Culinary Delights
BY CANSU ORANÇ (PSYC/IV)
oranc@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
What is your relationship with cooking?
a. How do you spell it?
b. I've just cooked baked salmon in kale wraps with dill and harissa, would you want some?
c. I don't cook and I've no idea what that thing above is but it sounds good. I would like some!
Personally, I'm from the last group. I don't cook; I don't have any clue how to cook certain things, but I just love to taste different food. I can eat anything as long as it's … Food. I enjoy spending time in fish markets, farmers' markets, and spice stores. I love the smell at those places. Another admiration of mine is a little weirder: watching cooking shows and documentaries about cooking. I don't mean the TV shows in a competition format but rather the ones that really teach how to cook something. To be honest, I prefer the foreign ones since the Turkish ones mostly focus on the recipe and leave out the aesthetics and joy of food.
A famous chef who has a strong passion for food and cooking is Rick Stein. He's a 64 year-old British family man with white hair, although these are not really the reasons I watch his hypnotizing programs on BBC, other foreign channels, or DVDs. I love the way he reflects his affection to the audience with a big smile on his face. As far as I understand from what I read, there's not a dramatic story behind how he began to cook and how he became a world famous chef. In fact, he studied English at New College Oxford. He just has a great passion for seafood, and I'm assuming that this led him to cook all kinds of seafood dishes. He now has four restaurants and a seafood cookery school!
Other than seafood, he cooks everything and interprets many dishes from all around world. As a striking example, it was very interesting for me to see him cooking and explaining how to prepare "lahmacun" (he described it as "spicy minced lamb flatbread") with a strong British accent. He travels all around the world, previously with his little dog Chalky who's now deceased. He goes to fancy restaurants sometimes but mostly to local restaurants, farmers' markets, food carnivals, and local shops. A lesson I learned from Rick Stein is that good food doesn't need to be fancy. He talks with the owners, people who eat there, and people on the street and buys stuff for his recipes before going back to his home to cook. You can then see the whole process. After he's done with cooking and serving, I love the way how the camera shows the plate polished off. You can than understand that cooking is a real thing and more than being "fancy."
I've been watching his program French Odyssey lately. It's a nine episode mini-series where Stein begins to travel from the rural area of Bordeaux to Marseille along the rivers of southern France by a barge, travelling, eating, and cooking. Can you imagine a better journey? He eats at local restaurants, visits vineyards, drinks wine, meets new people, learns new recipes, shops from local markets, and cooks along the way. Other than watching all these, I was fascinated by the landscapes; it was like I was watching a documentary on National Geographic. As I said, he studied English at college. This might be the reason why he's very much into literature or vice versa. Throughout the journey, he read passages from Proust and poems from many others about cooking, eating, and enjoying all these. As you can see, watching Rick Stein at work is a total food experience.
I'll now watch Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey and he'll first take me to Cambodia. Can't wait!