Cooking is a bit like art. First of all, you are creating something. And more importantly, no two people can end up making something that tastes exactly alike. You put a bit of yourself - your sense of proportion, what should go in first, what should go in at all.
Great cooks have an incomprehensible passion for their art. Unlike conventional art, it starts to pay well from early on if you take it up professionally. Everybody needs to eat, not everybody needs to read or buy a painting.
While artists in our midst are praised and encouraged, cooking is seen more as a hygiene skill for women and customer delight kinda thing for the men. (Today times are changing, and these extremities are moving towards each other, slowly but surely. Men at times, need to be able to cook to survive, and women don't.)
Art has an inessential quality about it. We don't really need it. Whereas food is - well, is fuel. That makes its preparation more mundane - one of the reasons why cooking misses the high-art train. Art has more of the snob-value.
Also, the body does not need art. Art is on a higher spiritual plane - catering to the mind, the soul, the spirit. Whereas cooking satiates that primal instinct of man - hunger. The paapi pet. Centuries of conditioning through spiritual and religious philosophies and texts have led us to believe that anything that provides corporal pleasure cannot be entirely free of sin. Few would sit in a gathering of socially accepted intellectuals and proclaim proudly to be a student of food and cooking, just for the sake of.
Exploring another aspect - a lot of people claim to be fond of eating, they have little interest in preparing it. Whereas, it has been seen that most ardent readers are also closet-writers. This divide between the host and parasite varies across art forms - depending perhaps on the degree of difficulty of the art form or how much fun it is.
I enjoy reading accounts of cooks, history of food and the like. Not that I have read a lot, just a couple of articles on Gayatri Devi's book and some stuff from Padmalakshmi. But I feel that in spite of fulfilling such a basic need, cooking hogs very little of our cultural mind-space.
So for all you great artists whose talent is as priceless as the cardamoms, cloves and chillies of the Malabar coasts - If food be the music of life, stir away!
Agree. And i know from reliable sources, that men who cook do well with the opposite sex as well.
ReplyDeleteCooking is an art. Period.
To add to what you said, another thing I have noticed is we are not confident about saying what we do, if it is not run of the mill. For example, we will proudly quote our Area Sales Manager qualification, but we may never say that we are writers or painters. To be a writer, one does not need to be published, a writer writes. A painter need not exhibit in a gallery. He paints. And these are beautiful things to do.