Stirring Up Your Life
Art ingrained in the kitchen table.
You are stuck in your writing. Ideas sputter, sentences crumble. You stare out the window praying for an idea but really all you’re doing is contemplating the daffodiles bobbing their little ruffled heads in the front garden and spying on your neighbors’ coming and going. This has happened before, feeling abandoned by words. You’ll snap out of it, you always do. But that doesn’t stop you from feeling flayed as you continue to sit at your desk, blundering around to find a path back in.
You are also stuck at your stove. Standing in the kitchen, lethargically opening and closing cabinet doors and grazing through the refrigerator to find God knows what to make a decent meal. This seems worse than your writing sputter because it’s never happened before. Still, the family has to be fed and so you rely on the boring foundational dishes of simple pasta sauces, braisings, and chops. Your husband, who can live on linguini bathed in garlic olive oil or store-bought macaroni and cheese, doesn’t even notice so this shouldn’t be a big problem. But it is a vast, haunting, problem to you.
The essentials to life as you have always known it: writing, cooking, feeding, eating. Gone.
And then you suddenly find grace in this sweet old world of ours when you stumble across The Kitchen Table Series by photographer Carrie M. Weems. With 20 silvery black and white images and accompanying text Weems anchors a woman’s story to a plain wooden table. Here is her man and her little girl, here are her friends, here she is in despair, here she is laughing, here she is daring to be seen.
Isn’t it miraculous how art can pull you outside yourself? Done so simply by insisiting you stand before it, contemplating another’s visions of being alive?
That’s a salvation kick-in-the-pants if ever there was one, right?
It is no surprise at all to find another harbor in a book, Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again by the artist and chef Daniel Licht and illustrated with evocative photographs by Laura Letinsky. The best way to understand why this little book feels so necessary is to invite Licht to sit down beside you. Read and then listen to him explain what cooking is really all about. . . .
Read:
I sense that something has been lost within our superabundance of recipes. It is easy today to find a recipe for anything imaginable or unimaginable online. There are recipes for holiday meals and for picnics, for setting up and for cleaning up, for splitting up cooking and cleaning duties and for waking up rested, for maximizing the work week and for maximizing one’s career, for finding love and for sustaining it, for walking alone and for being still, for listening to music and for reading a book. It is a wonderful thing, all of this available wisdom, but I wonder if it is somehow too wonderful, which is to say daunting.
I wonder if this widespread availability of detailed instruction discourages home cooks from thinking about what they are doing while they are doing it. It is an amazing thing that one can now be considered a great cook without actually knowing how to cook anything at all. I wonder if the discouragement from thinking while cooking, from using our senses as much as we use our timers and measuring cups, is making us miserable in the kitchen, anxious to finish, and ultimately happier to have dinner from a box.
I imagine an old way of cooking: an Italian grandmother in her kitchen with the confidence to cook what she pleases. After having spent a long time in the kitchen, this grandmother knows that it does not matter all that much whether she uses two cloves of garlic or six or even ten in her well-loved tomato sauce. So long as the garlic gets cooked, and so long as the dish is seasoned well, the amount of garlic only changes the amount of garlic. The dish will not become better or worse, only more or less garlicky. I imagine a grandmother leaning in to her children and grandchildren to tell them, to promise them, to swear: It will be delicious, do not worry.—Cooking As Through You Might Cook Again by Daniel Licht
Stop and put your feet up and listen to:
It's good to hear about your cooking, Ruth. Give me a boost in confidence. Finding Weems and Licht hasa gone a long way, too.
I have felt that stuck in my writing and cooking too, Pat. Art, beauty, the sage words of others—all can point the way forward. Thanks for the reminder and for sharing the work of these two creative people.