Food and Culture at Raven

Cooking As An Art Form

An Essay by Jack Foster

"A work of art," according to the Encyclopędia Britannica, "is something made or transformed by man that functions aesthetically in man's experience."

Obviously, the only way it can function aesthetically in our experience is if it makes an impact upon our senses.

And the more senses it makes an impact upon, the greater its potential impact.

And the greater the impact, the greater the art form.

Logically then, potentially the greatest art form must be cooking. For cooking-the creation and making of a great dish-does something no other art form does. It makes an impact upon not just one of our senses (as a painting does) or two of our senses (as a live performance of music does); it makes an impact upon all five.

But sometimes logic is the way to go wrong with conviction. So I offer a proof of sorts:

I remember my father-this was back sixty years or so ago-cooking breakfast for us on Saturday mornings.

First he made biscuits:

He pre-heated the oven to 450 degrees.

He sifted flour onto some waxed paper, measured out 2 cups of it, and then sifted it again, along with 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of baking soda, into a mixing bowl.

Next he took 2 tablespoons each of cold butter and cold lard and cut them into the flour mixture with two big forks until it was the consistency of coarse corn meal.

Then he stirred in all at once 3/4 cup of milk ("If it's not at room temperature, start over.") for "a half minute, never more" until the dough just started to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

As soon as that happened, he placed the dough on a lightly floured board and kneaded it-flattening it with the heel of his hands and folding it over on itself-five or six times for another scant half minute. ("They won't be flaky if you knead too long.")

When the dough was smooth and no longer sticky, he patted it down gently with the palm of his hands until it was about a half-inch thick.

Then he cut out the rounds with an old tin biscuit cutter by dipping the cutter in flour and pressing straight down on the dough without twisting.

He arranged the rounds at least an inch apart from each other on the ungreased baking sheet ("Put 'em too close together and the sides won't be crusty."), brushed the tops with milk, and sprinkled them with "a country dash" of cayenne pepper.

After he put the biscuits in the hot oven, he took out a slab of bacon from the refrigerator. We had two refrigerators in our kitchen back then, standing side by side like armed guards near the pantry-a cold one (38 degrees) for milk, butter, meat and fish, fruit juices, mayonnaise, leftovers, and sauces; and a cool one (50 degrees) for fruits, vegetables, beer, bread, and eggs.

The bacon my father got by special order from Hillman's in Chicago. It came, he said, from a Georgia pig that was raised on peanuts and corn and whey ("But mostly peanuts."). After the pig was dressed, the slab was cured, then soaked for six days in sage honey and water and juniper berries. It was well-marbled-not nearly as lean as bacon in stores nowadays. But it was a lot heavier with flavor.

My father unwrapped the slab carefully, the way an old lady might undo the ribbon from a packet of fading love letters. From the cut end, he cut off some eight-inch long slices, each one an eighth-inch thick, and placed them in a frying pan. It was a big old black cast-iron frying pan that was never used for anything except frying bacon and sausage, and was never (that I can remember) washed with soap and water, but always simply wiped clean with brown paper bags instead.

Robert Frost spoke of "the pleasure of taking pains." Perhaps that's why my father enjoyed the act of frying so much-he took pains with it.

He always started with a warm pan. ("Cold pans toughen things.") He placed the slices side-by-side in the pan, making sure they didn't overlap, and placed the pan over medium heat.

Then, because the middle of the bacon seems to brown quicker than the ends, he made sure the ends were always in good contact with the pan by lifting up the middle of the bacon and folding it back upon itself, in effect shortening the bacon the way a sailor uses a sheep-shank to shorten a rope. (This shortening technique was doubly helpful, of course, when a slice of bacon was near the curved edge of the pan and did not have the room to stretch out to its full length.) As the bacon fried and shrank, he exposed more and more of the middle of the bacon to the cooking surface, so that by the time the bacon was done, it was evenly brown-ed.

He turned the bacon a lot, too. Indeed, once when I was counting, he turned all the slices nine times before he took them out of the pan.

In addition, every time he turned a slice he alternated its position in the pan. Thus, if there were seven slices in the pan, numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 from left to right, after the first turn their positions read: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1; after the second turn: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2; and so on. The effect of this was that every slice was browned as evenly as every other slice.

