Corporate cooking class (or, chicken diapers)

Yesterday evening, I had a chance to go to a corporate cooking class. R.'s company had arranged it for their employees, and I got to tag along as a guest. My impression (and theirs!) was that the class would consist of making a meal under the supervision of a chef, a hands- and tastebuds-on learning experience. Fun, community-building, tasty.

Reality diverged. There were too many of us for the kitchen (although it was a large kitchen), so we sat, very quietly and politely, and listened to the chef extemporize while he prepared our dinner. We occasionally interjected questions, but his monologue rambled without pause.

Among other topics, he mentioned chicken diapers for the rich and famous; being blindfolded while driven to the wine-barrel woods; how the salt content of your food can incomprehensibly increase without any additions; hunting wild boar with a team of chefs; the difficulty of insinuating into a saffron-picking family; how to properly make chicken stock (6-8hrs); cheese cave security guards; the historical, political, and social migration of curry recipes over the past 800 years; how to properly make beef stock (12-20hrs); the refined and curry-acclimated palate of his dog; the three canonical ways to mix flour and water; how to get that perfect emerald green patina on beef; the textural and procedural differences between mashed and smashed potatoes; how to properly make vegetable stock (n+1 hrs); monkeys escaping Disney to terrorize chefs; and how proteins suddenly harden at both high and low temperatures. I attempted to remain respectful through all this, but he was so outlandish that I lost it when he said:

Oh! My fromagier would be so angry with me right now!

He was hyperbolically thus. (As he built up steam, more and more French entered his vocabulary; he started making French puns with no explanation in English. Or maybe they were serious phrases that I only interpreted as puns.) I began to giggle, but I tried to only giggle when he had made a joke. It was difficult.

If I had transcribed his speeches, you would think that I had invented an incredibly one-dimensional character. But there are witnesses: he was real, and he really lectured us on those topics. Overall, he cast cooking in such a mystical light, governed by innumerable specific rules which must be rote memorized and conform to no consistent set of principles, that I think it might be easier to learn alchemy. It's basically a miracle that I feed myself at all, given the flagrancy with which I violate his dictates. Nothing I cook for myself even qualifies as food according to his professional standards.

The dinner was okay. The desert (pears poached in raspberry puree) was really good, and I think I'll try to make it. You'll see photos when I do.


This post's theme word is pharisaical, "characterized by hypocritical self-righteousness; putting emphasis on strict observance of rituals unrelated to the spirit or meaning of the ceremony." The chef's instructions were arcane, pharisaical, and punitive; it does not require 10 steps and 3 specialized devices in order to boil an egg.
This post written, yet again, like H. P. Lovecraft. I wonder which indicators keep picking Lovecraft? Long sentences? Word choice? Sexism? (This last is a joke, of course.)

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is famous, Hugo-award-winning, and recently read by me. It takes place in three acts (separated by hundreds of years), all in our future, set after the worldwide failure of a nuclear standoff to stand off: countries bomb other countries to the destruction of all. Postapocalyptic riots of survivors blame the destruction on the educated inventors of the weapons, and so a massive movement attempts to burn all books and knowledge-holders: even literacy is shunned. The titular Leibowitz, a literate survivor, founds a monastic order dedicated to rescuing, hiding, protecting, and copying books in order to preserve knowledge for future generations.

The first act is a few hundred years later, and focuses on the canonization of Leibowitz; the second act features the re-discovery of electricity and nation-sized warfare; the third act completes the cycle by describing the planet's impending mutually assured nuclear destruction (and conflicting press/propaganda reports thereon), even as the monks of Leibowitz's order board a secretly-prepared spaceship to preserve their knowledge and religion in extraterrestrial colonies.

This three-act structure fragmented my enjoyment likewise. As soon as I got really interested in the story, it was abruptly cut short, and then fast-forwarded to a point when everyone misremembered it. This prevented me from ever really caring about the characters, or the society, or the planet, despite the fact that it is supposed to be this planet, the one we all live on, Earth.

The book was decent, but I am not crazy about it. Perhaps it was written for a different genre of people: those who brooded on global nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, or those outside of academia to whom the mysterious workings of science resemble the mysterious workings of God. Simply put, I never believed that the book was our future. It seemed like a thought experiment about humanity's warlike nature, and the structural (and perhaps philosophical) similarities of scholarship and monasticism. Several conversations in the book directly highlight these issues; if I were writing a high school essay, I would focus on those explicit, moralizing, judgemental authorial moments.

One last note: the Wandering Jew appeared variously through this book. He has appeared in other works I enjoy (Cryptonomicon especially), and is quickly becoming one of my favorite characters.


This post's theme word is guidon, "military pennant."
This post written like H. P. Lovecraft.