“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
– Luc van Donkersgoed
Years ago, one of my relatives indicated the piles of books in his house and told me “Booksellers love Jews, because Jews buy books. Why? Because we’re always the ones that have to remember.” It could also be that we’re historically not that great at sports and needed something to do on the playground.
There’s an older woman who lives in my neighborhood that I see on my walks. We’re not friends really- just familiar NPCs in each others lives. Walking home the other day, she was coming towards me up the sidewalk when she stopped and noticed a small stand of daffodils at the edge of a lawn. The bright yellow flowers were craned down as usual, baring the green shoulders of their stems against the rain beating on our hoods. Fat wet drops of water rain down from behind the petals before making their own small puddles on the sidewalk.
“Look at that” she said, gesturing to the flowers. “Blooming already. The daffodils don’t know it’s cold!” Without thinking, I said “They know, ma’am- they just don’t care. They never do.” My elderly NPC made her way up the sidewalk shaking her head, and I turned up the walk to my house. “They just wanna bloom.”
Daffodils bloom very early in the spring, often while it’s still cold and there’s snow on the ground. They also tend to grow near water but in Portland, any sidewalk can be a river if the weather is right. Their heavy craning heads look down over the water, as though they were admiring their reflection. This, along with their audacity of blooming when it’s cold, and a little myth-making merit their family the scientific name of Narcissus.
Old habits die hard. I wake up in the morning, and my gut instinct is to scroll.
America is back to being weird and scary as fuck and the urge to preserve my mental health is in constant tension with my wish to stay “informed.” I thought that getting rid of the social media apps on my phone would mitigate this- you can’t obsess over what isn’t there. The muscle memory remains, though. The habit. The “wake and bake” of the 21rst Century where our first instinct on resuming consciousness is “Shit, better fix that” and roasting our minds to a blackened husk on information before we go about our day.
If not “holiness,” then let’s call it “sanctity.” “Austerity” could also work, I think. Whatever word you want to use, it’s the idea of being in a very large place where a lot of people do a lot of generally serious things in the name of something arguably intangible, and it has a unique smell. The government buildings I have been in don’t have that kind of smell (“why” is something others can argue), but synagogues, the right kind of churches, and museums definitely do.
Somewhere a while back, I read that the reason people love the smell of “old books” is because lignen- the fibrous matter in plants and trees that paper is made of- has compounds that decompose over time into a yellowish color and is related to vanillin, the compound that (you may have guessed) gives vanilla its smell and flavor. Synagogues and churches inevitably have a LOT of old books in them unless they are brand new. Hymnals, prayer books, and holy texts to service a whole congregation don’t come cheap, and there aren’t “new editions” of ancient vows and praise that require refreshing the stock. The same prayer books (ideally) serve generations. The next time you walk into a place of worship, it might be interesting to wonder who held your hymnal before you. What were they going through? What were they thinking, if anything? What did they pray for if they could? Were they praying for you?
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I
At the end of his own weird and raunchy comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare lets us in on his own thoughts regarding passion and madness. Passion, Creativity, and Insanity are the coin of the realm in culinary arts. The work of food writers, celebrity cooks, and media like The Bear parade our damage for the public and make us heroes, horror stories, characters, and even martyrs when we die.
I don’t think for a second it’s somehow undeserved. That’s the part of our lives that kitchen veterans miss and swap stories about. What some people think needs to be done about- or with- that passion, however, has me wondering. How to do you temper, train, guide, and coordinate that kind of raw passion and madness? History would tell us we need to be like the military. Owners and executives who spend more time owning and eating in restaurants than actually making them work tell us we need to lead and manage like a business or a factory- possibly one that turns Dirt into Diabetes.
Personally, I think that the answer to leading and managing cooks is to stop seeking “employees” as much as finding acolytes.
The Black Hat Baker 