All the while, of course, he was making sure that the ends of the slices where always in contact with the pan by lifting up the middles and folding them back upon themselves, and sometimes-when the ends started to curl upward-by slightly splitting the ends with the edge of his fork and then pressing them down upon the pan with the back of his fork.

The magic for me wasn't in the mechanics of the frying, though; it was in the smells and the sounds and the sights of the frying.

Is there any smell more sapid and stimulating and hunger-arousing than that of bacon frying on an early morning? It is a big, meaty, salt-encrusted smell; a smell from the Middle Ages; an autumnal smell, redolent with the harvest and the home, with burning wood and falling leaves, with frost on the ground and smoke in the air. It is a smell that brings tears to your eyes and saliva to your mouth; a smell that haunts your memory and lingers in your soul. It is a smell for all of time.

And ah, the sounds! The sputterings and splatterings and cracklings and poppings and spittings and hissings and bubblings. They are the sounds of adventure, of the pioneers, of our youth; sounds alive with energy and exuberance, dogma-free and innocent, fearless, shimmering with hope. They are prairie sounds, sounds of the heartlands, of the open fields and plains, of rolling hills and jagged mountains.

And while all this is going on, your eyes feast on the sight of bacon slowly curling and shriveling and browning in a widening pool of hot bacon fat. Most art is static. Frying bacon is dynamic. It is more like a symphony than a poem, more like a sunset than a painting. And like a sunset, each time it is different, for no two pieces of bacon ever fry the same. Each one is a unique event, a once-in-a-lifetime performance, a visual miracle. The transformation itself is tremendous. What starts out flat and limp and bland gradually becomes craggy with texture, lean-muscled with strength, and toasted with colors, colors that warm your heart and melt all resistance-browns, ochers, beiges, and tans; burnt siennas and raw umbers; maples, mahoganies, teaks, red oaks, and black walnuts; strong, sturdy, lumberjack colors; colors you can wrap around yourself when the wind comes out of the north and the cold rain turns to ice and snow.

When the bacon was done, my father took the pieces out of the pan and placed them on the sport section of yesterday's Chicago Tribune. (There may have been paper towels back then but I don't remember them. We used the Trib for everything from cleaning windows to stuffing in wet shoes to dry them.) He folded the newspaper over the bacon and placed it in the warming oven on top of the stove. ("Cold bacon's worse'n warm juice.")

Then out came the biscuits, all puffed up and top-hat proud, browned and crusted; and the autumnal aroma of the bacon embraced the summer-warm, mother-home aroma of hot biscuits, and suddenly the kitchen was so flush-filled with emotion, no one dared to speak.

My father cracked open a biscuit, dipped the steaming inside of the bottom half into the hot bacon fat still in the frying pan, and spread the inside of the other half with cold apricot jam.

Then he took out and unwrapped the bacon. Most of the grease had been absorbed by the newspaper, but the pieces still had a sheen to them and that peculiar crunch that only perfectly fried bacon ever achieves. It's a texture that once you feel you never forget-slightly gristly but tender, a bit chewy and firm. It's the texture of pears in November and pine twigs in March, of a hard handshake and an early frost and your Uncle's hug.

My father selected a piece of bacon, broke it in half, placed the two pieces on the dipped biscuit half, covered it with the jammed half, and handed the whole warm wonderful package to me.

Do you know what a bacon biscuit feels like to a small boy on a Saturday morning? Do you know what home feels like to a sailor, the breast to a baby, the sun to a leaf?

I held that biscuit in both my hands, letting the warmth soothe my whole body. I turned it around and looked at its textures and colors, its shape and symmetry. I gave it a little squeeze and heard the bacon inside crack ever so faintly. I put my face next to it and inhaled deeply through my nose, savoring the incredibly complex aroma of hot bread and fried bacon and cayenne pepper and apricot jam. I closed my eyes and imagined what was about to happen inside my mouth when my tongue and cheeks and gums were suddenly assaulted, all at once, with a peppery-salty, hot-cold, sweet-bitter, soft-crunchy explosion of tastes and textures.

Then I took a bite.

Ah.

Don't talk to me of Rembrandt or Mozart or Yeats. Don't tell me about Kyoto and Florence, or the David and King Lear, or the Goldberg Variations and the Rose Window at Chartres.

I'll take a bacon biscuit on a Saturday morning any time, thank you.