Recipes as Musical Scores

7/19/2016

It's how it's woken up and played

In my chair, drinking tea and lost in looking across at my wall of cookbooks; I don’t have my glasses on so it’s an impressionistic sweep. Cookbooks, I'm remembering the scene from the Italian film, The Best of Youth, where the protagonist brother sends his imprisoned wife a box of Schubert scores, because he knows that as a pianist, even in her silent isolation she’ll ‘hear’ the music on the page. That’s how I feel about cookbooks, I taste the music and imaginatively enter the recipe and live it through the reading. It becomes a dialogue, a conversation. The ingredients and measurements are the cook/composer’s taste/score, or like a folk song the lineage of improvisation.
I was having this sing with a ratatouille recipe yesterday...but like music, it’s not what’s written, but how it's interpreted, how the Cook lives it into life-- how it's woken up and played. Read More...