On Cooking

Yesterday, I used my brand new pasta machine for the first time. It’s a beautiful device, and a simple one, a shiny hand-cranked metal thing.

Making pasta is time-consuming, but it’s not difficult: that is, there aren’t that many ways that you can screw it up. At the end of all that labor, you are probably going to have delicious pasta. You start with eggs and flour. You put most of the flour into a big mound, with a hole in the middle for the eggs to go into. You put the eggs into the hole, where you beat them. You slowly add more flour, until you have a small amount of sticky dough and a lot of flour. You add more and more flour, almost all of the flour, until you have dough that isn’t sticky anymore.

Turning flour and eggs into dough is alchemy or magic. If you cook a piece of fish, for example, you turn raw fish into cooked fish. You’ve changed its texture and its color, but it’s the same thing. When you make dough, you turn a white powder, clear egg whites, and bright orange yolks into a smooth, light-brown homogenous ball.

Once you’ve made this dough, you knead it for several minutes. Your hands might be tired by the end. You divide it into several pieces. You feed them through the first set of rollers, starting at the widest setting. You fold each piece into thirds, feed it back in, narrow end first, and repeat two or three times. You put the machine one notch narrower, and you feed each piece back through. You repeat, until the machine is on the narrowest setting. You run out of room on the counter. The cookbook says you can hang the sheets of pasta dough over the edge of the counter, which I didn’t do because my cat would attack them.

You run these long, thin sheets through the cutters, and now you have another transformation, from sheets of dough to strands of dough. There aren’t that many ways to screw up, but I did screw up. If you do what I did, and neglect to mix flour in with the noodles to keep them from sticking together, you will end up with a Cthulhu of pasta stuck together, which you will spend too much time untangling, and you will throw some of the dough out.

I made something like pasta carbonara. You normally toss the pasta in a bowl with a beaten egg and, if you have done everything right, your pasta will have a silken creamy texture. If you have not done everything right, your noodles will be encrusted with tiny pieces of scrambled egg, and it will still be delicious, but not in the transcendent way that proper pasta carbonara is delicious. I had spent enough time detangling my pasta dreadlocks that this part of the process sounded ambitious. I tossed the pasta with parmesan, with fresh parsley, and with pancetta, which I had cooked in garlic-infused olive oil and white wine.

Reader, I don’t want to brag about my cooking, but I won’t say it wasn’t delicious for the sake of pretending to be humble. I was following a recipe from the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and if anyone deserves credit for how it came out, it is the generations of Italians who refined the techniques I followed, and Marcella Hazan, the author of that cookbook. The individual flavors were simple. Salt from the pancetta and salt from the parmesan, fat from the olive oil and the eggs and the pancetta, the simple carbs of the pasta, the bright earthiness of the parsley, the subtle flavor of the garlic and the white wine, the al dente texture of the pasta, combined to produce an experience of beauty.

For the Stoics, living a good life doesn’t require any kind of beauty or pleasure. What is absolutely necessary is living a life of virtue, and everything else is an “indifferent.” For Buddhists, sensory pleasures are distractions, and the desire for these things is the root of all suffering. I practice Zen but not very well, having tried and failed multiple times to keep a habit of meditation, and I’ve read and re-read Epictetus and Seneca, but I wonder if there is another way of looking at these experiences of beauty, somewhere between, on the one hand, reflexively seeking them out, and, on the other, treating them as if they don’t matter, or as if they are actively harmful.

Sometimes life is hard, or at least stressful. Sometimes terrible things happen to you or to people you love, things that are completely out of your control. Six months ago, I fell while riding my bike, and cracked three ribs. For months, the only way I could exercise was to ride an exercise bike indoors. Doing almost anything else hurt too much, and riding my bike on the street risked another accident and an even worse injury. Three months ago, I found out my mother has cancer, and, while it’s not particularly aggressive, it is almost certain that she will be fighting the cancer for the rest of her life. The best case scenario, and the likely scenario, is that in the near and middle term her cancer is a chronic condition, rather than a descent into a terminal illness. Three months ago, I ended a relationship of almost two years. I have so much that I can be grateful for, and I know this, and the last several months have been tough.

When things were tough, I still found ways to experience beauty: the view from the top of Mailbox Peak, which you get to at the end of a gorgeous and arduous hike; the endorphins after a run; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; the short stories of Clarise Lispector. Maybe it is not that these experiences of beauty are the point of living, the reason we live, but that they help us poke our heads up out of the holes we’ve been sheltering or wallowing in, to see that, even when things are miserable or terrifying, there is still beauty and joy out there. A little bit stronger, we go back to dealing with whatever is making our lives difficult. And maybe, when you make yourself a meal or see a play or choose a poem at random from that book on your nightstand which you’ve been neglecting, it will be something even better than that, something that Hagit Grossman describes like this:

…You don’t yet realize
That this is a sublime moment in your life.
One of the most sublime you’ll ever know.