The Pleasures of Home Cooking, by Jonah Lehrer

Why I like making pasta at home

Posted on: October 7, 2009 12:52 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

 

The closing of Gourmet magazine is a sad event. I won't just miss the lush pictures and Paris travel tips - what I'll really miss is the food journalism, from DFW on the suffering of lobsters to Daniel Zwerdling on the tragic life of an industrial chicken. I hope other magazines can fill the void, because our food supply is messed up.

But this blog post isn't just another lament for the glossy. I had a short essay scheduled to run in the January issue of Gourmet on the pleasures of home cooking. Since that issue will no longer see the light of day, I thought I'd reproduce the essay below. (Note: the article was still in the process of being edited, so it comes with all the usual caveats: too wordy, flabby, imprecise, etc.)

I discovered the pleasure of home cooking while working in a restaurant. It was a fancy French place, and I was a lowly line cook; most of my days were spent laboring over a cauldron of veal stock. After ten hours in the kitchen, I'd reek of meaty bones and sweated onions; my hands ached from all the chopping and cutting. Even my tongue was tired.

But I was still hungry - staff meal was a long time ago. And so, although I was sick of the stovetop, I'd begin the ritual of my late-night dinner. A clove of garlic would be added to a pool of hot oil; the canned tomatoes would splatter as they entered the pan. I'd boil the spaghetti, watch the starch thicken the sauce and always add just a little too much parmesan. And then I would taste, and then I would reach for the salt, and then I would eat.

Why was I making pasta at midnight? We eat because we must, but we cook for a more mysterious set of reasons. When I entered my tiny kitchen - it was little more than a hot plate overlooking an airshaft - I was doing more than putting food on the plate. I was enacting a ritual, reminding myself that every appetite is an opportunity, a chance to wring some pleasure from a basic human need. We might start with a pantry of tin cans and a box of hard durum wheat, but if we stir and simmer and season then we end up with something else: a bite of stained red pasta, twirled around a fork. A moment of repose. An ounce of happiness.

I didn't appreciate it at the time - I just wanted to feed myself - but those bowls of spaghetti taught me something important. It was late and I was tired, but I was slowly learning how to enjoy the process of cooking, and not just the finished product. The eating, after all, is the easy part. The difficult secret is finding a way to enjoy everything else, from the peeling of garlic to the stirring of the sauce. Although we obsess over the adjectives and nouns of cooking - the things we eat and the way they taste - the pleasures of home cooking are all about the verbs. Because it's the doing that one must celebrate; the dinner speaks for itself.

The problem, of course, is that cooking is hard work, an act of manual labor after a long day of labor. We toil to make a meal and then, in a matter of minutes, the meal is over, leaving behind a mess of crumbs, dishes and grease spackled counters. Perhaps we'll conclude that the microwave would have been easier, or that next time we'll curl up on the couch with takeout. There were many nights when I'd look at my dirty kitchen and be filled with regret. Why make pasta when I could just eat pizza?

But the work, I assure you, is worth it. If you only looked at recipes, with their elaborate instructions and long shopping lists, you'd probably conclude that cooking was nothing but a procession of strange chores. We do something to a piece of protein, and then we do something else, and then we stick it in the oven for a vague amount of time. Voila!

If home cooking were merely those culinary mechanics - if it looked, in other words, like a cooking show on television - then it really would be a dismal labor, best left to the French experts and fast-food chains. But interwoven with all that chopping and roasting and cleaning is a more subtle activity, which is the real reason I enjoy the act of making dinner. This verb doesn't require fancy copper pans or a big stand mixer; we don't have to make a mess or trek across the city for duck fat. All we have to do is pay attention, to focus, if only for a few minutes, on the food right in front of us.

This was the enduring lesson of my first beef stew. The dish was too ambitious for me - I was a total amateur, with a crush on Julia Child - but there was something deeply thrilling about the experience, which was so full of new things to notice. There was the sound of sizzling onions and the way their sizzle accelerated when they started to brown. There was the stickiness of wet meat coated in dry flour and the purple wine that I wasn't old enough to drink. There was the wooded perfume of the herbs, tied together with string, and the way the flavors I could name mingled into a taste I could not. These were all such minor observations that I'd normally ignore them; life is too noisy to listen to onions, too busy to watch a sauce slowly simmer and thicken.

But what I learned from that stew is that these trifling details - the precise shade of brown on the beef, the thickness of the cut carrots - weren't just details: they were the difference between a tasty triumph and a disappointing failure. Unless I concentrated on the food above the flame, I'd never get the dish right. I'd burn the roux and undercook the meat. I'd add too much pepper and not enough salt. I'd have missed a chance for pleasure because I indulged a distraction. Because my mind was somewhere else when it should have been here, staring into the bottom of the pot.

