I have mentioned before that I am married to someone who thinks about and cares about food a lot less than I do. He has good taste in some foods: early in our working relationship, we bonded over great fried chicken on a trip to Memphis one time. But, overall, he doesn’t care about it much. I’m always talking about food, and he is always listening to me and taking an interest in things that I care about, though, so he’s learned some things. I am one of those people who says things like, “salt makes food taste more like itself.” When he rephrased it in the way he does below, though, I liked it. I like having more than one perspective on any topic, and I hope that you will as well. With that said, I hand the floor to my dear and loving husband. — Julie
Some of my difficulty in learning about cooking can be explained by observing that the vast majority of resources are produced by and for people who like food, as those of us who do not are not typically interested in writing about it and probably will never purchase more than one or two books on the subject. Despite a lack of any genuine fascination, my first reason for wanting a better understanding is to offer my wife, who will always be head chef, assistance competent enough to be helpful.
The subject is on my mind because for the past week and next few days to come, circumstances have left me home alone, and I am up to my bachelor habits but with some improvements. This brings me to the second reason, which is that I've often had a hard time being satiated by my own food. I don't need things to taste amazing and I don't care about most of the subtle qualities that foodies write about. But I do need food to make me not hungry anymore, and for a long time I had been baffled by how it's even possible to fail at this.
I am rarely struck by moods for a kind of food, something that seems to happen to most people all the time. They're really feeling like pasta tonight, or want something nice and crispy, or don't want something to get crispy, and they feel that it is mandatory to eat for dinner something different than what they enjoyed for lunch, and it makes the entire endeavor feel like succession of frivolities with whimsical hidden motivations I cannot relate to at all. Toasting bread, for example: Why would I go through an extra step when I'm going to eat this same piece of bread either way, and bread is fine to eat regardless of whether it's been toasted?
I've come round to the idea that it's not all personal whim (sorry dear, you're right), and the parts that aren't whim can be summed up roughly as: Food is better if it has as many different flavors and textures as possible. Foodies talk about complex flavor combinations and perfect pairings, but for the most part quality is simply additive. The more features you can incorporate, the better. Sweet, savory (meatlike), sour (acidic/fermented), bitter, smoky, spicy… it's not a complex system, you just want as much as possible and you can improve something by adding more variety. It doesn't matter whether the combination is present in a single dish or across multiple things, just that a lot of stuff is available in a single sitting. Aspects like texture are the same way. Hot, cold, solid, liquid, squishy, crispy. Doesn't matter what, only matters how much variety. If you're missing something on the checklist, you'll want to add it. Toasting bread, for example: If you don't have anything crispy, crunchy, or hot in the meal yet, throwing the bread onto the skillet for a minute is an easy way to tick that box.
I'm sure this is all a gross oversimplification of what's going on in the mind of an expert when they taste the sauce, gaze into the distance, and pensively decree "it needs just a pinch of …" but I'm not an expert, I'm never going to be, and this notion of a basic flavor and texture checklist gets me close enough.
Moreover, I've come round to the idea that the food being enjoyable does matter more than I thought because affects how full you feel. It turns out that I do like all the same things that the foodies like, I just didn't know it because I pay more attention to satiation after eating rather than sensation during. But we're perceiving the same things. I don't know why two very different foods sit more comfortably in the stomach than two similar foods, and it doesn't matter much. That seems to be how we are, and you can eat better once you know it.
But on the subject of why, another broad notion I've never seen anybody explain directly: Humans outsource much of our digestion to external processes, and the checklist reflects this.
We all know that applying fire to our food was a major breakthrough for humanity, killing pathogens, breaking things down chemically so we can use less of our own energy for digestion, and infusing food with smoke that inhibits bacterial growth. On this checklist, this corresponds to heat and to umami.
Sour flavor from fermentation is the same story. It's an indication that the food has been predigested by the sort of bacteria that won't hurt you and will increase the bioavailability of various nutrients. So it makes sense that we should appreciate these sorts of sensations.
Salt isn't an item on the flavor checklist, but it's also the same story. Think of salt foremost as a chemical reagent rather than as a flavoring. People say that salt "makes ingredients taste more like themselves," which is a mystical-sounding way of saying that it breaks food apart at a microscopic level so your digestion pipes can extract more out of it. (The salt's work can take time, which is why sprinkling salt atop finished food is not the same as letting an ingredient sit in salt for a while. The salt is not there for its taste.)
An important component to my strategy/philosophy here is that I refuse to name my meals; I resist engaging with "what you making?" or that sort of thing. There is no point in holding true to the goal of making a sandwich, taco, or frittata, the goal of aiming accurately at any regional or ethnic style. All that matters is the checklist. What I'm making is these ingredients, into something as palatable as I can in a short amount of time without dirtying too many pans.
I suspect that people who don't focus on the experience of eating simply never try to understand this stuff, as I never did until recent years. For those of us who aren't into it, it isn't necessary. You can avoid food preparation if you burn the cash to offload that work onto others. Or you can be a recipe-follower, periodically selecting the enumerated ingredients at a grocery store and following steps without much thought. But neither of these is really acceptable to me anymore, for reasons Julie has already written about to some length.
A robust local agriculture requires people who know how to adapt their eating to the foods that are abundant around them. An ethical and ecological way of eating does not begin with a desire for particular finished products chosen solely according to preference and entail whatever means are necessary to acquire or produce them. The organisms we eat have all the variations and irregularities of any natural product. If we are to consume what the land produces readily rather than torturously extract what we want from nature, people need agility and improvisation. This holds for everyone, whether we find cooking fascinating or not.
I still cook pretty badly, but I think finally I have enough principles to do this well enough.