I wanted to do some creative cooking, and have lovely photographs from these great photographers we have on staff. It turns out I have no time and no energy to do that sort of thing. Just getting the meals planned, shopped for, prepped, cooked, transported, and served is plenty of work. I’m surprised I’m still writing this, honestly. I wanted to make food I care about, and that satisfies some creative impulse, like I do when I pick up something interesting after work and play with it in the process of making dinner. But the entire menu wound up being determined by a few factors: budget is limited, lunch has to move at room temperature, and a bunch of our contributors have strong food preferences and dietary restrictions. I had basically zero room to maneuver. It’s hard enough to just feed these people. I’m trying to explore how the creative satisfaction I get from cooking creatively at home can transfer into cooking for others on a larger stage, and so far the answer is “not at all.” I’m just trying to get through this. At home, cooking amazing things feels like composing music, or any kind of making art. At the end I’m proud, excited, looking for smiles on faces, and dancing around as I do the dishes. Here it feels like drudgery. I think we call that “negative evidence.” You’d think from how I’m writing that the food was a failure. It wasn’t. Everyone got their meals on time, and they really liked what they were eating. I watched them eating lunch remotely on a live stream, and then I got emails like “omg noodle crack!” and “SESAME NOODLES!!!!” and big colorful text in an email from a professional graphic designer saying thank you. It was a lot of appreciation. It was the same for the dinner I did of polenta garnie (a cheeky French/Italian name for putting meat on corn porridge made with flour designed for tamales). I cooked. I was grumpy, but polite. It was unrewarding, but done well. People really liked the food, and I didn’t care that much.
In everything else I do, I care about the audience reaction a lot. At performances of the music I write I live and die by the audience reaction. This week I’ve had two emails about new performances, and I’ve been thrilled. But even though everyone loved my food (with special thanks to Meg Grady-Troia for refinements, improvements, competence, calmness, and the dishes), it’s just not that important to me. I’m always trying to make something finished, public, and worthwhile out of everything I do. This article is my attempt to do that with this cooking experience, but really it’s been a creative disappointment. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that. Not everything we do works, and knowing that this didn’t satisfy my artistic impulses tells me something about myself, and about where to put my energy next. When I was at conservatory, I wrote a piece called Les Privations that set an excerpt from Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s classic book, On The Physiology of Taste. That attempt to combine my food-loving side and my art-making side didn’t work either. It was an okay piece, but it wasn’t great, and it didn’t really get at the things I love about food. In the end, it was just music, not a good fusion of these two things I do. It didn’t capture the taste of a really briny oyster that just stops the world for a moment. It was a goofy piece of classical music with an old French text that the audience didn’t understand. I’ve thought about other texts involving food and rejected them (there’s a particularly tempting scene in The Odyssey with Achilles refusing to rejoin the fight while he serves his guests the finest food and wine). They seem to combine my art and my love of food, but really they aren’t about food at all. Because food feels so much like part of my creative life, I keep trying to make it part of my art-making. Today was another attempt that didn’t work. While food is definitely part of my creative life, it isn’t always. Sometimes it’s just a chore.