Learning to Cook

The beginner cook quickly learns that following a recipe is generally not that hard and that a well-picked repertoire of recipes will make him look like quite the accomplished cook to his friends and family. Buy the ingredients, follow the instructions—no skills required—and you will have produced delicious food.

Chefs, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are pictured as masters of skill. We rarely associate them with specific dishes, understanding that they could renew their menu and are merely cooking a vision of the food they want to serve. Instead, we think of chefs as people who have a mastery of knife skills, know how to reliably get a sauce's consistency right, etc.

I have found myself at a midpoint. I know a lot of recipes and can thus produce a breadth of delicious dishes that are deceptively easy to assemble. Yet, I am building skills and have found that some of the best things I do nowadays are simple things that I have been doing for a long time.

I have built intuition, then knowledge, about the way ingredients work together—skills that a book can hint at but which cannot be taught without at least a series of workshops, most of which would be wasted on beginner cooks who are still figuring out their basics.

This I find intriguing. Knowledge that cannot easily be taught is knowledge that cannot easily be sold, and thus knowledge that will rarely be transmitted. Yet, it lets me take a basic dish I have done for ten years now and, from the same ingredients, make the best version of it that I have produced so far. Actually, one of the best dishes I have ever made.

There is a lesson on learning magic and mentalism in there…