It’s no secret that cooking with love is the key ingredient to making food taste like you’re eating a caress.
Common wisdom cautions against cooking when you’re angry or upset.
It’s dangerous to handle knives or take command of a hot skillet while you’re busy being angry. Rageful cooking, when you’re running hot, has an acrid sting all its own. Rage tastes just as bitter or resentful or sad as you feel.
When I cook, I cook with my whole self. Bits of me go into the dish along with all the other ingredients. Not my literal bits. That would be gross. But when I cook, the food is tinged with my figurative blood, sweat, and tears. So, doesn’t it follow that whatever I’m feeling when I put my apron on will show up in whatever I’m cooking?
Usually, I cook with love. I know this to be true. Simply put, love amplifies flavor. But I can’t define for you or even myself what love tastes like on its own. It’s something I can only intuit. Does love taste like passion or desire or adoration or attachment? I’m not sure but I think the taste of love is like the taste of a pungent spice mix. It’s like when you know there’s something delicious in your food, but you can’t identify it in any specific way. You just know it’s there in every mouthful.
Feeding people is one of the ways–maybe my favorite way–I express my love. I am so grateful to be able to put this love into practice. There is nothing more fulfilling.
Occasionally though, anger takes up residence in my ingredient list.
When I was growing up, expressing negative or difficult emotions or thoughts was highly discouraged. Obedience and compliance were the preferred currency of my household. Backtalk or defiance wasn’t tolerated. Consequently, I learned to hide how I really felt, said what was expected to keep the peace, muddling through difficult events.
Now, decades and decades later, I’m finally more comfortable expressing myself. If I’m honest, it’s still not all that easy sometimes. But–and this is a biggie–when I do express my anger or have the gumption to take up space with a negative opinion, or say a difficult thing, I celebrate. I celebrate my voice, my nerve, my willingness to be uncomfortable.
It feels like power.
And yet that power, that white hotness of anger is a bit of a trickster. It’s fleeting. I’m beginning to learn that its underlying source is usually some combination of fear and longing.
I’m trying more and more when I feel anger to allow it to surface, and then identify what lurks beneath the surface. Am I sad or hurt or in need of something? Is that something love and attention?
Unsurprisingly, love is usually the answer.
Here is an attempt at a kitchen manifesto, a mission statement, for what kind of cook I want to be and how I want to behave in my kitchen. Because it matters. It makes a difference how my food will taste, how it nourishes and feeds, how my behavior fills me up too.
A KITCHEN MANIFESTO
Decide to cook with love.
Enter the kitchen with an open heart
Wash your hands, put on a clean apron,
Release your shoulders, take a cleansing breath.
Decide to cook with love.
Decide that cooking with anger
Will make everything taste like the things
You hate to eat like bananas, mashed potatoes, organ meats, overcooked garlic.
Decide to cook with love.
Love tastes of lemon curd, like blackberries in cream.
Love tastes like butter
Melting on a slab of toast.
Decide to cook with love.
Love tastes like hugs raining down from sunny skies
Landing like pillows
Against your tongue.
I know there will be times when I won’t be able to abide by the Kitchen Manifesto, when my head space won’t allow me to be in the kitchen. Here are a few kitchen-adjacent things that almost always make me feel better, that calm me, that motivate me to let go of the negativity that keeps me from doing the thing I love…cooking.
Read a cookbook, any cookbook
Make a list of how I will use my preserved lemons
Write in cursive because I don’t want to forget how
Make or feed sourdough starter
Make quick pickled red onions
Go to the grocery store or farmers market without a list, buying just enough of what looks good
Clean out the refrigerator, oddly satisfying
Same for organizing the pantry
Make spice rubs for meat, veggies, and fish
And finally, possibly my favorite kitchen adjacent activity is to make a cup of herbal tea, sit in a comfy chair, daydreaming about being on the other side of anger.
On, my! What high praise. Thanks so much. I'm thrilled to know this post resonated with you.
Beautiful post. These words hit home today. Your manifesto is poetry.