Heat, Knife, Sizzle

That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.

—Ecclesiastes 3:13

My friends and I didn’t learn to cook, necessarily. In an effort to widen our options, to set us free to be whatever we wanted to be, many of our mothers shooed us out of the kitchen—that place of lingering oppression and captivity for many of them. They encouraged us to study and travel and participate in sports and the arts, the things women didn’t get to do when they were young.

But many of us, men and women alike, at a certain point, are wandering back to the kitchen and fumbling and learning and trying to feed ourselves and the people we love, because we sense that it’s important and that we may have missed something fundamental along the way. Especially for those of us who make our livings largely in front of computer screens, there’s something extraordinary about getting up from the keyboard and using our hands for something besides typing—for chopping and dicing and coaxing scents and flavors from the raw materials in front of us. There’s something entirely satisfying in a modern, increasingly virtual world about something so elemental—heat, knife, sizzle.