Cooking is a kind of magic. You take flour and water and yeast and
it starts to grow. And what happens in an oven is pretty amazing. It
changes color, it changes shape, it smells great. Very few children would
reject the opportunity to be in a kitchen. And then, if you actually are
allowed to cook, what you find is that everybody loves a cook.
Food is a great defuser. I've found the best way to eliminate
tension is to go into the kitchen and cook. It makes everyone feel cared
for and loved.
PT: Have we taken the magic out of cooking these days?
RR: You can't take the magic out of cooking. It is magic. But we've
made a big project out of it. We've made it into something more
complicated than it is. We've told each other that you need a lot of
expensive equipment, you need lessons and you need a lot of time.
We now regard cooking as recreation rather than an integral part of
everyday life. People say they're a "good cook." But what they mean is
that they can create a splendid dish. Being a good cook really means
being resourceful. We've lost the ability to go into a kitchen and throw
together what's available and turn it into a satisfying meal.
PT: How do you eat at home?
RR: Very simply. I eat most of my meals in restaurants, which is
unnatural, and increasingly in restaurants you get this very complicated
food. So when I'm home, I really want home cooking. I want a turkey
that's just been taken out of the oven. I want meat loaf. I want roasted
potatoes. I want a very simple plate of pasta, maybe with just butter on
it. I want the kinds of things that we think of as comfort food.
What I want are very elemental flavors--a great peach, a wonderful
salad. I love bread and butter. I love peaches. I love clams.
PT: What do you think of the change in the family meal? When people
sit down at the dinner table, no one seems to eat the same thing anymore.
The kids may have a meal from McDonald's. Mom has a tossed salad and
sandwich from the deli and Dad may be eating leftover Chinese that's been
heated in the microwave.
RR: That's if they're all eating at the same time in the first
place--which is more and more of a rarity. The end of the family meal is
a tragedy. The most important thing about a meal isn't the food. It's
that we sit down together, we stop and pay attention to each other and we
talk.
Any parent knows that you can say to your kid, "What'd you do at
school? .... Nothing." You sit down for 15 minutes and you just have
aimless conversation, and then suddenly out comes, "Do you know what the
teacher said to me today?" It's not just children. It happens with any
two people who sit down. You need that quiet time. You need that paying
attention to each other.
PT: Don't milk and cookies do it, with children at least?
PR: Not quite. You need more time. You need the span of a meal. You
need to know that you're going to be there for a while together. Milk and
cookies amount to five minutes and the child is out the door. A meal is
not done at a kid's pace. It's done at a family pace. Much as a kid may
hate it and twist and turn, the point is to wait for everyone to
finish.
PT: Well, you're supposed to, but that doesn't happen much anymore.
People finish their own food and they're gone!
RR: And that's terrible! We learn about each other from the
conversation and from each other's pacing.
PT: Is everyone eating the same thing important?
RR: Yes. There is something very important about sharing the same
food at the same time at the same table. It's a way of building family
connection and unity.
There's a bill coming due for everybody sitting down to eat his own
little meal in his own five minutes. We're going to discover that it's
had a profound psychological impact on people and that this generation of
children who have been brought up eating alone are going to be different.
They're not going to be socialized the same way.
PT: They also won't have a sense of family traditions.
RR: Right. When a mother cooks a meal, or a father, or whoever,
you're giving your family something of yourself. All of us who are cooks
prepare something the way that someone in the family made it. I find
myself scrambling eggs the way my father did.
PT: What did he do?
RR: He had a trick of taking the pan halfway off the fire and
cooking the eggs over a very low flame, and as they curdled, pulling them
apart.
Or when I make meat loaf. My mother always tore up pieces of bread
and soaked them in milk, and I loved those little funny pieces in the
meat loaf. I've made a thousand meat loaves from a thousand different
cultures and here I am, when I'm making it at home for me, it could be my
mother's. And when I'm kneading the onion and the egg into the hamburger,
it's like I'm with my mother.
PT: It's a sense memory, isn't it?
RR: Yes. My grandmother, who really didn't cook, did prepare one
dish. It's a hamburger done in a cast iron skillet sprinkled with salt
and served with peas and rice. Every once in a while, I'll make it and
when I eat it, my grandmother's with me.
PT: Food seems to become even more important to us during the
holidays. From Thanksgiving through the New Year, our activities seem to
be centered around family and food. What do you think of this new trend
of families eating the Thanksgiving meal in restaurants, or even hotel
suites?
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