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Don't All Good Cooks Love To Eat?


zoramargolis

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I just started reading _The Reach of a Chef_ by Michael Ruhlman. I came across this statement on p. 29: "And I love to eat–loved it. When you are cooking you're kind of eating in your mind the whole time. I can't imagine the drudgery daily cooking would be if you didn't love to eat."

I completely agree-- I love to cook and I love to eat, and to think and read about food, as well. You don't have to be a good cook to love to eat, but I have always believed the opposite to be true.

Ruhlman's declaration put me in mind of a somewhat mind-blowing observation. The other night, I was watching a Food Channel program involving competition cooking. This was the finals of the "Build a Better Burger" contest. This may be prompted by sour grapes, since I entered the contest and didn't make the cut. But in the "non-beef" sub-competition, one of the selected competitors was a woman named Kelly, who had won that same contest two years ago. I have worked in mental health for a number of years (I am a licensed clinical social worker), and I could tell with absolute certainty that Kelly has severe anorexia nervosa. She had many observable hallmarks of the disorder: in addition to her cachectic appearance, she had enlarged parotid glands under her jaws, which are the result of frequently inducing vomiting. She wore a gigantic sweatshirt, a typical gambit to disguise a skeletal body, until she presented her salmon burger, when she had removed the sweatshirt and put on an apron, and her tiny body was revealed. The other contestants talked about having made their recipe hundreds of times, but when the judges asked her, she admitted that she had developed her recipe at the computer and had tasted it once--she probably took a bite and then spat it out. She didn't win this time, but it seemed amazing and bizarre to me that someone so conflicted about eating could concoct a recipe good enough to propel her to the finals of a contest with thousands of entrants, not once but twice. I have been involved in the treatment of a number of anorexics--some hate food and will do anything to avoid eating, others gorge and then vomit. But have never met one who was a really good cook.

To me, deriving pleasure from food is all of a piece: cooking for myself and others, eating and talking about food. I don't have any desire to cook for my family if I am unable to eat for some reason. Kelly demonstrates that it is possible to think about food and cook wonderful food for others while simultaneously denying herself pleasure in eating it. Anachronistic, don't you think?

On another note, the finalists in the beef burger contest all had bizarrely complicated recipes. I thought my Flamenco Wagyu Burger with smoked paprika alioli, sofrito relish and manchego probably tasted better than any of them, and I tried out and tweaked the recipe numerous times before submitting it. Oh, well...

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I thought my Flamenco Wagyu Burger with smoked paprika alioli, sofrito relish and manchego probably tasted better than any of them, and I tried out and tweaked the recipe numerous times before submitting it. Oh, well...

It's clearly not the main point of your post, but a statement like this can't just be casually dropped in without evidence to back it up. I think we're going to have to have a taste test to determine if your burger-making skills live up to your claim. This weekend works for me ...

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I have been involved in the treatment of a number of anorexics--some hate food and will do anything to avoid eating, others gorge and then vomit. But have never met one who was a really good cook.

I can introduce you to a couple of people if you would like :)

To me, deriving pleasure from food is all of a piece: cooking for myself and others, eating and talking about food. I don't have any desire to cook for my family if I am unable to eat for some reason. Kelly demonstrates that it is possible to think about food and cook wonderful food for others while simultaneously denying herself pleasure in eating it. Anachronistic, don't you think?
Not completely when you consider the fact that the underlying cause of anorexia and other eating disorders can come down to gaining and maintaining control. Food and weight become the one thing the person can control. Cooking, while directly related to food, can be a form of expression and art. It can also be theraputic, with the chopping, mixing, pounding, etc.? While I don't want to speculate about this woman's psyche it is possible to seperate cooking from eating.

From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?

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What a story, Zora. A dear friend of mine has struggled with bulimia her whole life, but is also a great cook who loves entertaining. I wonder how she does it. Food can give great pleasure and cause immense personal pain.

Don't even get me started on food and weight issues.

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Don't even get me started on food and weight issues.
I second that emotion. However, in talking about eating disorders, the word disorders has the most relevance. Anorexia, bulimia, et al., are caused by body-image issues and insecurity, among other things. It doesn't usually have to do with whether one likes eating food or cooking food. I can see how someone can be a very good cook, due to an obsession with food, and still not be able to eat normally.
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From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?
A story that I've told before...