Most things in life become more automatic with time. This, after all, is the gift of experience - it allows us to pay less attention, so that we don't have to think about maintaining our balance on a bicycle, or shifting gears in a car. But with cooking the opposite happens - the more time we spend in the kitchen the more we notice. The act is intensified, layered with new subtleties. The first time I cooked beef stew, I was merely obeying a recipe, counting off the minutes until the mirepoix was sweated and the meat was seared. But now I don't need the clock - I've learned how to smell the dark sugar of cooked onions, how to see when the stew is viscous with the richness of bones. The dish is the same - beef bourguignon is too perfect to ever change - but my sense of it has become much richer.

This is the moral of the kitchen: even the most mundane rituals deserve our attention. And maybe they deserve it most of all. To cook is to insist that every hunger is a potential occasion, not just for something delicious (because deliciousness can be easily bought), but for that quality of experience that comes when the flame is on high and the last knob of butter is being whisked into the sauce. The tough meat is finally tender and there's the pile of parsley, waiting to be sprinkled over the stew. It's all so fleeting - the food will soon be eaten, the mess will be cleaned up tomorrow - but Virginia Woolf was right: "Of such moments the thing is made that endures." We have taken a need and made a meal.

And then there's the next meal. Who knows what we'll want to eat? Because we cook, we don't just see things as they are, raw and tough and fibrous. We look at what is and we glimpse the possible - that ugly fish can have crispy skin, and that bitter broccoli rabe would be delicious with garlic and oil. The pretty radicchio belongs in a risotto and those leftover scraps of meat will make a perfect stock. The world, it turns out, is a pretty delicious place. All it needs a little attention, and maybe just a pinch of salt.

Why do so many people dislike atheists?

Good Minus God

By LOUISE M. ANTONY, The New York Times


I was heartened to learn recently that atheists are no longer the most reviled group in the United States: according to the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, we’ve been overtaken by the Tea Party. But even as I was high-fiving my fellow apostates (“We’re number two! We’re number two!”), I was wondering anew: why do so many people dislike atheists?

Atheism does not entail that anything goes. Quite the opposite.

I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?

Well, actually — no, it’s not. (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.) Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

Admittedly, some atheists are nihilists. (Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get the most press.) But such atheists’ repudiation of morality stems more from an antecedent cynicism about ethics than from any philosophical view about the divine. According to these nihilistic atheists, “morality” is just part of a fairy tale we tell each other in order to keep our innate, bestial selfishness (mostly) under control. Belief in objective “oughts” and “ought nots,” they say, must fall away once we realize that there is no universal enforcer to dish out rewards and punishments in the afterlife. We’re left with pure self-interest, more or less enlightened.

This is a Hobbesian view: in the state of nature “[t]he notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice.” But no atheist has to agree with this account of morality, and lots of us do not. We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket. Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others.

This view of the basis of morality is hardly incompatible with religious belief. Indeed, anyone who believes that God made human beings in His image believes something like this — that there is a moral dimension of things, and that it is in our ability to apprehend it that we resemble the divine. Accordingly, many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things. Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable. At least this is what I was taught as a girl, growing up Catholic: that we could see that God was good because of the things He commands us to do. If helping the poor were not a good thing on its own, it wouldn’t be much to God’s credit that He makes charity a duty.

It may surprise some people to learn that theists ever take this position, but it shouldn’t. This position is not only consistent with belief in God, it is, I contend, a more pious position than its opposite. It is only if morality is independent of God that we can make moral sense out of religious worship. It is only if morality is independent of God that any person can have a moral basis for adhering to God’s commands.

Let me explain why. First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God. Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:

• It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.

• It is wrong to enslave people.

• It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.

• Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists. That seems to me to be a remarkable claim. If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.? There’d be nothing wrong with torture? The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

Think now about our personal relations — how we love our parents, our children, our life partners, our friends. To say that the moral worth of these individuals depends on the existence of God is to say that these people are, in themselves, worth nothing — that the concern we feel for their well being has no more ethical significance than the concern some people feel for their boats or their cars. It is to say that the historical connections we value, the traits of character and personality that we love — all count for nothing in themselves. Other people warrant our concern only because they are valued by someone else — in this case, God. (Imagine telling a child: “You are not inherently lovable. I love you only because I love your father, and it is my duty to love anything he loves.”)

