You Can't Be a Perfectionist Cooking with Fire
And that actually might help in the apocalypse
I am not a perfectionist. This can sometimes come into conflict when I’m doing house projects with my very perfectionist husband. Every project we get into together usually involves an argument about how I’m either not paying close enough attention to the details or how he’s taking forever because he’s insistent on getting it absolutely perfect. Our solution has been that he’s on his own for most projects unless he needs a hand with something.
His perfectionism is essential in his job as a nurse anesthetist, though. You sure as hell want your anesthesia provider to be a perfectionist. It’s not as essential when, say, painting the office. It’s nice–I do very much appreciate that he prefers taking on the borders and I can just fill in the middle with paint–but not essential. And admittedly, my lack of perfectionism has gotten me into trouble when I get something meant to be assembled and instead of looking at the directions first, I merely just dive in and then inevitably have to backtrack because something didn’t go right.
This whole apocalypse prepping adventure has me thinking a lot about perfectionism. As a non-perfectionist, this journey has never been about mastering all of the skills I’m learning along the way. I knew at the outset that the reality of me becoming excellent at any one of these skills was a fool’s errand. That doesn’t mean that I’m not committing myself to the learning process. Having a baseline understanding of what these skills entails is what this journey is about. It’s also helpful to know enough of a skill in order to muddle through while also knowing when I really need to have someone around who knows what they’re doing in that area (for, ya know, safety). It’s also important where perfectionism comes in handy and where winging it will be just fine. I encountered this while attempting to build skills in open fire cooking.
Cooking is one of the skills that I can actually say I already possess. I love cooking. It was a love that began when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer where some of my most joyful evenings spent in my small house in rural Malawi revolved around trying out ambitious dishes from whatever locally available foods were around. And it has flourished even more in the last decade. I thrive off of the lack of precision required for a lot of home cooking. Surely you don’t want too much or little salt, but it doesn’t matter if you accidentally put a bit more liquid in or you substitute an ingredient here and there. Home cooking is a craft that suits my personality. Baking, on the other hand, was never something I took to precisely because of the need for precision. It seemed like chemistry more than cooking and that always freaked me out.
When it came to cooking over fire, though, the act of adding a flame to the equation made me feel like there needed to be more precision involved. I was lucky enough to attend the innovative company, Tournant’s farm-to-fire cookery workshop last summer at Star Mooring Farm where I thought, at last, that I’d learn the secret to open-fire cooking.
During this immersive choose-your-own-adventure kind of workshop where participants could watch or get in the action as much as we wanted, we roasted vegetables over coals and ate them over grilled flatbread slathered in hot coal-melted cheese. We sloshed broth into dutch ovens filled with a vibrant three sisters stew, and we oohed and aahed as co-founder of Tournant, Jaret Foster, cooked a Croatian style Peka in a special domed contraption topped with coals.
“Do you have recipes for all of this and will we be getting those?” I asked during a moment for questions after Jaret covered the Peka with coals. I was eager to know how to do what he was doing.
“Well, we’re kind of working with intuition with these dishes, judging all of it by look and feel and adding seasoning when it feels right,” he said. But then concluded with “but yes, we will be sending out some recipes.”
At the moment I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t imparting some grand wisdom about the process. But upon reflection, I realized that he was. He was saying that it’s not about perfection.
In a conversation later with founders, Jaret Foster and Mona Johnson, about this intuitive approach to cooking, they confirmed this was intentional. Both had come from the precision and rigor of fine dining and felt boxed in by it. “It’s letting go of perfection,” says Mona. “It’s a chance to learn by sensation and intuition. All those things are really a part of most cooking.”
Fire being one of the most natural elements is such a perfect medium through which to embrace imperfection and in doing so, you’re honing your instincts to what’s happening in the pan and with the fire and taking stock of the cues from your senses. “What does it look like? What does the sound of the sizzle? What is the smell? Smell being one of the most important things, you just know when something’s done,” says Mona. “Trusting those instincts and all the senses is a part of cooking.”
And fire offers the best way to do that.
“You have to be super present,” she says. “Every fire puts out different heat. Even one fire has different hot spots in different places, and coals give off different heat. You have to be super in-the-moment and always adjusting. It’s certainly not like an oven and a microwave. You can’t just set it and walk away. But things are going to happen. Something might get overcooked or something might get burned in a spot. And we’re always like ‘eh, maybe it’ll even taste better, just cut that portion off.’”
The conversation reminded me why I was on this journey. It made sense that cooking was an area that I felt determined to become more adept in. It’s also what I’m most scared to lose lest the world fall apart. But moving away from perfection was, in fact, the beauty of cooking and eating came as a bit of a relief. It took some of the pressure off. That’s how I cooked already. I frequently miss steps or ingredients from recipes I use because I mostly just skim the instructions and realize two steps later that I missed something. For the most part it works out fine. There have been issues, but I’ve been able to lean on my experience in home cooking to know when things have gone wrong. And in a way, parenthood has forced me to embrace winging it. The point is to get food on the table. It’s always a delightful bonus when it tastes amazing. And, you know what, it often does. But the misses don’t really matter and I always learn something from them–a little less salt than the recipe called for next time or need to cook the pasta for less time or could use butter instead of oil.
And what Jaret and Mona are doing in the Tournant classes is subtly imparting the wisdom of imperfection. It would be fine if the eggplant had a little bit of charred skin still stuck to it. It would be fine if the beans didn’t quite cook right. It would be fine if you had to substitute something in season even though the recipe didn’t call for it. It would be fine. If anything, it merely shows evidence that you were cooking over fire.
Rest assured that the food Tournant produces at their events always hits the mark. But the way they casually demonstrate getting away from following a recipe to a T and letting the ingredients guide you is transformative. What they are hoping to impart is less about the hard-and-fast skills of do this and you will get that, and more take your time, try things out, learn from what works and doesn’t work, and over time you’ll develop stronger and stronger intuition. And intuition is not something built overnight. It’s something you develop through practice.
As an avid home cook, that’s what I had already been doing over the better part of the last decade without really knowing it. I enjoyed cooking so I just sought out more to learn and gradually developed a sense of what tasted good. After the Tournant workshop, I let go a little bit of the sense of urgency I had about learning all there was to know about fire cookery. I knew I already had the foundations of cooking delicious food in an apocalypse. And the workshop inspired me to be even more spontaneous with my cooking every now and then. Find some ingredients and whip something up without a recipe. The real skill of winging it with locally available resources when the world falls apart. Be led by what’s in season and beautiful and mouth watering at the farmer’s market and take it from there.
