It’s a Grimm Life

I recently sat down with an annotated edition of the Brothers Grimm and was reminded of the odd pairing between magic and horror offered up in the original stories. “Cinderella” is quite different from the Disney version. One stepsister cuts off a toe and the other her heel to fit into the glass slipper, and then, for their sins, both have their eyes pecked out at Cinderella’s wedding. In “Hansel and Gretel,” the evil stepmother tries to lose the kids in the woods during a famine. And in the most grisly tale of all, “The Juniper Tree,” a stepmother hates her husband’s first child so much that she cuts off his head, reattaches it with a scarf and props him up outside as if he were eating an apple. The story ends happily, but not for the stepmother.

The Grimms are offering us a devilish choice: We can be enchanted by the fairy-tale magic or repulsed by the wickedness that lies at the heart of humankind. In one of the shorter stories, “Mother Trudy,” a “stubborn, inquisitive” little girl is told to stay away from the house of the evil Mother Trudy. One day she disobeys, and Mother Trudy invites her in, saying, “You can provide me with some light,” instantly turning the girl into a block of wood and throwing her on the fire. Mother Trudy exclaims, “Now that does really give off a nice bright light!” No happy ending there.

All of this makes me think of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and the notion of “magical thinking”—the art of infusing everyday life with imagination. And that sums up my thoughts about the kitchen, a place that should be freed from expectations to become a place that offers magic along with supper. Make stock from water and toasted spices as they do in Transylvania. Whip up soup with bread and garlic as they do in Spain. Substitute phyllo for flour in an orange-syrup-kissed cake as they do in Crete. Make a meaty ragù without meat as they do in Calabria. Cook pasta in a wok, steam chocolate cake on top of the stove and pull together a pizza dough that is so wet you can pour it into the pan, no stretching required.

Years ago, after the hurricane in Puerto Rico, I was on the phone with José Andrés, who asked me to hop on a plane and join his team. I begged off with excuses about my busy schedule. To my everlasting regret, I never got on that plane.

Like Yoda in “The Empire Strikes Back,” the message is that there is no trying, only doing. Don’t try to become a better cook, just cook. Don’t think about hopping on a plane, just get on board. Magical thinking allows us to do the impossible, whether it’s feeding the world or transforming your kitchen into a place of adventure.

What holds most of us back from kitchen adventure is fear of a bad ending—the stew scorches, the cake doesn’t rise or the bread tastes like brick dust. Yes, the Brothers Grimm offer plenty of desperate endings: A mother-in-law asks the cook to kill and roast the queen’s children, and in another, kids play a game of “butcher,” and one of them is actually killed (the mother hangs herself, and the father dies shortly thereafter). But in other endings, the dead are resurrected—a simpleton tailor transforms into a canny trickster, a hard-working sister prevails over her more beautiful sibling, and a bloodthirsty king ends up spending eternity ferrying souls to hell.

As Julia Child might suggest, put aside the recipes that went wrong—the slumped pie crust and the overcooked turkey. There is always a happy ending if one is willing to add just a tablespoon of magical thinking.