SEEKING THE WAY
Work in the kitchen may take many forms, but fundamentally it means giving the objects of awareness your attention—that is, the use of your consciousness to help the ingredients realize their true potential. You quickly find that giving out directives only goes so far—the ingredients do not simply obey—but that asking for direction moves the meal forward. How would you like to be cooked? What needs doing next? You listen, you taste, you feel. You work with your hands to help them be handy, with your body to be grounded and fully manifested. You work with ingredients so that they may be offered as food. Your work with thoughts is to do some disentangling so that the one thought needed steps forward on its cue. You study feelings enough that they are no longer a stain on your persona and instead in-form your being with what we call soul. You’re getting cooked, along with the food.
Way-Seeking Mind
True suffering, also, is fundamentally always a prayer . . . True effort of the will, i.e. one-hundred-percent effort, true work, is also a prayer. When it is intellectual work, it is prayer.
Hallowed be thy name. When it is creative effort, it is prayer.
Thy kingdom come. When it is work with a view to supplying for the material needs of life, it is prayer: Give us this day our daily bread. And all these forms of prayer in the language of work have their corresponding benedictions or graces.
ANONYMOUS IN MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT
In order to make reverential offerings, there is a position called tenzo. Since ancient times this position has been held by accomplished monks who have way-seeking mind, or by senior disciples with an aspiration for enlightenment. This is so because the position requires wholehearted practice. Those without way-seeking mind will not have good results, in spite of their efforts.
ZEN MASTER DŌGEN
Along with other Zen teachers, Zen Master Dōgen has emphasized the importance of way-seeking mind. That is to say, fulfilling one’s life purpose is not only acquiring knowledge and skills but also opening your perceptual awareness and your capacity to respond in the present moment from your inner depths, or seeking the way to be awake in the present moment. As one Zen master said, “If you memorize slogans, you are unable to make subtle adaptations according to the situation . . . If you stick to your teacher’s school and memorize slogans, this is not enlightenment: it is a part of intellectual knowledge.”
In our world, there are the cultural norms, expectations, and standards. Beyond that, you’ll need to keep finding out as much as you can and finally have the courage and wherewithal to express what comes from within. The cooks in the wonderful Netflix Chef’s Table series realize this. Beyond absorbing the traditional ways to cook, they eventually realize that they wish to go out on their own and cook food their way (often using local produce). Then the results of their efforts deeply touch people.
Suzuki Roshi’s advice was not to stick to anything. You don’t know what will happen next. In one episode of Chef’s Table, an Italian chef, Massimo, tells his chef to go ahead and serve a whole tray of broken tarts that had been dropped on the floor. Now breaking the tarts is done on purpose, and the dish is called Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart!
Seeking the way is both outwardly and inwardly oriented. We want to find out the way to cook rice or the way to make a salad dressing. We want to discover how to work with less stress, how to focus our energy, how to work with our emotions, and more intimately, perhaps, the way to be true to ourselves, or the way to express our heart. Cookbooks tend to provide the instructions for working with the materials, while working with yourself will largely be up to you. Much of the time we do not realize that self-work is a possibility, so we may start believing, “I’m just not much of a cook,” or, “I’m not meant to cook.” Putting your heart into what you are doing is often an important step along the way.
No one has been you before, and no one will ever be you again. You’re a work in progress, with various aims and agendas, goals and ambitions, dreams, hopes, and fears. What will see you through is cultivating this mind that seeks the way, or what Suzuki Roshi called, most famously, beginner’s mind. You continue to find out how to do things, how to seek inwardly as well as outwardly.
“True work,” we learn in Meditations on the Tarot, “is also a prayer.” It may be formed or formless—what is the way to express what is innermost? The text also states that work means “learning the art of learning.” May I bring through what is from Beyond? Again from Meditations on the Tarot: “Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!”
There is work to accomplishing this—working on how we work. Even choosing to work is to sacrifice other possible activities so that we can focus on the work at hand. Our awareness engaged in work tends to be accessible to the Sacred coming through, perhaps more so than letting our awareness be unoccupied. Way-seeking mind is busy—be it walking, working, dancing, singing—and yet open to inspiration, insight, or reworking.
If using favored cookbooks is what makes cooking satisfying and enjoyable for you, you may have no need to look further. When you are ready for something else, chances are it will appear.
Way-Seeking Spinach
You might think that you are a terrific cook, but now it’s time to do something else. You might think you are a terrible cook, but now you have something else to do. A good cook is someone who continues to study how to be a good cook.
A PARAPHRASE OF ONE OF SUZUKI ROSHI’S TEACHINGS
I’ll never forget a time when I was the tenzo at Tassajara and we had a case of spinach—twenty-four bunches—to prepare for dinner. As I had never before cooked spinach, I was concerned about having it come out the way it should. I looked in several cookbooks, but none of them explained how to cook spinach so that you ended up with spinach rather than spanakopita, spinach lasagna, or spinach soufflé. In time it became obvious that you cook it—apply heat over time—but along the way, there were so many uncertainties.
