Open Thread: ?Cooking Isn't Easy, and It Isn't Creative? - Balloon Juice

By Anne Laurie October 13th, 2012

As part of its Sunday ?Food & Drink? issue, the NYTimes profiles cantankerous cook/editor Christopher Kimball:

... I was at the meeting for the unveiling of the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg. It?s one of those recipes that isolate the weird, wayward essence of the Cook?s Illustrated project, a seemingly boner-proof preparation that, when fixed with Kimball?s unsparing eye, reveals itself to be fundamentally broken. And therein lies the narrative arc of the C.I. recipe ? invariably it begins with the insuperable flaw, that through toil and experimentation is resolved in a sudden, improbable revelation that, in-house, is known as the aha moment? Kimball compares the arc to that of a Sherlock Holmes whodunit, and no recipe ratchets the stakes higher than the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg, a single-ingredient obstacle course that turns entirely on technique.

The P.S.B.E. is slated for the January/February issue and falls to Andrea Geary, from the magazine?s stable of overeducated, underpaid editor/cooks who research, test and write the stories. While the 20ish editors around the table resemble bright children at a model U.N. convocation, Geary, a hale, wiry 46, is the one you want beside you aboard the helicopter when smoke begins to billow from the controls. Her mien expresses unfussy competence; before coming to the magazine, Geary cooked at an inn on the Scottish Highlands, roasting venison in a coal-burning stove for hunting parties of drunk Italians. Even among the high-strung editorial ranks at C.I., Geary is considered a little intense.

f you?re wondering what could be especially difficult about boiling an egg, you should have heard her. The Flaw ? the unappetizing probability of either a chalky yolk or a runny white ? occurs because the yolk gets cooked before the white, and the desired temperature window turns out to be harrowingly small, so the ideal preparation must set the white while leaving the yolk custardy, and not do it too rapidly. Oh, and tossing a fridge-temperature egg into boiling water will cause the air inside to expand and sometimes crack it, and apparently no two cooks can agree on exactly what simmering means, and third, the number of eggs must be compensated for by adjusting the amount of boiling water to keep cooking time constant. Geary recited further facts imperiling the P.S.B.E., and after a while the difficulty of boiling an egg at home with anything like success sounded to be on the order of a bone-marrow transplant. This appeared to please everyone, particularly Kimball, and the meeting moved on to Dressing Up Meatloaf.

?Most magazines don?t write about failure, but we do,? Kimball told me later. ?Disaster in the kitchen puts the reader at ease, and that?s why we start our recipes with it.?...

Something about this guy seems vaguely familiar?

... Like most things about Kimball, the facts of his biography are more convoluted than those of the public persona. Just how much more is something I discovered while he talked about the summer after he graduated from high school, when he enlisted in an overland trek from London to Nairobi, traveling with fellow Phillips Exeter students in a caravan of Land Rovers. (One of their chaperones was an English teacher with a bent for Indian spirituality and encounter groups; that one of the country?s top prep academies countenanced a three-month trip across war-torn Africa can be construed only as a curiosity of the late-?60s.) Kimball concedes the trip was ?totally ill advised,? particularly in light of the group?s nearly expiring of thirst after taking a detour through the Sahara ? Kimball recalls passing dead camels ? and being taken prisoner after speeding through a Congolese Army roadblock. ?It was at night, and they had put us in a little hut,? Kimball recalls, ?and the guy in charge wasn?t there, and the No. 2 guy wanted to kill us.? After the scare, the students needed to unwind. ?There were Pygmies in this village,? Kimball recalled. ?They were sitting on huge truck tires. I remember one night, we sat around a campfire and we got them high. We took out this huge joint, and everyone smoked dope and got high with a bunch of Pygmies in the Congo.?...

Speaking of which, what?s for dinner?

Source: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/10/13/open-thread-cooking-isnt-easy-and-it-isnt-creative/

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