What could make anyone think such things? Ironically, I think the answer is: the same picture of morality that lies behind atheistic nihilism. It’s the view that the only kind of “obligation” there could possibly be is the kind that is disciplined by promise of reward or threat of punishment. Such a view cannot find or comprehend any value inherent in the nature of things, value that could warrant particular attitudes and behavior on the part of anyone who can apprehend it. For someone who thinks that another being’s pain is not in itself a reason to give aid, or that the welfare of a loved one is not on its own enough to justify sacrifice, it is only the Divine Sovereign that stands between us and — as Hobbes put it — the war of “all against all.”

This will seem a harsh judgment on the many theists who subscribe to what is called Divine Command Theory — the view that what is morally good is constituted by what God commands. Defenders of D.C.T. will say that their theory explains a variety of things about morality that non-theistic accounts of moral value cannot, and that it should be preferred for that reason. For example, they will say that atheists cannot explain the objectivity of morality — how there could be moral truths that are independent of any human being’s attitudes, will or knowledge, and how moral truths could hold universally. It is true that D.C.T. would explain these things. If God exists, then He exists independently of human beings and their attitudes, and so His commands do, too. If we didn’t invent God, then we didn’t invent His commands, and hence didn’t invent morality. We can be ignorant of God’s will, and hence mistaken about what is morally good. Because God is omnipresent, His commands apply to all people at all times and in all places.

Whatever the gods love — bingo! — that’s pious. But what if they change their minds?

That’s all fine. It would follow from D.C.T. that moral facts are objective. The problem is that it wouldn’t follow that they are moral. Commands issued by a tyrant would have all the same features. For D.C.T. to explain morality, it must also explain what makes God good.

The problem I’m pointing to is an ancient one, discussed by Plato. In his dialogue “Euthyphro,” the eponymous character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates: “the pious acts,” Euthyphro says, are those which are loved by the gods.” But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous, and asks Euthyphro: “are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are the pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?”

What’s the difference? Well, if the first reading is correct, then it’s the gods’ loving those particular acts that makes them count as pious acts, that grounds their piousness. “Pious,” on this alternative, is just shorthand for “something the gods love.” Whatever the gods happen to love — bingo! — that’s pious. If the gods change their preferences on a whim — and they did, if Homer knew his stuff — then the things that are pious change right along with them. In contrast, on the second reading, pious acts are presumed to have a distinctive, substantive property in common, a property in virtue of which the gods love them, a property that explains why the gods love them.

Translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of God’s favoring them? Or does God favor them because they are — independently of His favoring them — morally good? D.C.T. picks the first option; it says that it’s the mere fact that God favors them that makes morally good things morally good.

Theories that endorse the second option — let’s call any such theory a “Divine Independence Theory” (D.I.T.) — contend, on the contrary, that the goodness of an action is a feature that is independent of, and antecedent to God’s willing it. God could have commanded either this action or its opposite, but in fact, He commands only the good one.

Both D.C.T. and D.I.T. entail a perfect correspondence between the class of actions God commands and the class of actions that are good (or rather, they do so on the assumption that God is perfectly benevolent). The two theories differ, however, on what accounts for this congruence. D.C.T. says that it is God’s command that explains why the good acts are “good” — it becomes true merely by definition that God commands “good” actions. “Goodness,” on this view, becomes an empty honorific, with no independent content. To say that God chooses the good is like saying that the Prime Meridian is at zero degrees longitude, or that in baseball, three strikes makes an out. D.I.T., on the other hand, says that it is a substantive property of the acts — their goodness — that explains why God commanded them. Indeed, it says that God’s goodness consists in His choosing all and only the good. D.I.T. presumes that we have an independent grasp of moral goodness, and that it is because of that that we can properly appreciate the goodness of God.

D.C.T. is arguably even more radical and bizarre than the Hobbesian nihilism I discussed earlier. On the nihilistic view, there is no pretense that a sovereign’s power would generate moral obligation — the view is rather that “morality” is an illusion. But D.C.T. insists both that there is such a thing as moral goodness, and that it is defined by what God commands. This makes for really appalling consequences, from an intuitive, moral point of view. D.C.T. entails that anything at all could be “good” or “right” or “wrong.” If God were to command you to eat your children, then it would be “right” to eat your children. The consequences are also appalling from a religious point of view. If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him. We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so. God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants. (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.) The same goes for worshipping God. We might find it in our interest to flatter or placate such a powerful person, but there could be no way in which God was deserving of praise or tribute.

