“I speak food, this is my language”, said Norma Bourque during the baking class last week.
I’d heard this expression before: cooking is a language. Norma Bourque’s phrase makes the meaning even more direct: “I speak the language of ‘food.'”
Norma Bourque and me
I would add: food knows how to listen, understand and repeat what the person who cooked, had said.
Yet it’s true.
I was amazed when I taught at the Institute for Foreigners and had 18 students in class, each at their own station, equipped with induction hobs, sinks, pots, utensils, and ingredients that I had weighed and prepared for each of them before they entered the kitchen-classroom.
As I wrote in “The Quantum Thought in Italian Cuisine,” at the end of the lesson, during the tasting, each dish was different—despite the same quality of ingredients and the same procedure followed by the mirror tilted to the ceiling. It wasn’t just about technical and organoleptic qualities like flavor or sweetness, reduction, consistency, or assembly. There was more.
As I tasted it, I could read—or taste, if you prefer—sloppiness, the desire to excel, the desire to stand alone, to be distinct or different from others, precision, the humility of wisdom, solidity as well as evanescence, lightness as well as gravity, confidence as well as hesitation: a long series of feelings, attitudes, moods, even personalities. It’s true: you can identify and taste emotions when tasting food. Each dish “resembled” its creator, spoke of him or her. Each dish conveyed the essence of the person who had cooked it.
I believe this exercise and ability to savor food “deep down” is common to all of us, even if we don’t notice it, caught up as we are in the cravings of the moment, the rush to get back to work, the worries of our lives, and a thousand other things. I’m convinced we all know how to recognize—taste, if you will—the emotions within a bite. Maybe it’s enough to just stop for a moment and listen to them. Maybe it’s enough to just “pay attention.”
My book “The Quantum Thought in Italian Cuisine” is currently on sale on Giglio Island or directly at the Gigliocooking school in Florence.
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Marcella Ansaldo © 2026