One night in my quest to learn to appreciate seafood, I decided to see if I could stomach salmon. Mrs JPW took one bite and declared it the best salmon that she had ever tasted. I took one bite, turned a most interesting shade of green, and leaped the six feet between my dining room chair and the kitchen sink and promptly and forcefully expulsed the bite I had taken.

One more angle. What about chefs who are allegic to certain things?

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I can introduce you to a couple of people if you would like :)

Not completely when you consider the fact that the underlying cause of anorexia and other eating disorders can come down to gaining and maintaining control. Food and weight become the one thing the person can control.

From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?

Well said hillvalley. The issue tends to be control, not food.

I think a good chef can see potential in certain foods despite their personal distaste or allergies, granted they may not make or taste them in the case of severe reactions.

A majority of art in Italy wouldn't be in existence if it hadn't been for patrons. The artist doesn't always have the taste of the benefactor but they may still create for those that may enjoy it.

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I can introduce you to a couple of people if you would like :)

Not completely when you consider the fact that the underlying cause of anorexia and other eating disorders can come down to gaining and maintaining control. Food and weight become the one thing the person can control. Cooking, while directly related to food, can be a form of expression and art. It can also be theraputic, with the chopping, mixing, pounding, etc.? While I don't want to speculate about this woman's psyche it is possible to seperate cooking from eating.

From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?

While you are correct in your understanding, gaining and maintaining control are among numerous underlying factors in anorexia, which are not necessarily the same in all individuals or in all of the various permutations of eating disorders. Anorexia is a very complex problem, both medically and psychiatrically, and is generally considered to be among the most difficult of all psychiatric disorders to treat successfully. And only about half of those who get into treatment, who have lost as much weight as the contestant in question has, actually survive.

Being conflicted about eating, gaining weight, body size are so common among women that it is almost too much of a cliche even to discuss. And I am sure that there are legions of the svelte among us, who live on salad with lemon-no oil and eschew dessert, who enjoy cooking and will eat a little bit of something fattening and delicious and have the will power to ferociously control portion size and dress size. And many relatively normal-weight bulemics, who purge in various ways after eating something they fear will make them fat, who may love to cook. This, however, was someone with full-out, advanced anorexia, who looked like she weighed about seventy-five pounds. Anorexics who look like this refuse to eat just about everything, so she obviously must completely separate cooking and thinking about food and creating recipes from eating, though she seems to do a lot of the former. I just find that remarkable.

About chefs who "detest" a particular food yet cook it well. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic at Vogue, has some interesting things to say about food dislikes and prejudices in his first collection of essays, _The Man Who Ate Everything_. When he first started reviewing restaurants and writing about food, he realized that he would have to give up many of his reflexive attitudes and learn how to stop rejecting and disdaining certain foods and flavors he had always disliked, if he was going to be able to be good at what he wanted to do. And he did. I'm sure he doesn't like eevery food and flavor equally, but he claims not to avoid any food. My guess is that you won't find very many really talented professional chefs who are picky eaters. Were you thinking of someone in particular?

I have a couple of unfortunate allergies--to apples, walnuts and pecans. I certainly am capable of making wonderful food using those ingredients, but I just about never do, even though my family would be happy if I did, because I like to eat what I cook. The love of cooking and of eating are not separate for me, though I am discovering that is the case in some rare instances.

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I have worked in mental health for a number of years (I am a licensed clinical social worker), and I could tell with absolute certainty that Kelly has severe anorexia nervosa. numerous times before submitting it. Oh, well...

I don't think you can assume someone has severe anorexia from watching them on TV. I am not even sure a social worker could make that assumption. I know this is off topic, but I think you were out of line for you to doing this in a public forum. You never know who is reading this board.

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I know this is off topic, but I think you were out of line for you to doing this in a public forum. You never know who is reading this board.

Eating disorders are not crimes, or moral failings. Obesity is obvious to everyone who sees it, anorexia may be obvious only to those who are familiar with it. Would it be inappropriate to describe Paul Prudhomme as morbidly obese, if you had seen him on tv? And to speculate about his relationship to cooking and eating? Not that interesting to me, since no cognitive dissonance is engendered by a good cook who loves food and undoubtedly eats a lot.

