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Let’s talk about cooking.

Are you expecting recipes? Well, I might disappoint you.

In the beginning I would like to quote from a book “Cooking with fantasy” that my friend Viktor published together with his brother Mirek. Our friendship was based on our mutual interest in cooking. Unfortunately Viktor died about three years ago and therefore I don’t have his permission to quote from his book. Since nothing of what I write here is intended for monetary gain but is only intended for an explanation of my attitude toward cooking and therefore of my attitude toward life as I see it, I feel free to use his quote on this page. So here it is.

There exist thousands of soups. Our grandmother knew how to cook a few
hundreds of them, but in reality she cooked maybe twenty or thirty soups
and she has taught us to make two soups only. As she has taught us to make
two soups, we know how to make thousands of them. It is that simple.

                                                                                           Viktor and Mirek Adam

That’s how my wife Anicka makes soups. I only, whenever she asks me to do it, debone a chicken, put the chicken bones into an appropriately large pot, pour some water over the bones, add some spices, an onion and some salt, then I wait till the water goes into a gentle boil so I can cover the pot and finally I can go away to mind my own business. It is time to leave the rest up to Anicka. But when Anicka tells me to come and get it maybe an hour later, I can be sure that a remarkable culinary experience awaits me and that I will savor it to the last drop of that soup.

Viktor talks about soups, but his quote applies to cooking in general. When you have learned to make tomato gravy and the gravy was good, didn’t you want to learn to make equally good cream gravy and didn’t you learn while doing it that both gravies are essentially the same with only minor differences in individual procedures or ingredients? And didn’t you discover shortly afterwards that the most important ingredient is your own heart and that without it you will never cook any dish well! And didn’t you learn at the same time that you don’t even need to ask for recipes? No doubt you have found that it is quite sufficient to take a good look at a dish, taste it, try it a few times and that there is no way in hell you couldn’t duplicate it exactly as the original one was.

My mother did not teach me how to cook. Well, she had thought it’s up to my father to teach me things boys should know when they grow up on a farm (and he has taught me well - I could handle a scythe and I can mow the grass using it almost as well as he could do it). My mother only told me once in a while, or when I happen to be in a kitchen, “why don’t you watch the roux for me”, or “why don’t you shred some cabbage for me”, but she did not realize that I had watched her when she shredded the cabbage a week before, and that I watched what she had done with that cabbage afterwards - and then, many years later, when my parents visited us here in the United States, and when I surprised them by cooking my mother’s favorite dish for them (roast duckling, sweet and sour cabbage, liver stuffing, special tomato sauce, dumplings), my mother could only say “ . . . who gave you my recipe for this duck, nobody knows how to cook the duck like this.” I knew how to do it then and I keep doing it still to this day, exactly the way my mother has done it, for it’s my favorite dish too.

I repeat. My mother has never taught me how to cook, yet I can do every dish she used to make and every such dish I can make without a recipe. It was entirely sufficient to watch what she was doing that long time ago and then try it a few times . . . .

         My children asked me to write down my mother’s duckling recipe. I tried to write it down but I had to write it in five independent
         sections. (1) A recipe to make a liver stuffing (onions, eggs, chicken liver, vegetable oil, toasted bread, pepper, salt), (2) a recipe how to
         stuff the duckling and how to roast it, (3) a recipe to make a sweet-and-sour red cabbage (red cabbage, pepper, allspice, onions,
         vegetable oil, vinegar, sugar, salt), (4) a recipe to make an unusual but simple tomato sauce (tomatoes, salt, duckling fat, flour), and
         (5) recipe to make dumplings which almost nobody makes anymore, because - well, I don’t really want to write about that.

         I myself was surprised at how complex it all looks.

I have to admit that what I said about recipes is not entirely the truth. I am using one and only one recipe and it is the one that directs me how to pickle a pumpkin. Who pickles pumpkins, you may be asking and why would anybody do it, might be another of your questions. Well, it’s a Czech thing just like one of many other Czech things that I deal with in this paper, and on top of that, it’s specifically my own Czech thing. My mother pickled pumpkins and doing it she somehow instilled a pickled pumpkin dependency in me. In other words I’m hooked on pickled pumpkins. My mother’s pickled pumpkins were so delicious I had to have them here in America but nobody was selling them, nobody else would make them for me and the only way to have them was to make my own. It seems to me that a ‘make-it-yourself’ deal is the one I have to constantly cope with here in America. A curious thing is that only about one out of maybe fifty people like pickled pumpkin as opposed to ‘everybody-likes-pumpkin-pies.’ In other words, I had to develop my own recipe for it. It was not easy because there were some unexpected variables I had to take care of, but I got it now, I pull it out once a year and I pickle my pumpkin to last me also for about one year. By the way, are you not tired already of pickled pumpkin talk?

And what about some exotic dishes - Italian, German, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Hawaiian, or others nearly into infinity. I assure you that most of the time it is enough to take a good look, try it a few times, do some experiments and your success would be guaranteed. But as is the case with everything else, there is one exception. That exception is an event in my life but, as much as I would like to share it with you, I have to restrain myself for I am running out of the space I allowed myself here. If you are curious about it you can contact me on ‘fslintak@hotmail.com’ and refresh my memory mentioning a word ‘shwei-chu-zhou’ to me.

But I still did not answer one question. The question is ‘why?’ - You know, a lot of people already asked me “why did you learn to cook?” Indeed, why did I?

There is another Czech thing you should know about to understand what I am going to say concerning that ‘why,’ for it would best clarify my explanation of it, and your understanding of it would also mean that both you and I are ‘on the same wavelength.’ The old bohemian story goes like this. Dalibor was imprisoned in medieval times in a castle in solitary confinement, he was lonely but he somehow obtained a fiddle. He learned to play the fiddle and in time became quite proficient doing it, so people gathered below a window of his prison cell, they listened to Dalibor’s beautiful concertos and they kept saying: “Hardship taught Dalibor to play the fiddle”. And this saying became one of (many) Czech proverbs. (Other people say that while Dalibor was in prison the chance was they tortured him and during that torture Dalibor was ‘singing’ rather than ‘playing the fiddle.’) You just remember: Hardship taught Dalibor to play the fiddle.

Now, back to my ‘why’ question. So when one of my friends ask me, Frank, why did you teach yourself to cook so many fantastic dishes, my reply would be - well, do you know about that guy Dalibor and that hardship he has met? And, if that friend was of Czech origin, I would not need to say anything more. He would know because he most likely knew what was going on in my previous household. And now you know it too. (Please visit my page ‘Jak zit’ for details.)

Of course, these days I don’t need to go to our kitchen at all, but Anicka deserves to get some help from me occasionally, she helps me in my garden too.

And of course, the correct answer is: I like to cook and I like to cook well because I love to eat very well.

I would like to conclude what I have started, but at the beginning I said something about my attitude toward cooking and my attitude toward life . . . Look, I talked about cooking (a lot), but to talk about life - (well, what do you think I was talking about so far, if not about the essence of life itself) - many more qualified people have already discussed life and related matters and who am I to compare myself to them? But I believe that if anybody takes the “Ten Commandments,” and if he or she thinks a little about the “Seven Deadly Sins,” he or she would seldom go wrong. What more can I say?

Frantisek Slintak with Anicka’s help
(January 2010)