I don’t know that my mother ever cooked spinach, and if she did, she didn’t show me how you do it. Along with so many other mothers, mine occasionally heated up frozen spinach—these days, who knows what is getting microwaved or baked from the freezer—and even the few mothers who cooked spinach might not have had a very good method. I never went to cooking school, but friends who have tell me that you are primarily taught how to work with the flesh of animals: how to prepare pâtés and sausages, how to cut up carcasses. How do you actually learn something about cooking spinach?
My friends who went to acupuncture school say that what you learn in class is how to pass the state examination. Once you’ve leaped through that hoop, you begin studying how to do acupuncture, on patients. There’s a certain irony with this, as acupuncture emphasizes using the close experience of sensory information to diagnose the patient and having something of a poetic imagination, which is attuned both to classic procedures and to insight arising on the occasion to what is beyond knowing. (Reading Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, you find out that Western medicine has a body of knowledge about how to diagnose through direct observation as well, which from his perspective is underutilized. Last I heard, he was teaching these skills to medical students at Stanford University.)
Can you trust that—human awareness and responsiveness? You bet you can. In fact, the more you do so in cooking, the more your food will come alive. You see, smell, taste, and dream up what to do with the ingredients presented. You connect your experience of what is outside (the ingredients) with what is inside (your intention, knowledge, and experience) and what is from Beyond (your insight, intuition, imagination). Sometimes it’s called magic.
I can’t say that we performed magic with our spinach. We cut the spinach at the base of the bunch, and we knew to wash it more than once, as spinach at that time tended to be quite muddy. Meanwhile, some of us began working on removing the stems. I had read that you were to fold the sides of the spinach leaves forward and hold them together with one hand, while you pulled the stem off, up the back of the leaf, with the other. No stem is left! Precisely following these instructions, you end up with exquisitely delicate spinach harboring not a trace of stem. The book said to do this. We complied.
Hence, several of us were busily engaged in religiously removing stems, leaf by leaf, by hand, when someone said, “Ed, I just tried eating a stem, and it’s not tough at all. Why don’t we leave them on? If the stems are this tender when they are raw, they will only get more tender as they cook.”
What is the way to prep spinach for cooking? I tried a stem or two—tender enough to chew easily. “Okay, let’s leave the stems,” was my conclusion. The kitchen exploded with a huge sigh of relief that sounded like a burst of cheering.
What is the way to prep spinach? It all depends, doesn’t it? What dish are you planning to make with the spinach? Who are you cooking for? How much help do you have? Do you have any other plans for the afternoon?
If you want to make a spinach soufflé or timbale soft and smooth, the way to do that is to remove the stems laboriously or use a Cuisinart with the sieve attachment. Even then, you’ll probably want to remove the largest, gnarliest stems, which can be much more stringy than the others. Are your diners people who demand food without the work of chewing? Are they ready and willing, even eager, to apply rules and standards? Or are they more country folk, down-to-earth eaters who are prepared to dig in, chew, and swallow, to enjoy with gusto? And even if you wish to offer the more refined version of cooked spinach, do you have the help and the time to carry it out? What is the way?
Having tried a variety of methods and usually serving people who enjoy eating while not being overly preoccupied with assessing their food, I’ve come to my way. I cut the clump of spinach twice, once close to the base of the stems and a second time at the base of the largest leaves. Remove the loose stems and use for stock; save the large leaves that were above the second cut and the smaller leaves that were hidden among the stems. Wash thoroughly, as needed—nowadays the spinach we purchase is not nearly as muddy as it was in the sixties, unless you’re buying from a farmers’ market or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).
When the stems of the spinach are primarily of the thinner variety, I might just cut the spinach at its base, spot and pull out those few leaves that are the largest, and cut the stems off of those—eating the other stems along with the leaves.
For cooking? I usually melt a bit of butter in the bottom of the pan, add the spinach and some salt, cover, and apply heat over time.
What is the way? The way is to study the way each step of the way.
To Cut or Not to Cut the Collards
One morning I went to work in the kitchen at a well-known Zen center. We were instructed to tear collard greens—four cases—that is, to tear them after cutting the leafy part off of the stem. Of course, tearing rather than cutting collard greens is going to take two to three times as long, since you can cut several together while you tear one at a time. Is tearing rather than cutting worth that much extra time? I didn’t think so, so I asked why we were tearing the collards. The answer was a holy “At this center we tear the collards.” We were not given a reason (more tender, more beautiful—and significantly, so that it warrants the extra work). No reason was given to waste hours of everyone’s time.
I went into the kitchen and asked the assistant head cook, “Chef, may we have your permission to cut the collards rather than tearing them?”
“Sure.”
