I WAS TWENTY WHEN I STARTED COOKING FOR MYSELF IN A thirty-nine dollars a month flat on Byington Street in San Francisco. My girlfriend Judith and I shared one bedroom and Bob rented the other bedroom—there was also a living room—so each of us paid thirteen dollars a month for housing. While the site of the flat is now somewhere in the middle of a vast Safeway parking lot and while, sad to say, I haven’t seen Judith in about forty years, I am still cooking and eating, sharing food with family and friends.
In a life of change, food and cooking are still bringing joy and sustenance into my world. In 1965 I got out a friend’s copy of The Macrobiotic Cookbook by George Oshawa and began cutting up vegetables; now I am making up recipes and writing them down. We keep doing different things, or the same things differently. As growing beings our taste and aesthetic develops and changes. Our interest shifts, the focus is refined.
Cooking those macrobiotic-inspired dinners I became engrossed with vegetables, curious to see the inside of a green pepper, enthralled by the white “tree” which came into view when cutting open a purple cabbage, the burst of aroma from the newly cut surface of a yellow onion. And I studied for the fun of it. At the thrift store I’d bought a set of beige-brown soup-sized wooden bowls and another stack of bowls coated with Day-Glo enamels: candy-apple red, metallic silver, emerald green, brilliant lavender. Which cut-up pieces of which vegetable went in what bowl? The orange of carrot in the enamel green or the simple wood? The off-white of onion slices in the buffed silver or the intense lavender?
Cutting open the vegetables left me awestruck. Where did all these things come from? Why are they the way they are? And how is it that I am here with them, resonating in harmony and well-being? And no, I didn’t need scientific answers—I wanted poetry, like Rumi, who said, “What was said to the rose that made it bloom is being spoken here in my heart now.” Cutting open the vegetables I found something inside: presence, awesome spacious presence. How do people not notice this?
At that time I was already wondering how to convey this to people—that the spiritual world is right at hand; that food is precious, and we are precious beings; that hearts can delight in cooking. Over the years I have endeavored to share this with a wide audience. Of course cooking is about getting it right, making food that is edible and delicious, but more than this cooking is about awakening your innate capacities for living in the fullness and vitality of the present, touching and being touched by life itself. Again, to quote Rumi, “What else would human beings want?”
When I was working on The Tassajara Bread Book in 1969, my friend and Sensory Awareness teacher Charles Brooks said, “Ed, why are you working on another cookbook? We need more cooks, not more cookbooks.” And I tried to tell him, “Charles, that’s what I am trying to do with my cookbooks—teach people to cook.”
And this seems so rare, that we could encourage each other to know and trust our inherent good-heartedness and our capacity to sense and know for ourselves, to respond, offering our sincere effort. This becomes a major life undertaking, as mostly people understand that if you want to do something, you get a recipe for how to do it so that it will come out right (and you will not have to struggle). You follow the directions, you do what you are told, and things will come out the way they should. While I have been encouraging people to wake up, to taste and smell, to learn and know for themselves how to cook.
Things come out the way they do, not because you were doing what you were told, but because you gave your attention to the ingredients, and to the process. Not everyone will want to learn to cook like this, but for those who do, the experience is liberating, energizing, invigorating. Do people have any idea how annoying and challenging it is for a cook to start using scales and measuring spoons instead of hands, and to look at clocks instead of the food? What’s actually needed to create a “recipe” when the deeper, truer recipe is like Zen Master Tenkei saying, “See with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue . . .” You create the recipe by living it.
In this book I want to encourage your creative capacities, so while I am offering you specific recipes, I am also providing you with very simple recipes (which do not give quantities) and also general layouts for how to make a soup or prepare a salad. Of course the explicit recipes will be useful, but I also want you to know that you can learn to cook by giving your attention to the ingredients and to the activity. I am aiming to give you enough structure so that in the process of cooking you can be learning to trust your observations and perceptions—and still end up with a delicious dish. You can also delight in using your consciousness to inhabit new physical movements: cutting, washing, examining, mixing, folding. With practice you can make yourself at home in the physical experience of cooking so that there is an invigorating flow of energy, rather than the solidified drudgery that marks much of our lives.
I want you to know that cooking is not just working on food, but working on yourself and working on other people. It’s working on how you work. Cooking as self transformation, rather than the magical process that appears on TV shows, where everything is prepped ahead of time. You watch the show and it looks as though cooking does not involve work, effort, time but is performance, show . . . a great recipe. Everything just comes together—and it takes no time to bake. Put it in the oven . . . take it out . . . its ready! The real magic is that you could grow kind, generous, and larger-hearted in the process of preparing food—because you give your heart to the activity. You are realizing yourself by realizing food. Instead of looking good, you are becoming you. You realize that it’s OK to struggle sometimes, and that struggle can turn into food. I’ve wanted people to recognize that much of cooking, perhaps most of it, is work, plain old-fashioned work—doing something with your hands. And what a blessing that is to do something with your hands! I know I’m going against the grain here in a culture which has de-valued working, and elevated deals and sales, savvy manipulations and lordly takeovers—don’t get your hands dirty, leave the work to others. As a culture we’ve largely forgotten the benefits of work, and have so little appreciation for hands and what they are capable of doing.
So I have wanted to explain that work is not just work, something you have to do to get paid, something you do to get it out of the way, but something that is the way: the way to be more intimately involved in life, the way to be more intimately human, awake and alive to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables; the way to connect with this world with this life. And I am not sure that it is possible to teach this. But I endeavor to point out that you could be studying how to use your hands, studying how to do any particular task so that it is easy and enjoyable, so that your body has rhythm. How did work get to be so alien to people that we would no longer understand the joy and fulfillment and satisfaction of hands touching and doing. The difference between chore—where you are repeating an activity over and over, while telling your self it is boring—and joy—when you are studying, feeling, sensing the way—is the difference between being alienated and making yourself at home.
Even to say this is probably to discredit the capacity of chores to awaken bliss and well-being. Clearly joy can be there in the chore of tending to the everyday affairs which nourish life. Please, go right ahead. Enjoy yourself. Offer your effort.
I know that when I started cooking, I thought that I could gain love and approval by being a good cook. Over time that seemed less and less relevant—I was cooking to express my love, giving it all away. Cooking became an opportunity for the depth of my love to surface and become manifest. Certainly we love our family, our friends, and with cooking we give it color and flavor, body and taste. We make it edible and not simply abstract. Instead of staying in your head, the love flows and becomes embodied in food. And we share it with one another.
Finally, you will discover that much of cooking is studying how you study best: what works for you, and what doesn’t; what is useful, what isn’t. I’m guessing that you will find out that fiascoes come with the territory, and also you’ll discover that you can do what is inconceivable. See what guides your study and your learning.
Blessings on this food. Thank you for your effort.
October 2008