A Few of My Favorite (Kitchen) Things

Gingerbread. Flaming Pudding. Panettone. Roast Duck. Giant Gingerbread Cookies. Rye Bread. Hi-Hat Biscuits. Yeasted Waffles. Apple Cake. Italian Meringue. Anything Pesto. French Lentil Salad. Calabrian Onions. Homemade Tortillas.

I love the actual cooking even more, including weighing flour, shaping bread dough, dicing onions, whisking batters, icing cakes, grilling chicken, roasting vegetables and mincing herbs.

The modern age has burdened us with AI summaries, dopey IG reels, clueless talking heads, “breaking news,” inscrutable levels of passwords to open a simple piece of software, an ocean of bad news, and a massive flood of content from around the world that is beyond my ability to process or admire.

The kitchen is the antidote, offering its own universe, a microcosm of Newtonian physics. Cakes rise and fall. Hot skillets transfer heat through conduction. Time is linear, from start to finish. There are no nano particles or dark matter to ruin my recipes—cooking still operates under the old school of science. You cannot go backwards in time, bend space through the force of gravity, or have one ingredient magically talk to another from a distance.

I have a theory. Humans have limits beyond which they find it impossible to find happiness. Some change is welcome; too much is disruptive. Having a world view can be helpful but, today, the world is overwhelming. The need to belong to our own tribe whether that is geographical or cultural is fundamental but nobody stays in one place very long which renders us unmoored.

The remedy is simple. Go to your kitchen. Turn off your phone. Don’t listen to the news. Play music. Pay attention to what you are doing. Feed friends and family. Start your own soup kitchen!
Explore new cuisines through cookbooks, you know, the ones printed on paper. Go back in time with Marcella Hazan, Judy Rodgers, Fannie Farmer, Paula Wolfert, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, Fuchsia Dunlop or dive into the new crop of cooks from Hetty McKinnon to Samin Nosrat to Jet Tila. Drip gravy on the pages, write notes in the margin; turn a cookbook into your own personal reference work.

Cooking is limitless in its variety from clay ovens in the middle of the Sahara to outdoor ovens with coal fires to kitchens located in the living room to Bolivian clay stoves to Senegalese braziers for grilling meat to indoor fire pits and homemade ovens. You don’t need a $100,000 kitchen. You just need a passion for cooking.

The business of cooking is charity, patience, benevolence, passion, skill, practice, and kindness. It is local, specific, healthy, and it builds family and community.

You can practice yoga and meditation, but you can also practice cooking to achieve enlightenment.

In George Harrison’s song “I Me Mine,” he talks about transcending ego by being part of something greater. Cooking offers the same off-ramp; cooks are part of history, part of a million shared recipes, part of a community. The superstar chef is a myth; you never stand in the kitchen alone, you are part of what has come before.

As Marley’s ghost lamented to Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” “Mankind was my business…the dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Cooking is my business, the practice of sharing recipes and food. I invite you to join us here at Milk Street to share our passion for the business of cooking and sharing food.