So I went back outside to the prep area, mentioned that the assistant head cook in the kitchen had given his permission, and we cut collards until the break. After the break, when I was no longer there, the outside supervisor said, “Now that Edward is gone, we will be tearing the collards!” Enough already of all that disobedience! Back to doing it by the book, as written by the one in charge.
As for those torn collard greens (with a few cut ones)? After being washed in unicorn tears, they were served in the dining room with two dals and a spongy pancake. Two women from Ethiopia loved it! The greens were bitter and tough—just barely steamed. The hours of extra work tearing them instead of cutting them did not make any perceptible difference: they were bitter and tough! Please, I wondered, would someone be willing to study which differences make a difference?
That meal was three carbs and bitter, tough greens. It was August, summertime. What about summer vegetables: zucchini, green beans, peppers, eggplant, crookneck, tomatoes? What about fruits? Nuts? Cheeses? What about sauces? Seasonings? What about garnishes? What about sweet, sour, pungent? What about cooking the collards longer and seasoning them with garlic butter or a lemon-flavored peanut sauce? What about cooking the collards in a spicy ancho chili tomato sauce? What about being less bound by the rules and more waking up to how to cook?
Noticing differences and considering which differences make a difference, we study what is truly important in the kitchen. The laboriously torn collard greens were not a noticeable improvement over cut collards: that simple. I do not find this complicated: observe, study, find out. Try them both ways. Taste them side by side, and find a way to cook them so that they are tender, juicy, and flavorful.
Lovely Energy in the Kitchen
If you encourage yourself with complete sincerity, you will want to exceed monks of old in wholeheartedness and ancient practitioners in thoroughness. The way for you to attain this is by trying to make a fine cream soup for three cents in the same way that monks of old could make a broth of wild grasses for that little.
ZEN MASTER DŌGEN
I became friends with Dennis who was cooking at Esalen Institute many years ago. What an immense transition it had been for him, coming from the Culinary Institute of America where he had worked previously. At the Institute, everything is structured, including a clear chain of command: “Chef, what shall I do next?” Whatever it is, peeling potatoes, slicing carrots, washing spinach, the answer is, “Yes, chef, I will.”
In contrast, during those days at Esalen, anyone could call a time-out at any time: “I need a check-in” or “I’d like a weather report.” The whole kitchen would pause and regroup, perhaps on the lawn outside, to form a therapy circle. What’s happening with you, and how do you feel about that? When you’ve been in a chain of command focused on accomplishing the work at hand, to drop everything and postpone cooking until further notice can challenge your self-esteem if not your sanity. Dennis said that it took awhile, but he did get more used to it.
Someone needs to put up a sign for the retreatants: “Dinner postponed until further notice,” or “Dinner when we get around to it,” or “Dinner when we resolve our childhood trauma and residual anger.”
Of course, I am in the school of putting emotions to work—not being immobilized by them and not acting them out, but putting emotions to work. As I often say, if I had to be completely loving while I was cooking, we would never have had anything to eat. I say, Turn it all into food! Transform everything! Zen monks are said to have mouths like a furnace (burning up everything) and minds like a fan in winter (completely useless). Instead of trying to sort things out with your thinking mind, turn the emotional energy into food!
Dennis said that one of his teachers at the Institute would come up to you while you were working and ask, “Chef, what are you making?” If you said, “Carrot soup,” the instructor would ask, “And what should carrot soup taste like?” The correct answer was carrots.
Without careful study, we may conclude that adding ginger, green chilies, fresh cilantro or basil, and perhaps some lemon juice will make the carrot soup “so much more flavorful.” “Isn’t that delicious?” we say. Yes, the flavors are intense and perhaps beautifully vibrant, yet the original flavor may be masked. And since the orange color may signify carrot, winter squash, or yam, someone tasting the soup may ask, “What kind of soup is this?” Somewhat less or fewer of the same seasonings may bring out the best in the soup.
Classic French vegetable soups often seem to have carrot or cauliflower, say, sautéed with onion or leek, simmered with chicken stock, blended, finished with cream, and seasoned to taste. Perhaps a fresh herb garnish or small croutons as well. The chicken stock and cream give the soup a flavorful, reassuring body, which is carrot flavored. What’s delicious is the chicken stock and cream—you can’t beat it. Yet as a cook, especially if you are vegetarian or vegan, you train yourself to study whether it is possible to make a carrot soup that tastes even more like carrot—rather than the version where the carrot flavor is softened with the chicken stock and cream.
Perhaps your leftover oatmeal or cream of rice cereal can provide body and sweetness that do not soften the wild vegetable nature of carrot as much as the chicken stock and cream do. Perhaps you try using even more carrot to make the same quantity of soup, or you soften the carrot flavor a bit with stewed apple. Yellow onion, red onion, leek, shallot? You’ll need to decide which of the onion family strikes a chord with carrot.