There is always a gamble in having someone taste something you dearly love, that you think is one of the best things you’ve ever tasted, for fear that in their failure to enjoy it, some thread of sympathy, of connection, will be foreclosed. It is like the fear of too strongly recommending a book, lest the other person does not appreciate it, and in so doing reveals the limits of their understanding of you, or you they. I mean, it is not a great fear, but it sometimes gives me pause.
Tastes are so idiosyncratic and so personal that to share a taste for something can feel like a particularly strong form of connection, and its lack all the more tragic. I wonder if this is a risk that lies behind all sharing of food—that while it is the basis of an important bond, “breaking bread” together does not guarantee that bond but rather provides the conditions of its possibility and, equally, its foreclosure. I find there is a strange disconnect in cooking for others if the food I have made makes others happier than it does myself, or when someone thinks excellent what I consider only adequate. The whole matter of one being one’s own worst critic is somewhat beside the point. I sometimes feel it is a greater compliment when someone likes something I’ve made only as much, roughly, as do I, when they can say, “Yeah, this is pretty solid, I can see what you mean about something being missing, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” rather than when they are moved to gush and/or rave.
Is that a selfish thing? Prizing one’s own evaluations over the happiness of others? A chilling thought, if one thinks of cooking as an act of love, as it is often framed (counterposed against cooking as a self-aggrandizing and masculine exercise in technical mastery), but nevertheless I can see where I’m coming from (duh). In that shared critical evaluation—not identical to, but not utterly different from, a shared love—there is the consonance of something that makes sense to one making sense to another, so that one does not feel alone in it.