This is the sense in which I think that it is a more pious position to hold that morality is independent of the existence of God. If the term “good” is not just an empty epithet that we attach to the Creator, who or whatever that turns out to be, then it must be that the facts about what is good are independent of the other facts about God. If “good” is to have normative force, it must be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by a powerful omnipresent being.

So what about atheism? What I think all this means is that the capacity to be moved by the moral dimension of things has nothing to do with one’s theological beliefs. The most reliable allies in any moral struggle will be those who respond to the ethically significant aspects of life, whether or not they conceive these things in religious terms. You do not lose morality by giving up God; neither do you necessarily find it by finding Him.

I want to close by conceding that there are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant. Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption. Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you. I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant. I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.


Louise M. Antony teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes on a variety of philosophical topics, including knowledge gender, the mind and, most recently, the philosophy of religion. She is the editor of the 2007 book “Philosophers Without Gods,” a collection of essays by atheist philosophers.

Strunz & Farah - "Candela"

Lana Del Rey singing "Video Games"

What is the best distance for watching a 1080P HDTV set?

The devil in the details

Consumer electronics: Changes in technology mean that choosing a big-screen television has become more complicated than ever. Should you pay extra for 1080p resolution, LED backlighting or 3D? We crunch the numbers

 

Dec 3rd 2011 | from the print edition of the Economist

 

IF YOU have not gone shopping for a new television set for quite a while, enough has changed to require some serious thought. So before splurging on a new high-definition television (HDTV) set, it is worth considering which features make sense and which do not.

Start with the viewing angles available in the room that will be used. THX, a technical standards-setter for the video and audio industries, requires the back row of seats in a home theatre to have at least a 26° viewing angle from one edge of the screen to the other. Seats nearest the screen should have a viewing angle of no more than 36°. These subtended angles correspond to a viewing distance of roughly 2.2 times the screen width at the back row of the seating, down to 1.5 times the screen width at the front. Within these limits, viewers should be able to enjoy the most immersive experience.

The question, then, is how to relate viewing distance to a person’s visual acuity. In other words, what is the maximum distance beyond which some picture detail is lost because of the eye’s limitations? Visual acuity indicates the angular size of the smallest detail a person’s visual system can resolve. Saying that someone has 20/20 vision (6/6 in metric terms) means that they can resolve a spatial pattern (a letter of the alphabet, say) in which each element subtends an angle of one minute of arc when viewed from a distance of 20 feet (six metres).

In other words, a person with 20/20 sight should, in normal lighting conditions, be able to identify two points that are 0.07 of an inch (1.77mm) apart from a distance of 20 feet. Twenty feet is taken because, as far as the eye is concerned, it is in effect infinity. Beyond this distance, some of the detail in the picture can no longer be resolved by the conical receptor cells in the retina of the eye. It will simply blend into the background instead of being seen as a distinct feature. Thus, it is a waste to make individual pixels—the tiniest elements in a display—smaller than 1.77mm across when viewed from 20 feet.

The problem with viewing images on a television screen—especially the “progressively scanned” 1080p HDTV sets in use today—is that most people sit too far back. At the typical distance of nine feet, a 1080p HDTV set (with a screen 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high) needs to be at least 69 inches across (measured diagonally) if viewers are to see all the detail it offers. To see all the detail on a 32-inch set with 1080p resolution means sitting a little over four feet from the screen—great for video-gaming on your own, but hardly conducive to communal viewing.

In other words, viewers are not enjoying the full benefits of the higher pixel count of 1080p televisions if they sit any further back than 1.8 times the screen width. At a distance of 2.7 times the screen width, they might as well buy a cheaper 720p set, as the eye cannot resolve the finer detail of a 1080p screen at that distance.

The next choice that must be made is between plasma display, liquid-crystal display (LCD) or the latest light-emitting diode (LED) variety. Plasmas, with their rapid switching and deep blacks, have long been the favourite for sports fans and movie buffs. Apart from their lack of blur and judder when tracking fast-moving objects and their freedom from wishy-washy greys, they can be viewed from wider angles than LCDs without the picture changing colour. But plasmas have lately fallen out of favour because they are bulkier and more power-hungry.

To lick the LCD’s motion problems, manufacturers have developed special circuitry to predict and compensate for any rapid movement within a scene. This increases the screen’s frame rate from the 60 hertz (Hz) of conventional television to 120Hz and even 240Hz. A few manufacturers have begun offering sets with refresh rates of up to 480Hz, with 960Hz on the horizon. Unfortunately, the motion-compensating circuitry can make filmed content look like a cheap video—a glitch known in the trade as the “soap-opera effect”. The source of the problem is the way film shot at 24 frames a second has to adjust to the television’s much higher refresh rate of 60, 120 or even 240 frames a second.

