instance, Mozart is said to have had a feel for music when he was three, Federer could caress the tennis ball even as a young kid and Borge could translate Oscar Wilde’s work into Spanish when he was six. Such people have a natural disposition to specific skills because their brains are wired that way. I am not talking here about such preternatural abilities. I am talking about those of us who have to slog and go through a strict regimen of effort, structured learning, practice, and mentoring to acquire a skill to which we are voluntarily committed or imposed on us from outside. Sometimes, the sheer routine of doing something day after day gives us a sense of confidence in doing it well, but, please note, doing a task with confidence is not necessarily having a feel for it. A good indicator of “feel” is when you can apply a skill in different contexts. A feel, then, is much more than just following a set of rules to perfection, it is often exemplified by a heightened passion, an inquisitive urge to experiment, innovate, and apply. In short, you begin to play around with the knowledge you have without losing control. Just like love, anger, and grief, this feeling for a skill is visceral, and often cannot be adequately rationalized. It manifests itself as a tingling sense of doing the right thing even if the rules are being bent a little. Having such a feel is a prerequisite to mastering that skill in the long run.

Nowhere is this feel as necessary and imperative as in the process of cooking. Till I arrived in the US, the only cooking I had ever done was boil milk ( not always with precision) and occasionally peel potatoes ( after they had cooled down. It embarrasses me today to think how foolish I was to assume that peeling the skin of potatoes was the most important thing I could do to help. I understood the meaning of the wry and pardoning smile on my mother’s face each time I would proudly volunteer to do this). Food was always taken for granted. I sat ( or we were summoned) at the table, and food mysteriously arrived, fully cooked, delicious, and full of aroma. How it came to be was a black box defined by the kitchen, where my Mom ruled and weaved her magic. Because of this upbringing, the first few years outside home, at work, were hellish, to say the least. Restaurants became my refuge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But such a state of affairs, obviously, was untenable, impractical, and not to mention financially draining.

I had to learn how to cook at any cost. It was an existential requirement. But the question is how and how soon? The entire process seemed so intimidating, especially Indian cuisine, which is what I needed on a daily basis. Making a sandwich, American style doesn’t need much brain power, but even the simplest of Indian dishes – the most foundational ones have such depth and artistry to them. Starting with acquiring the array of ingredients, to following the right proportion and sequence of flavors to be followed, to finding the right tools to cook, to insights into the chemistry of how the spices mix and the physical laws of thermodynamics that make it happen, and above all, after it is done, the sheer dread of how the end product will turn out to be – is enough to make even the brave-hearted shy away from cooking. But one has to start somewhere. Taking that first step to learn something new is the most difficult part. So many doubts and uncertainties loom large in front of us. But the key is to overcome the reticence and take the plunge. I knew when I embarked on this journey that it wasn’t going to be easy even when youtube videos showcased well-dressed chefs assured me otherwise. No amount of expert demonstration alone was going to help me cook. I should commit myself to the task, and be prepared for the countless mistakes and misjudgments, and trashable outcomes that constitute the process of cooking. While the experts can show me how it can be done, I have to do it myself ( NIIT’s Stackroute pedagogy) to understand the nuances, pitfalls, and micro-triumphs that are inherent in the task.

I began cooking with serious intent to become proficient at it somewhere around 2016 when I moved to my new home. Unlike my old place, there were no restaurants here within walking distance where I could step out and have a choice of two dozen places to eat from. Here, I had to cook, otherwise, drive a few miles to the nearest restaurant. Not practical! So I began cooking. I had to approach every step of the cooking process with trepidation. While the cooking videos oozed with confidence on how easy it was to do the things they did, I had quite the contrary experience. While the ingredients were now available and the means, I remember, how many times, I got it wrong. Countless times I have overcooked, undercooked, misread and misinterpreted the proportion of ingredients, betrayed a lack of timing, filled with a sense of anxiety, and paralyzed due to my inability to gauge the state of the ingredients during the cooking process ( a crucial skill that is directly related to having a feel for cooking). God knows, how many times, I have thrown what I had cooked into the trash bag, and started all over again hoping for better results the next time. Step by step, dish by dish, attempt after attempt, I stumbled and rolled my way into the art of cooking.

I would be wrong if I conveyed the impression above that I learned cooking entirely on my own with the aid of videos only. Nothing can be further from the truth. There were two mentors who played a critical role – My Mom and Rajan. Let me talk about Rajan first. Standing beside Rajan, and watching him cook has been a great influence in shaping the way I thought and felt about cooking. Rajan’s love for the process of cooking is wildly infectious, as will be attested by anyone who has seen him in the kitchen. Every ingredient he carefully chooses and drops into the cooking pan holds life and meaning to him, and you can almost feel his silent sensory communion with them as they crackle, boil, simmer, and mix to his satisfaction. In many cases, Rajan is fastidiously adamant that only a specific brand of an ingredient can go into his cooking and nothing else. if that was not available, it was better to cook something different. This was an important lesson for me. It helped me become aware of alternatives. And being the great teacher that he is, he often articulated the reasons for doing what he just did or had done. Like a good mentor should, Rajan usually never explained everything about the preparation ( only his youtube channel does), but he has this knack for pointing out just the right detail which is crucial for the well-being of the dish. For instance, for quite some time, I didn’t know what is the indication that tomatoes in a pan were really cooked, and during one of my visits, in an offhand manner, I remember Rajan pointing out that when the oil bubbles up and coats the surfaces of the tomatoes like shining pearls, they are fully cooked and ready for the next step. It is in such intimate details that learning happens. Books and videos can point out general statements, only a master can show specifics. For a novice like me, and struggling, these details clarified and opened up a new dimension. Rajan taught me the difference between poppy, sesame, and fenugreek seeds. along with the relevance of the spice powders that form an essential part of Indian cuisine. Once he showed me how to make a Potato-cauliflower curry with 777 brand sambar powder, instead of regular chili powder. The result, of course, was amazing, but more importantly, It was one of those rare occasions when he allowed me to handle some parts of the cooking. Those thirty minutes standing alongside Rajan taught me more about cooking than any video could have done. I bought a Preeti mixer at his suggestion, and a vegetable chopper, which expanded the process of cutting vegetables into small cubes. I can’t tell you, how much this appliance has eased the process of cooking. Apart from these, I have accumulated a lot of tips just by observing how Rajan works in the kitchen. And with each of them, I refined my own cooking techniques and skills.

