Kitchen Intution: Tasting Poetry

Stop for a minute. If you’re near a kitchen, enter and look around slowly. Use your senses to consider what you find. Look at the bulky foods: potatoes, tomatoes, fruits, greens. Look at the canned, bottled and wrapped items: milk, cheese, meats, olives, minced garlic, mustard, salsa, hummus. Look at the nuts and spices and dried grains. Hold them in your hands, if you’d like (All employees must wash hands), smell them, taste them.

This is just an exercise, but like jogging or walking, regular practice is good for you.

The crucial step: whisper the names of what you see. Let the words hang in your throat and graze past your ears. Don’t be shy; string a few together. You’ll notice that some words go together like peanut butter and jelly, others like tomatoes and ice cream. What you’re practicing here is food poetry, and it can help transform your cooking life.

Tasting poetry marries eating and metaphor. It happens when distinct ingredients, cooked together, become something unique, and delicious. You can practice by speaking out loud the ingredients in your kitchen and cooking by instinct. You may not be a chef or even a seasoned cook, but you’ve been eating (hopefully) since birth, and that should be enough training.

You might ask why food poetry depends upon words as much as taste or smell. The reason is because cooking, a uniquely human process, is so intimately tied to human language, which allows us to imagine how foods will change in the cooking process and to teach others our methods. Without the ability to say “sauteed onion” and thus predict its rich flavor, most people would avoid them altogether.

Rather than tell you all the combinations I enjoy, this is the chance for you to create recipes simply by connecting the dots. You’ll make some false steps, creating some really ugly combinations. (For example, I love to cook, but I stumble all the time. Fortunately, my tasters are forgiving.) Along the way, you’ll discover your palate. You’ll rebuild a foundation for your intuition, which never left you, but was simply masked by a culture that relies on experts and advertisers to decide what to eat. If you’d like to post your favorite tastes (like: black beans, cumin; winter squash, cinnamon), all are welcome. Just remember to invite your friends and dig in.