To be or not to be?
You always learn from the people you teach.
Marco has recently retired and is attending the basic cooking class.
I realize that he knows many things, not only because age generally brings wisdom, but he also knows many things about cooking and food: he knows things with the wisdom of instinct and memory.
We can feed ourselves, but eating means not interrupting the sequence of various pleasures at the table.
This is Marco’s creed: when you sit at the table, you reap the fruit of your work, experience and expertise. It is a moment that has its own sacredness and that we should celebrate simply by “tasting it”, savoring everything that “reaches” us through the taste buds, the receptors of smell, sight, memories. It is a set of sensations and pleasures that should not be interrupted. Or, as Marco says, it is a series of “satisfactions”: satisfaction of the senses and feelings.
Very different from simply “feeding”; the act of “eating” is knowledge, art, culture. It is the act of being and becoming.
As the title of Pellegrino Artusi’s book states: “Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well“
At the table we talk. We don’t discuss, we talk.
Not knowing some things can be constructive. This is why Marco doesn’t have “social media”. Not knowing that a friend has gone on vacation to Nepal can be a topic of conversation and you learn more from conversation than from reading on social media.
“We are what we eat” said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, we can improve by improving our diet. To “what”, i.e. to what, I would add “how”: quickly or slowly, savoring or distractedly, “dialoguing” with food or ignoring it The how makes the difference.
Today at the basic cooking class we talked about rice: which variety is best suited to the dish we have to make.
We cooked a Venus risotto with zucchini cream and sea bream fillet.
A green apple risotto with pork tenderloin.
We also made an excellent Vialone Nano with aromatic herbs to which we added pieces of black garlic. The photo is missing. As Marco teaches: we tasted it without wanting to interrupt the chain of satisfactions that the dish gave us.
Marcella Ansaldo © 2023