Cook n Scribble

is for Authentic, a state of being that is essential to writers, but a word sorely lacking the literary libido to provoke that glorious condition.  When one stands firmly in what is real, the past and the present, the individual and the collective, the manifest and the imagined merge and flow as righteously as the Mississippi.

It is the only place from which to write. Writers slog through a lot of fantasy to achieve firm footing in what is genuine, universal, and enduring. The ache for the state is constant. Using the word pushes the ache to root canal level pain.

“Authentic” trills from restaurant menus, book covers, bill boards and travel brochures; from advertisements for blue jeans, whiskey, luxury roadsters, and animal-skin Manolo Blahniks. A jar labeled “Authentic Thai Red Curry Sauce, Simply Add Fish, Meat or Vegetables” blares from a shelf in the grocery store. The word married a marketer and became a Stepford Wife.

Avoid eye contact. One blink and you’ve fallen for simulacra, a finely wrinkled word whose complexity has been nipped and tucked to a smooth nothing. Such is the cruelty of au courant cliché. Your every mitochondrion is straining toward the vibrant, the vital, and the enduring.  You wake up next to a dead tuna.

Throw it back. However, don’t toss the yearning for authenticity out with the word. The yearning is a blazing ball of energy. It is the blind belief that capturing a moment in words, which is not unlike capturing fireflies in a jam jar, will allow others to see what you saw, a glimmer of transcendence, a pathway through the limits of a particular time and place.

In an era in which access to the idiosyncratic and the real is limited; authenticity equals transcendence.  This helps explain the mania to write about food and read about food. The palate is one of the last wholly opinionated, uncolonized and completely singular “shit detectors” left. Taste is today’s Walden Pond.

A writer capable of identifying the disparate sensations in a single taste,the flashes of memory, both personal and collective ; strands of knowledge, both instinctual and acquired;and connecting them to  her own time and place, is holding a fine jar of fireflies. The challenge is keeping the fireflies alive.

Imagination and evocation tend to work better than definition.  Write: “A jar of Photuris lucicrescens^“ and you’ve limited yourself to a science display. Write, as the poet Liliam Moore did “A jar of tiny stars,” and you’ve made the world bigger.

Expansiveness is the essence of authenticity. In food writing, the term is used to represent flavors unsullied by time, geographic remove,  or, most often today, industry, mass-production, and the false economy of scale.

As a stand-in for “old-fashioned,” “naive,” “innocent,” “pure,” “unadulterated,” and “genuine,” the word “authentic” leans heavily on history and indigenous folk-ways. In this sense, it is time-travel, in-situ, un-exported. It is an unchanging recipe. It is also a misuse of the word.

Things that stay the same are traditional. Tradition is shaped by culture. Traditional cooking, writes Marcella Hazan, is “formed over time by the consensus of a group, it is entirely the manifestation of a territory, of its social organization, of its political and economic history, of its climate, of the configuration of its land and sea, of the unique products native to each. Traditions can evolve, but with immensely slow and irreversible progression, immune to judgment.”

Authenticity on the other hand, is an individual response to an ever-changing world, it is ceaseless improvisation, unedited, raw, risky, unpredictable, and impossible to duplicate. It is scarce and imperiled today and therefore, the thing that people –and those who want to sell them things –want most.  In this climate, the nostalgic aspects of authenticity are exaggerated. Authenticity is the great-grandmother you never knew, the Eden that most certainly existed before the asphalt was laid. It is the conviction that things used to be better. It is the possibility of a do-over, a get-it-right-this-time. To dwell solely in the word’s backward glance, however, however, sells authenticity short.

From the ancient Greek autos (self) and hentes, (worker, doer, or master), authentic is more about active engagement than it is about passive pining. It is more about the here and now than a backward glance. It is the risk of originality, the ongoing act of mastering. For food writers this means tying tight to the senses — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell are the mooring of the genre — and letting imagination out to play.

Authentic holds the past like a handful of fallen stars, throws them up in the air and starts again, alone in the dark, naming the sparks, the smell of the heat, the taste of night on the tongue.

is for CHOICE and choosing and choose, an action that is best left unsaid. A perfect dish or a memorable sentence is, after all, the sum of choices. The cook selects ingredients. The writer chooses words. When successful, the sentence — or the dish — shivers the timbers, marks the moment, expands the universe. The creator’s capacity to select is implicit, it is the life force that propels the work. Stating the obvious kills that pulse.

The small, fat chicken arrived at the restaurant table, buttery, herb-scented fat dancing victoriously against the cast iron skillet. I swooned into a deep inhale and then:

“The chef has chosen a locally-raised, free-ranged, heritage-breed poulet and roasted it in the wood-fired oven, with rosemary and just a touch of lemon thyme and mint thyme from his family’s farm, in Lenox, Massachusetts,” said the waiter. He pinched his thumb and index finger together to communicate the finesse of the seasoning and continued:

“He chose to massage the bird in the butter made on his family’s farm in Lennox Massachusetts and to pair it with a selection of the Yellow Amarillo, Atomic Red and Cosmic Purple carrots and the Adirondack purple potatoes that are cultivated on a small farm not more than ten miles from here. I can give you a moment to enjoy the presentation before carving.”

That’s ok. Reverie successfully curtailed. Just slice the sucker.

Great writing, like great cooking is a conversation. The creation is only as powerful as its resonance — the imagining and feeling, the desire, determination, the altered sense of what is possible that it stirs. The waiter stopped the flow. It wasn’t his fault. He was just doing his job. In an era when mere mortals feel powerless over big things like jobs and taxes, healthcare and war, small displays of individual choice ease anxiety, at least for the one trumpeting his choice.

“I chose” asserts the privilege and capacity to select, the decision to stake a higher ground, to triumph over lesser options. I chose, therefore I am.

The Chef chose chicken. I watched the sizzle die in the pan.

Too Much Information murdered that moment. But there was also a basic misunderstanding of sentence structure. Presumably, the chicken, not the choice, was what the server meant to discuss. Instead, the chicken became the object. As well as the object lesson.

In a another context, this sentence structure could be powerful. “After the marauding troops had moved on, the farmer’s wife emerged from her hiding place in the barn to find the bodies of her husband and son, along with a single surviving chicken from her flock. She chose the chicken.” In the context of dinner, on the other hand, the act of choosing is a little less significant.

And yet, “I chose” and “My choice” is increasingly prevalent in food writing. It breeds awkward elocution: “I chose local chicken from a local farmer and opted to roast it over young alder, as opposed to a mass-produced coal derived of less sustainable wood.” In addition, “I chose” shrinks the world to a single consideration.

Ah, but the sound of the buttery chicken fat giggling, the sight of that spectral rosemary branch pressed between the skin and the plump breast, the scent of the wood, the flush of heat that rushes upward to your face — these sensations open the world, the eyes, the nostrils, the mind.

Bacon Letter Photo courtesy of Henry Hargreaves.