One way of doing this is to analyse first one frame of film and then the next, and calculate an average of the two. This interpolated frame is inserted between the first and second frames, and the process repeated for each successive frame of the film. The interpolation process is good at removing blur and judder, but it can make the motion appear unnaturally smooth and disconcerting. Be warned: 240Hz sets are the worst offenders. For sports fans in particular, this gives plasma the edge.

Lastly, there are the LED sets. These are simply LCD televisions that use LEDs for backlighting instead of the usual fluorescent tubes. The LEDs can be either along the edges of the screen or spread as an array behind the whole of the display. Edge-lit displays have problems with uniformity of brightness, as well as a limited viewing angle. Apart from giving more uniform brightness, a full array of LED backlights allows the screen to be dimmed selectively in places where a scene needs to be dark. The effect is to make the LCD’s blacks appear almost as dense as a plasma’s. Only top-of-the-range LCD sets from Sharp and Sony currently have this feature. Expect to pay dearly for it.

2D or not 2D, that is the question

So, what to choose? All things being equal, plasma televisions are about two-thirds the price of their LCD equivalents, which are themselves up to a third cheaper than LED sets. Meanwhile, the premium that 3D sets once commanded has all but vanished. They are now worth buying, not so much for their ability to show 3D content, but because they display 2D even better than conventional plasma or LCD sets. 3D sets have special features to reduce “ghosting” in the image and maximise the 3D effect—and this ensures sharper 2D images, too. Happy viewing.

Why a water bath is important when cooking custards and flans

From Harold McGee's

The Surprising Science of Water Baths

Most cooks know that oven heat can be moderated with a water bath.  Though the oven may be at 350°F, the liquid water can't exceed 212 °F/100°C, the temperature at which it boils and turns from liquid into vapor.  Less well known is the fact that the water temperature can vary over a range of 40°F depending on the pan containing the water and whether it's covered.  A pan of water is heated by the oven, but it's simultaneously cooled as water molecules evaporate from the surface.  The actual water temperature is determined by the balance between heating of the water mass through the pan, and evaporative cooling at the water surface.  More heat accumulates in a thick cast iron pan or passes through infrared-transparent glass than is transmitted by thin stainless steel.  So in a moderate oven, a cast-iron water bath may reach 195°F/87°C, a glass bath 185°F/83°C, and a stainless one180°F/80°C.  If the pans are covered with foil, then evaporative cooling is prevented, and all of them will come to a full boil. 

Custards are tenderest when heated gently, and so are best cooked in an open water bath---one, however, that is sure to reach at least 185°F; otherwise the mix may never completely set.  Many cooks take the precaution of folding a kitchen towel in the bottom of a water bath so that the custard cups or dish won't be in direct contact with the hot pan, but this can backfire:  the towel prevents the water from circulating under the cups, so the water trapped there reaches the boil and rocks the cups around.  A wire rack works better.

How to make Pineapple Flan, by Rozanne Gold

Adapted from Rozanne Gold's

Pineapple Flan

This quivering custard of tropical intensity is made like a traditional crème caramel.


1 cup sugar
5 large eggs
5 large egg yolks
2 cups unsweetened pineapple juice 


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Put 1/2 cup sugar in a small nonstick skillet. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until sugar melts completely into a dark liquid caramel, about 3 minutes.  Immediately divide caramel among cups (pouring to coat bottom of each.) Caramel will harden.

In bowl of an electric mixer put 5 whole eggs, 5 egg yolks, and remaining cup 1/2 cup sugar. Beat for 1 minute, until eggs and sugar are well blended.

Slowly add pineapple juice, little by little, and continue to mix until juice is incorporated. Do not let mixture become too frothy. (Use a strainer if the mixture becomes too frothy.) With a ladle, divide mixture evenly among custard cups.

Place custard cups in a large, deep pan. Create a water bath by adding boiling water to pan so that water level comes two-thirds up the sides of the cups. (To prevent accidental burning of the top of the custards, cover the whole pan LOOSELY with foil that has been pierced in lots of places to let steam escape.)  Carefully place in oven. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until firm. Remove cups from water bath. Let cool, then refrigerate until very cold, preferably overnight. When ready to serve, carefully unmold custard onto dessert plates, loosening the sides with a small sharp knife if necessary. Caramel will coat the top and sides of the flan. Serve immediately.

Serves 5

© Rozanne Gold