Both my wife and I love to cook, which is handy on those days when one or the other of us is not in the mood (to cook). This poem by Jane Hirshfeld is for all those other amateur chefs out there ...
Cook
by Jane Hirshfield
Each night you come home with five continents on your hands:
garlic, olive oil, saffron, anise, coriander, tea,
your fingernails blackened with a marjoram and thyme.
Sometimes the zucchini's flesh seems like a fish-steak,
cut into neat filets, or the salt-rubbed eggplant
yields not bitter water, but dark mystery.
You cut everything into bits.
No core, no kernel, no seed is scared: you cut
onions for hours and do not cry,
cut them to thin transparencies, the red ones
spreading before you like fallen flowers;
you cut scallions from white to green, you cut
radishes, apples, broccoli, you cut oranges, watercress,
romaine, you cut your fingers, you cut and cut
beyond the heart of things, where
nothing remains, and you cut that too, scoring coup
on the butcherblock, leaving your mark,
when you go
your feet are as pounded as brioche dough.
Speaking of chefs and cooks ... I'm hooked on a series of superb suspense novels by Sam Eastland* set in Russia during the time of the revolution and World War II. One of the characters is a young officer of the Cheka (secret police) who ended up in that role because the Bolsheviks shut down the school where he was learning to be a chef. Every time someone calls him a "cook," he gets very upset and insists on being called a "chef."
Words matter.
Have a good day and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts coming.
Bilbo
* The Eye of the Red Tsar, Shadow Pass, Archive 17, The Beast in the Red Forest, Red Icon, The Red Moth, and Berlin Red.
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