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Eating disorders are not crimes, or moral failings. Obesity is obvious to everyone who sees it, anorexia may be obvious only to those who are familiar with it. Would it be inappropriate to describe Paul Prudhomme as morbidly obese, if you had seen him on tv? And to speculate about his relationship to cooking and eating? Not that interesting to me, since no cognitive dissonance is engendered by a good cook who loves food and undoubtedly eats a lot.

I still don' think you can make that judgement by just looking at someone. There are many conditions that can cause a person to be obese outside of food. (genes or thyroids) I even know a few people that eat more than I do who are very thin, and they do not suffer from anorexia. I understand what you are trying to say, I just don't agree that you can determine a medical condition based on appearance.

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The other contestants talked about having made their recipe hundreds of times, but when the judges asked her, she admitted that she had developed her recipe at the computer and had tasted it once--she probably took a bite and then spat it out. She didn't win this time, but it seemed amazing and bizarre to me that someone so conflicted about eating could concoct a recipe good enough to propel her to the finals of a contest with thousands of entrants, not once but twice.
This is fascinating to me, as I can only develop recipes by making them, and my attempts to develop a recipe on paper, as it were, are generally failures. I actually have to be working with the ingredients to come up with something. It certainly requires a particular kind of cognitive skill (which I lack) to develop a recipe in the abstract.

The ability to create a recipe that way may also imply a different type of relationship to food. I wonder if it is accurate to conclude that someone who is very thin and seems to exhibit signs of anorexia doesn't love food. It seems more like a different, complex type of relationship to food (love-hate might be too simplistic a description, though). The creation of the dish might take the place somehow of consuming the food, rather than happening in conjuction with it as one would expect.

On another aspect of your question, I find that when I prepare an elaborate meal for other people, I am often spent by the time I put the food on the table and no longer have any appetite. All of my energy has gone into making the meal and I cannot appreciate it the way I could, say, if I were in a restaurant having it served to me.

There are also nights (such as last night) when I prepare a meal for my husband and don't eat. Sometimes this is because I'm dieting and have already consumed my calories for the day. Last night it was because I spent a great deal of time searching for a pasta sauce I made over the weekend (which took hours of preparation) that seems to have vanished from the refrigerator without a trace. I got myself so worked up over not being able to locate it and having to alter my dinner plans that I found I had no appetite when dinner went on to the table. In that case, you're talking about an emotional cause for not eating food one has prepared (or prepared and lost :) ), which relates to the point of your topic. Before my husband commented on how good they were, I knew the salad and soup I prepared were good by sight (salad) and smell (soup), without tasting them.

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On another aspect of your question, I find that when I prepare an elaborate meal for other people, I am often spent by the time I put the food on the table and no longer have any appetite. All of my energy has gone into making the meal and I cannot appreciate it the way I could, say, if I were in a restaurant having it served to me.

My mother and I called this "cook's syndrome": the inability to enjoy what you've prepared. And the longer we spent in the kitchen, the worse it was.

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Before my husband commented on how good they were, I knew the salad and soup I prepared were good by sight (salad) and smell (soup), without tasting them.

if you have made the salad and the soup many times before, i suppose you could know they were good by looking at them or smelling them, but there are few things i cook that don't get tasted along the way. maybe it isn't necessary, because typically the tasting doesn't really change the course i am already on, even with regards to salt. i do it anyway. on special occasions i used to cook maybe a dozen marcella hazan recipes for my large family, and if i didn't eat that much when dinner was served, it was usually because i had already had my fill by the time i finished cooking. getting into recipes that you have little interest in tasting or eating is an approach to cooking that is strange to me, even if you're doing it for competitive reasons. it would be like a person who's not comfortable with dogs entering the westminster dog show.

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My mother and I called this "cook's syndrome": the inability to enjoy what you've prepared. And the longer we spent in the kitchen, the worse it was.

Do you taste frequently while you are cooking? Tasting while cooking can sometimes add up to the equivalent of a full meal, so it's no wonder that it is possible to have no appetite by the time dinner is served. Also, anxiety about a dinner party going well, the dishes coming out right so they please or impress the guests, conflicts in the family (or frustration about one's homemade tomato sauce disappearing into the Twilight Zone) can all affect one's appetite on a situational basis. I think that happens on occasion to everyone, it certainly does to me.

