Team Wet Dog

magic

I want to talk about magic, for a moment.

Nine weeks ago, in one of the first days of class at the Art Institute, the chef-instructor was giving a knife skills demonstration. Explaining how to properly grip the knife, and use your other hand to guide the blade, he began chopping a large onion.

In seconds, the onion was gone. In it's place was something else. Magic.

Now, I've probably chopped hundreds, if not a few thousand onions. Cutting up raw ingredients is just something most of us take for granted I think (regardless of how much you like or dislike cooking). So on some level, this demonstration was no big deal.

But on the other hand, I really thought about that onion for a while. How the simple act of chopping it, of breaking it down, meant that it was no longer an onion — it had become an ingredient, the in-between form of Something Yet To Be. In many ways, completely transformed.

I think this is what has me so fascinated by cooking these days: The ability to take that onion, and several other raw and basic ingredients, and to transform them. To take chicken stock and vegetables to make soup; chicken bones and water to make stock; XX and YY to make ZZ.

And the more basic you begin with, the more essential you end up with, the more incredible this feat of transformation seems.

I made pasta from scratch the other day. I started with two eggs, some flour, salt and oil. I combined it all, rolled it out, cut it into thin circles and stuffed it with crab meat and vegetables.

I dropped one batch into boiling water, and the result was ravioli. And then I pan-fried a second batch in butter and basil, and the result was different - empanadas.

Pasta is one of those things I don't think much about. Either fresh in a restaurant or dried from a box, it's less the sum of its parts and simply Pasta, capital P, a thing that is always there. And yet now I realize that it isn't. Now I've seen the trick, glanced behind the curtain and understand the transformation a little better.

But understanding the process — clumsily doing it once — is also a far cry from real sorcery. What gets me most about the creation of staples like breads and stocks and pastas and delicate soups, is that they are so deceptively simple. A few ingredients and a recipe can lay out a roadmap for me, but I could probably spend a lifetime trying to get from proficient to perfect. 

— Robert

(8/29/06) 
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All Images Copyright 2006 -- Robert Walton