My birthday passed last week. In prior years, I’d disregarded the day, too busy to notice, and carried on as it were any other. This year, it seemed, so many people from all periods of my life contacted me with well wishes.
I was surprised to realize that each of those people were in some way catalogued in my memory in conjunction with some image of food and cooking. Of my childhood friends, I remember weekend camping trips, open fire cookouts, a flat sandstone pushed into the coals on which we tried to sear hamburgers.
I remember working through knife skills in culinary school alongside my brother, the sense of competition we felt at cutting perfectly diced carrots, and the pride in seeing him excel just as I did.
I remember a ripe papaya I plucked in Hawaii, the day of my dear friends’ wedding, the flesh of the fruit still warm from the sun, wet and perfumed and perfectly sweet without being cloying.
Of course, being a chef, food is an integral part of my memory and my social framework. Food and cooking, however, do operate similarly to personal memory on a larger social scale.
Recently, Adam Sachs noted in Travel + Leisure that the San Francisco dining scene has “developed a personality.” Restaurants such as SPQR draw on specific time and place, in their case the classical Roman Republic, to inform its culinary aesthetic. There is the fervor surrounding the demise of Hostess, maker of the Twinkie, amongst other beloved mass manufactured snacks.
These examples show how food and cooking extend beyond just sustenance and form identity and social consciousness. The reaction to the loss of the Twinkie perfectly highlights our connection to food and the importance of food and cooking. Food is capable of eliciting great response not only in the individual, but across a swath of people as well. The Twinkie is as iconic to many Americans as is any other modern day hero, even more so given that our heroes are often far removed from us, while the Twinkie accompanied many of us to school when we were children.
In order to understand the social power of food, we have to look to a past even further than our own childhoods. Cooking has been with humans from the very start of our species – it has even been recently argued by primatologist Richard Wrangham that cooking created the modern human. The act of taking raw food and applying fire to it is intertwined with our genetics as much as our proclivity to speech. When we cook for others, with others, we tap into our primitive past and express a fundamental part of being human. Therein lies the power of cooking.
On my birthday, I was cooked for. In the middle of dinner service, I was marched from the kitchen to the restaurant’s bar and Roland Passot cooked me dinner. As I ate, still in my chef coat, looking at the other diners also celebrating birthdays, or anniversaries, or simply their love for each other, I thought of all the people who have come in and out of my life. How fortunate I have been to have shared a meal with or cooked for so many. How graced to have been touched by their collective humanity.
I wondered how I would remember the day in years to come. Perhaps the memory would return to me in the form of dessert, an opera cake, with layers of dark chocolate and decadent mousses, a perfect quenelle of curry ice cream, everything smoky and sexy, as if I’d spent the night kissing a newly met beloved in a darkened foyer.