It doesn't seem that this is always the case for you, however. Do you think that if you rarely or never enjoyed eating food that you'd prepared, that you would be as interested in cooking as you undoubtedly are? Maybe, if you still enjoyed food prepared by others, you could. But if you didn't enjoy eating, period?

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if you have made the salad and the soup many times before, i suppose you could know they were good by looking at them or smelling them, but there are few things i cook that don't get tasted along the way. maybe it isn't necessary, because typically the tasting doesn't really change the course i am already on, even with regards to salt. i do it anyway. on special occasions i used to cook maybe a dozen marcella hazan recipes for my large family, and if i didn't eat that much when dinner was served, it was usually because i had already had my fill by the time i finished cooking. getting into recipes that you have little interest in tasting or eating is an approach to cooking that is strange to me, even if you're doing it for competitive reasons. it would be like a person who's not comfortable with dogs entering the westminster dog show.
The salad was just a mixed green salad--lettuce, radishes, cucumber, tomatoes, carrots and whatnot. That's something I wouldn't taste along the way unless I wanted to munch on a carrot. The soup I had not made before (it was the succotash chowder from the Moosewood Cookbook), and I did not taste as I was making it. I checked on it purely by sight and smell. I even altered the recipe somewhat, knowing, for instance, that she seems to call for tamari sauce in almost everything and that I didn't think it would work with this.

There certainly are times when I eat as I'm cooking, but there are numerous times that I'm just sure of how it's turning out and don't need to check. I think I sample meats more than anything when cooking. A lot of times, though, I rely on smell and sight and just how I "know" it's supposed to be.

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Do you taste frequently while you are cooking? Tasting while cooking can sometimes add up to the equivalent of a full meal, so it's no wonder that it is possible to have no appetite by the time dinner is served. Also, anxiety about a dinner party going well, the dishes coming out right so they please or impress the guests,

That all comes into play, I'm sure. But what Mom used to experience (and me, too, sometimes) is "engh, this isn't very good, is it?" when everyone else is heaping genuine praise.

On the other hand, I've had plenty of "damn, this is good - pity I'm no longer hungry" moments, too. :)

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My mother and I called this "cook's syndrome": the inability to enjoy what you've prepared. And the longer we spent in the kitchen, the worse it was.
I keep benefitting from your late Mother, in one way or another . . . I have "suffered" from Cook's Syndrome for a long time and never understood what was going on. I'm so glad to know that I am not alone in this.
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Do you think that if you rarely or never enjoyed eating food that you'd prepared, that you would be as interested in cooking as you undoubtedly are?

Definitely not. But I suppose others are wired differently. Actually I've known people who were very, very good at some particular thing but didn't really care about it at all. (Example: an excellent technical pianist who didn't like most of the music he played.) Irritating. Life is unfair. People shouldn't be able to be casually good at something. There ought to be passion in excellence.

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I can introduce you to a couple of people if you would like :)

Not completely when you consider the fact that the underlying cause of anorexia and other eating disorders can come down to gaining and maintaining control. Food and weight become the one thing the person can control. Cooking, while directly related to food, can be a form of expression and art. It can also be theraputic, with the chopping, mixing, pounding, etc.? While I don't want to speculate about this woman's psyche it is possible to seperate cooking from eating.

From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?

This is a from an article that appeared in the Post a few weeks ago: "The inspiration for the Roasted Carrot, Chevre, and Corn “On-the-Cob” came from crockery. For my first menu at Trumpets Restaurant, I wanted to create an appetizer just because I liked a corn-on-the-cob plate I noticed in a store. I couldn’t just offer a piece of corn, so I fashioned a trompe l’oeil cob by roasting a carrot, covering it with herbed goat cheese, rolling it in fresh corn, and baking it. What became my “signature” dish, ironically, was one I never actually tasted. I dislike goat cheese."
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I completely agree-- I love to cook and I love to eat, and to think and read about food, as well. You don't have to be a good cook to love to eat, but I have always believed the opposite to be true.
I love to cook, I love the taste of food, but I really do not like to eat, and I hate the feeling of being full. I get bored with what I am eating quite quickly, and generally prefer very small portions as the larger the portion the more rapidly I become bored with it. Once overcome by the monotony of a dish I no longer even pick at the food in front of me.
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