My all-time inspiration for cooking is my mom. I may not be wrong in stating that anyone who learns the rudiments of cooking, consciously or unconsciously, tries to replicate their Mother’s cooking. It cannot be otherwise, we are, after all, in body and spirit a consummation of the food she fed us, and what we crave is the taste we are used to and have grown up with. When I make rasam, sambhar, or Biriyani, I instinctively compare it to the flavors my mom invoked with these dishes. In my mind, her version will always triumph over anything I will ever eat, and what I and others make will always fall short of her preparation. I took to cooking ( like many others, I suspect) because I craved for “home food” or “mom’s cooking”, the way she made it. Nothing else will do to satisfy the craving. Therefore, in anything I cook, there is this undercurrent of expectation that it should live up to how Mom would make it. That is a tall ask for any novice. And it is not long before I painfully realized that such an expectation cannot be met at all. Every cooking hand is different. We could use the same ingredients, utensils, and the process to the tee, but the outcome can be radically different. There is an unknown, often mysterious quality, that a good chef injects into the dish to give it a distinctive flavor unique to the person cooking it. Mom’s hands can never be replicated. This cannot be scientifically explained, but this is true of any skill. In fact, they may not know how they do it themselves. Even today, Mom guides me over the phone with full-blown instructions. I try my best to stick to the letter of her instructions, knowing well, that I can never capture the spirit of it. But sometimes, and this happens rarely indeed, something I make comes close to Mom’s version. And those are the moments I cherish.

During the pandemic, I got to cook more often, and this helped home my skills. It has been six years since I started cooking in right earnest, and at this point, I am reasonably confident of my skills. As I said at the beginning of this essay, I now have a feel for it. I don’t have to follow instructions without deviation. Instructions have become signposts or guardrails and nothing more. Within the boundaries of the overall recipe, I am able to play around with the ingredients and steps, and sometimes, even substitute both to experiment with the outcome. A feel for cooking fosters the courage to experiment. If you didn’t know this already, cooking is fun, and definitely a stress-buster. It demands a different kind of holistic attention, unlike most other art forms. It involves all the senses – sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch ( the texture of a paste or mix is so important). Even if one of these is ignored, the final product may not come out well. In another sense, Cooking is a tangible activity with clear outcomes. The process and the outcome are there for everyone to behold. And if a dish comes out well, there is an indescribable pleasure that makes it worth all the effort and time put into it.

Jean Anthelme Brillat – Savarin, was a quiet French lawyer, who lived during the French Revolution and for many years after the revolution lived the passive life of a judge in a district court of appeals. He did nothing to distinguish himself during his lifetime. He died in 1825 a happy man. In 1826, his friend found a journal that Brillat-Savarin was working on for nearly twenty years and decided to publish it. The journal happened to be the author’s personal meditation on Gastronomy, which he jotted down when he had free time in court. The book was a hit, and for the last two centuries has continued to remain in print as one of the finest expositions of the art and science of gastronomy. Much of what he wrote about cooking, its science and skill may be outdated, but the essence and the passion he had for the subject is infectious. The 1949 English translation of the book, by the brilliant Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher – who is also widely acknowledged to be the creator of what we now call the “food writing” genre – has a grandiose title: ” The physiology of taste or the meditations on transcendental gastronomy”. I happened to find this book at a book fair about five years ago in mint condition, and since then, it has remained one of my favorite bedtime books. For those among my readers who are connoisseurs of food and take delight in gastronomical experiments, I recommend the translation by M.F.K Fisher. In the first chapter, Brillat-Savarin lays down twenty aphorisms that guide the flow of the rest of the book. The tenth one says:

“We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast”.

This should be borne in mind by anyone who learns to cook. We may have access to all the Youtube videos in the world, the best books on cuisines, detailed instructions on how to cook, and great mentors, but, unless we acquire a feel for the process of cooking, we can never emerge as skilled chefs. “Knowing how to roast” cannot be taught beyond a point. It has to be felt, one has to know when the potatoes are fried without losing their flavor and texture, or when the masala mixture has cooked enough to drop in the veggies or meat. We can estimate rough timelines for each of these activities, but they cannot be relied upon. And it is a feel for such matters that distinguishes a good cook from an average one.

There is no better way of ending this essay than quoting a paragraph from Brillat-Savarin’s book. Describing what good food can do, he writes “Well-prepared food should gratify mouths which never open wider than a simper, to tempt vaporous nervous ladies, to awaken stomachs made of papier-mache, to rouse thin fanciful dyspeptics in whom appetite is like a whim always on the point of vanishing: to do this takes more genius, more deep thought, and more hard work than it would to resolve one of the most difficult problems in the geometry of the infinite”.

Need we say more?