I like to cook. Not just to make something to shove down my throat to refuel but the creative act of selecting ingredients, chopping onions, cutting meat with a razor sharp cleaver, and selecting spices to satisfy not only a basic, primal, urge of survival but a specific chemical need my body is relaying to my brain in the form of appetite communication. I've always believed a picky eater is an underachiever but more importantly, if you eat something you like that you never had before you'll live a hundred days longer. My goal is to live forever and if I try something different every 99 days and like it I'm ahead of the game.
As I was preparing a gulyas the other day, I realized two things.
1. I'm a godam good cook.
2. Smokers make better cooks.
First of all, I don't measure anything. A pinch of this, a handful of that, dump in some of this, taste and adjust. In the case of the gulyas I started with a bunch of chopped onions, clarified and slightly blackened in olive oil, A bottom round roast cut in 1/2" cubes, washed and salted and dumped in the pot with caraway seeds, a bunch of hot paprika and a couple handfuls of sweet paprika, and water to cover after it browns. By the time it was ready for the spuds, the gulyas was developing a truly spectacular flavor. Then it dawned on me... If a non-smokin' me were to make this stuff it wouldn't have near the flavor it has now. See, nicotine reduces the sense of taste so non-smokers don't require as much flavor. It's been said you can pour a pint of Irish whisky in one end of Loch Ness and a non-smoker can taste it at the other end. Is that the kind of person you want to flavor your food? Someone who can taste .0003 parts per million? Or would you rather have a gastronomic experience prepared by someone who compensates for a diminished sense of taste by creating a fully balanced, sumptuous flavor that would make a Hungarian cry?
This explains why nuvo cuisine, wheat grass, and sawdust is so tasty to all those people who want a non smoking world.
I hear Julia Child used to smoke cigars with Paul Prudhomme. Is that true?
Monday, February 26, 2007
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4 comments:
when in rome do as the romans do, get pissed and have a riotous good time, go to the vomitorium and do it all over again. by the way i do not smoke, but can appreciate the ashes and orgiastic rites
well ... speaking as both a smoker AND having eaten and enjoyed the aforementioned gulyas (and believe me, its flavor was even better than described) -- I'd say yer spot-on, Attila *S*
(yep, it's me, Baby -- had to dredge up an old ID to post, didn't want my usual one!)
you're still lying!
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