The best cooks love well
Cooking is love. The most crucial ingredient in ANY dish is love. Without it, you can have technical perfection, but you won’t be able to dish up soul satisfaction, I tell you. The best cooks love well.
Take my mom’s Tia Conching, for example. She used to cook me a simple scrambled eggs with only two ingredients: Beaten eggs and butter.
Tia Conching cooked those eggs in a heavy skillet over a low flame, waiting patiently for the skillet to heat, and melt the generous pat of butter she’d toss in, and gently swirl around the pan until it was properly melted, signaling that the pan was, indeed, hot enough, but not so hot as to burn the butter.
She would whip two eggs with a fork until the color was sunshine yellow, with a bit of froth on top, her face that of a serene madonna from a Renaissance painting, her eyes focused on the eggs. Slowly, spoon in hand, she’d pour a thin, steady stream of the beaten eggs into the skillet and its simmering butter, stirring the eggs calmly, and in her measured way, as she emptied the bowl.
Tia Conching (I called her “Mita,” or grandma, like her own grandchildren still do now) would stand at her stove patiently, focused on the task of cooking the perfect scrambled eggs for a little girl who’d just come out of the hospital with a list of verboten foods because she’d been on dextrose for days, and her tummy could not bear any stress.
She added no salt or spices to the scrambled eggs, but they were perfect: Perfectly moist. Perfectly flavored. Perfectly seasoned with her love and her attention. I called her Mita because her sister, my grandmother, passed away when I was four. She’d taken me under her wing and loved me just as my own Mita did: With good food prepared just for me.
When I asked her, years and years later, how on earth she made those scrambled eggs taste better than anything on the planet, she told me her secret: “I love you. When I cook for you, it is the most important thing I can do for you, and I focus all my love on whatever I am cooking for you.”
Life can be that simple, and that profoundly complex.
