dotintime
seasoned
The winter of 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression, Edgar Rombauer shoots himself in the head with a shotgun, leaving his wife alone and without a source of income. Irma, depressed and alone, entirely lacking in career skills at the age of 53, decides to try her hand at writing a book about the one thing that still gives her pleasure: cooking. She calls the book The Joy of Cooking.
It’s significant that the widow Rombauer included the term joy in the title. At its best, cooking is a joyful experience. It requires a certain attention to detail…enough attention to keep the cook from dwelling on the immediate miseries of life…but still allows room for creativity and experimentation. In the kitchen, experiments may start tentatively (“should I maybe add a little touch of garlic?”) but the joy of cooking soon sweeps hesitation aside (“oh what the hell…more garlic!”). All good cooking includes a wee bit of ‘what the hell’ in it.
A life spent in a professional kitchen is a life of hard work. But it is satisfying work, soulful work, joyful work. And that satisfaction, that soulfulness, that joy, it shows itself. It shows itself in the food and on the face of the chef. It shows itself on the faces of those who eat the food. For most of us, the joy of cooking is best expressed by the joy of eating.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
