Food carries forth our love to others and ourselves. Feeding others is a way to give love and also show others the energy of their own love. Will all food perform for us in this way? The answer is ‘no’ because the quality of food we make and serve others matters. What we cook and deliver as food of love needs to have roots, reconnect us to our ancestors, should fortify us, and give us a native wisdom that connects us to the cyclical seasonal rhythms.
No taste sits alone with just its own taste. No smell is just that smell. The halibut’s sizzle in a hot oiled pan echoes the old ice cream maker’s grinding path as it churned through big salt crystals on its sides in its intent to make cinnamon ice cream. The blood orange’s oil broken free with the zester’s friction sends images of our mother’s orange tree flush with blossoms in early April, earth’s warm comfort, switchgrass heads bloated with seeds, oxalis’s yellow tassels.
In Cooking by Hand, Paul Bertolli expresses that “A rich memory for tastes and scents, whether gathered casually or cultivated consciously, lends emotional resonance to cooking. Scent is like a switch in the memory, triggering old and new sensations, primal associations, and appetites” (xii). We seek to ignite our rich food memories that carry with them these stimulating associations, that cause the weight and significance of prior food experiences to be called forth in a sort of symphony of tastes, sounds, aromas. No dish that we consume is eaten in isolation as it calls forth each prior meal and taste. We sound one note with a night’s dinner that sends off waves of food memories that reverberate throughout the years. When our tongues dance through the thick swirl of mashed fresh potatoes or the viscous lemon-infused olive oil settling on a roasted carrot’s sides, our synapses signal a meal at grandma’s 16 years ago when the family was all gathered for the last time. When we snap the crispy fried calamari tentacles at the oceanside trattoria, we are again at the first meal we had with our lover as the spring’s rain pounded against restaurant window panes—we always return.
In How to Cook Your Life, Zen master baker, chef, and author of the Tassajara Bread Book, Ed Brown, recounts how a visit to his Aunt Alice’s home in Washington, D.C. sent him on a food quest to make wholesome bread and share that nourishment by teaching others how to bake. Ed’s first exposure to real bread and the fragrant process happened when he was ten, but it was over several decades that he had the epiphany that he would learn how to make real bread and teach others as well. Ed thought “what has happened in our culture…why are we eating this not very tasty, papery cardboardy bread?” The magic and sensuousness of what Ed experienced in his aunt’s kitchen was kneaded by his mind for some time, but in that early summer’s moment his decision was made: “I decided that was precious. We make these decisions sometimes, that something is precious, and I will find out how to do that, and I will teach others.”
The food that delivers our love and encourages that love in others should be precious to us. This food does not need to be expensive or rare, but it should be grounded in what connects us and what stirs familiarity and comfort.
What is invaluable to us is what makes us leap beyond the logic of practicality and feasibility into the limitlessness of our imaginations, into the trackless paths etched into our mind’s memories. Our taste memories vary so much based on our background and upbringing, but the limitlessness of one person’s grounding in food easily transmits to others through their cooking and dedication to nourish. One of our most intimate acts revolves around an onion’s harvest as it warms in the sun’s projection, our careful dicing and slow caramelizing of that just plucked flesh, handing the meal to the ones we love or want to nourish, and their committing the ultimate act of trust and acceptance of love by placing a forkful of the warm and tangy morsels into their mouths. They ingest our love, our essence, our energy, our passion in the most sacred way. This is love’s ultimate expression.