An Emotion, like a Recipe, is Always Waiting to Become the Thing that it Already is
INDEX
The realm of eros is always a bureaucracy. Bruce Pearson, a friend of mine who is a painter and a self-made gourmand, likes to buy books written by cooks whose restaurants he cannot afford to dine in. Over the past twenty-five years, he has bought dozens of books and perfectly repeated a number of dishes in them: Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Sweetbreads en Cocotte with Ginger and Licorice, Thomas Keller’s Bouillabaisse and Alice Waters’ Grilled Duck Livers & Mustard Herb Butter Pasta. The last time I dined Chez Bruce, he was wearing his painting uniform. This reminded me of Picasso and Braque who, after a long night of absinthe, would go to their studios at 8am wearing blue jumpsuits that workers in French gas stations wear. Bruce was wearing rubber sandals. When I went over last month, he served up Alain Ducasse’s Provençal Leg of Lamb with Fennel and Scallion, and a beaten Ginger Salad by Jean Georges, and I understood that it is not that recipes function as generalities, but that recipes are typologies for those feelings we have forgotten were inside us. An emotion, like a recipe, is always waiting to become the thing that it already is. The most general feelings are the most beautiful feelings because they are the only ones we know how to have. People who think they have their own emotions are incapable of empathy or cooking.
A recipe by a celebrity cook or the feelings that somebody else is having induce the most beautiful sensory hallucinations because they seem to be occurring inside of us, but they are actually only the patterns of things that somebody else has duplicated for us. The world is inconsolable. All of our emotions are obvious and the same as everybody else’s. The world is consolable. Eating Bruce’s version of Alice Waters’ Mango Salsa was like experiencing one’s own taste buds [1:1] as a form of internal emotional branding [haiku] where all extraneous details [non-haiku] exist in a permanent state of depletion. Roland Barthes said that. Recipes should be repeated just like poems. Although there were nine other people dining at Bruce’s house last night, I was actually eating alone. The human tongue has millions of taste buds deposited upon it, each designed to extract a particular flavor from a food. The most beautiful book would be a 1:1 scale model of itself and divided into
Front / Back
Like a Diary of Someone I Know
~Tan Lin
from ”INDEX” in Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking ~ Middletown, CT : Wesleyan UP, 2009 / pg 106
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