Prep Work

We had some new friends over for dinner the other evening, an event that was long overdue. Having settled on a menu I was dragging my feet a bit because I knew it was going to require a lot of prep work and some finicky timing. I know my way around a kitchen and I can follow a recipe but the real joy for me is in the company, and when I choose to cook something that requires my full attention I feel conflicted by my desire to mingle and the dishes insisting I attend to them.

You might well ask why go to such effort, choose a simple dish that can be made ahead of time and enjoy your friends. Perhaps it is some perverse stubbornness on my part, or the lesson my fraternal grandmother imparted that a good meal is a gift. Josie was an amazing cook. I say cook rather than chef as that would be far too imposing. Its not that she cooked pedestrian meals but they had little pretense--just smelled and tasted like the best thing you've ever eaten.

She and her sister were semi orphans--their mother had passed when they were very young and her father felt unable to raise them alone as his work required constant travel. They were summarily packed off to a convent where Josie learned needlework, cooking and other housewife crafts and skills appropriate for a proper young woman. In the intervening years following the first world war, nestled in the Carpathian mountains the convent was apparently a relatively benign home for Josie and her sister until they came of age, and shortly after she met my Grandfather, emigrated to the US, and became what she was for the rest of her life, a housewife.

Don't get me wrong, she kept a home for my Grandfather, not at all the easiest personality . A perfectionist and self made millionaire who came to this country with no skills, no english, just determination, he put himself through night school and worked as a janitor in a machine shop until he invented a piece of machinery that revolutionized how printing presses worked and amassed a fortune from royalties which he lived on for the remainder of his life. He was an inventor and he went on to imagine a number of brilliant designs in the packaging industry but never made another penny from them because he imagined himself equally capable as an attorney at drafting patents. The loopholes he left were enough for the large corporations which had commissioned him to pay a pittance, just enough to keep his shop open, but skirt the lucrative royalties that had made his original fortune.

As brilliant as he was as an engineer and inventor he was difficult as a human being. When I visited my grandparents I typically spent the day in the kitchen with my grandmother watching her cook and as I got older, helping her make the meals. By the time supper came the smells emanating from her kitchen were a siren's call. My grandfather would arrive home, change out of his work clothes and proceed to the basement of their modest suburban house, retrieve a frozen dinner from the freezer chest and pop it in the oven. He admired the technology and somehow ignored my grandmother's lovingly prepared meal. No matter how much everyone else was wowed by her cooking, he would not be swayed.

Josie's quiet rebellion was seldom seen. She had signed on for life and that was that, but she took to calling him "That Man" in her broken english, her way of making clear the trials of living with him. Much of that was lost on me as a youngster, only as I grew older did the melodrama become obvious. But the time I spent in Josie's kitchen meant the world to me. She made no demands, simply radiated love and acceptance, and watching and helping her I learned to cook. I also learned two important life lessons. Food made with love and care is one way we say I love you to those we serve. The other lesson which is much bigger than the kitchen, is that the prep work is everything.

There are a lot of qualities that make for a good cook, loving good food is one of them and of course there are skills and knowledge one acquires along the way that help. But the prep work--the quotidian tasks, making a stock, dicing, marinating, boning, scalding and peeling--the endless picking and cleaning, all these and more that constitute the work of prep are where the meal is made or fails. No one can teach you to develop a palate--to know how something should taste, that takes experience and time. But prep is learned, and at the hands of an experienced cook it is a pleasure to watch.

Which brings me to the point of this post. The kitchen is an excellent metaphor for life. In everything we do, the prep work matters. In our relationships, in our professional life too, the prep is where the foundation is laid from which we'll reap the benefits. It can be tedious, it may even result in an outcome that is under appreciated but we'll know what went into the making and that changes us. That commitment to the making is what we do to give of ourselves. We do the unglamorous out of love, and if we do it well we should never concern ourselves with the results, they'll be fine.

That was the reminder the other evening, it was never about the meal. So I dutifully did the prep--two days of it and the meal was fine, not as good as I hoped or a bad as I feared it might turn out. But the company, the company was a delight.