Day 29: Baked cookers

I do not enjoy baking.

I do enjoy cooking, which I am aware is technically a definition that includes baking, but to me they are different things. Cooking is something you continuously interact with. It’s something that happens mostly on a stovetop. You’re in the kitchen chopping up ingredients at the same time as you’re cooking onions and boiling pasta and making a sauce and adjusting and tasting and improvising when something doesn’t quite go right. It’s messy and chaotic but there is something about the momentum of it that makes it work. Not to mention that if something is going wrong, which it frequently does, you can improvise. And you can do it with your sense of taste and smell! If something isn’t coming together you can go through the spice rack or the sauce shelf, letting your nose do the walking,^[1] and grab something that you can tell will work.

On the other hand, to me baking is mixing up a bunch of stuff, putting it in the oven, and praying. The ingredient ratios are often so exact that if you mess it up, there’s next to no hope, and the worst thing is that there’s no way to improvise. Run out of an ingredient with an absurd name like “Cream of Tartar?” That’s it, your pudding is ruined. Nothing substitutes and there’s no way to intuit what the correct proportions are. It’s follow the recipe or bust. And even if you do follow the recipe as often as not something mysterious goes awry during the process and — unlike stovetop cooking, where cause and effect tend to be neighbours on good terms with each other — you never get to understand what went wrong. Cake didn’t rise? Fuck you, that’s why. And there’s the time factor. You’d think being able to go away and do something else while the bread bakes would be advantageous but it’s a dangerous liability. If I’m not looking directly at what’s in the oven — for example, keeping an eye on a pork crackling under the grill — it may as well not exist, to the point that I have started small food fires with company present, and my charred sausage rolls have become a running gag with friends.

I think, if I squint, there is a metaphor here. I tend to prefer more chaotic processes where I’m able to have direct input and the format require me to be present and paying attention. I’d rather improvise following a format or loose set of guidelines than need to be exacting. And, inconveniently, improving at baking has unquestionably made me a better cook. Being more exacting has made me a better improviser. (Sadly it has not worked in reverse; any attempt to modify a baking recipe ends in instant disaster. Perhaps there is someone in my audience that can tell me how the ingredient ratios are meant to work.)

So the moral is that getting out of your comfort zone and seeking out the things that are opposite to your usual inclinations can actually augment your strengths. Perhaps that is too painfully obvious a point but I feel that we sometimes lose sight of that. So many of us are hyperspecialised and spend all our time zoomed way in on what we’re used to or good at. I don’t think having a specialism is bad, but I do think we could all stand to be better generalists.

Here’s an example from both literature and history. I’m re-reading the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien, and if you have ever had the misfortune to start talking books with me in real life you have absolutely heard about this series and why you need to read it immediately. If I haven’t met you, consider yourself warned to read the books now, so I don’t have to bother you about it.^[2] The books are an incredibly involving and very warts-and-all account of life in the British Navy during and around the Napoleonic Wars, and feature one of the great literary pairings: Autistic Stephen Maturin and ADHD Jack Aubrey.^[3] The reason I bring this up, apart from that they are wonderful books that you should read, is that the sailors are extraordinary generalists. They obviously know how to knot, reef and steer, but they also sew, knit, shave, and even take care of each other’s hair. They are self-reliant and martial in a way that absolutely appeals to modern self-improvement ideas but also excel in areas that clash wildly with contemporary male ideals. Many men seem obsessed with excelling only in those things that are comfortably male-coded, whereas I think the idea of being able to produce my own beanies and mend my own gear is both handy and manly, if that mattered. Maybe once I find the time I can learn how to knit.

So perhaps go do some stuff you’re not at comfortable with, or that is unfamiliar, and you may find it helps you improve at the things you’re already good at.

Or maybe you set the kitchen on fire again. And on that note, I have a cake to get out of the oven.

Thanks, as always, for reading