Culinary Science

I have never professed to be much of a cook, although I love to perceive myself as a connoisseur of sorts. The portentous descriptions of taste, with a vocabulary ballooning beyond the basic parameters of sweet, bitter, sour, and spicy (did I miss out anything?).

There is a dichotomous mix of admiration and scorn for those obscure food critics who abstrusely gush about the "full-bodiedness" and" intangible savoury flavours" of the food at hand. (granted the ability to Taste treads the strange line between the tangible and the intangible- it’s like love, really, but that’s best left for another time.)

Seasoning is never an exact science, each slab of fillet intrinsically different, each grain in a pinch of salt reacting differently with one another. Does one grain more or less really make a difference? This is different from the hard sciences like Physics, where one atom and another atom, under the same conditions, always produces the same results. You may argue that it is the same for food, but 2 slabs of fillets cooked under the same conditions are not the same to different people. Heck, the same fillet shared between 2 persons do not even illicit the same reactions. But on the other hand, a molecule of water is a molecule of water(is a molecule of water).

I wonder how people in the past used to cook, harking back to an era without calibrated weighing machines, thermostat ovens and all the Philip Starck designed kitchen appliances. Imagine – tender mammoth meat cooked by a cave man, compared to steak from Morton’s, that esteemed culinary institution. There is a curious revival of returning to basic methods of food preparation. Using coal ovens to bake pizza, prehistoric grills to cook meat- this manufactured primitivism has become a highly modern phenomenon in itself.

I would love to meet one of those people who proclaim that the food “talks” to them, one of those elusive food seers who draw prophecies from a plate of omelette. (Tea leaves are so last century.)

Perhaps that ability exists in some degree in all of us. An oily plate of Hokkien Mee from the hawker auntie who watched you grow up, pig innards stew painstakingly boiled by your grandmother because you have an exam tomorrow, and who can forget the ubiquitous black chicken with dang gui, that rancid concoction for bleeding girls – these speak to us in their own inimitable language, very often divine proclamations of love.

And on some days, I can taste God in a bowl of chicken soup.

Mid terms have been over for a while now, so it has been jolly and relatively peaceful the last couple of days. I love the routine of getting up, doing quiet time while eating breakfast (tea is my new addiction), reading the papers and catching up on my work in general.

Have been reading "My Utmost for My Highest" by Oswald Chambers for QT, and I have to say that it gets better everyday. Every single entry somehow seems to address whatever particular issue I'm going through. (So who says one needs to witness a burning bush or some other equally bizarre phenomenon to know that God works in our lives?)

In other reading material-related news, I have taken up "The End of Economic Man" by Brockway, which reminds me of Barnard and all his dry Brit ramblings. I miss his sense of humor. I have come to realize that I judge people heavily by their sense of humor, more specifically whether we are on the same wavelength. But I suppose friendships need to be based on more than our proclivity to laugh at the same jokes.
Anyway, this is one of my favourite shots of the campus ministry at Mari's place during the CNY cross-island house visiting extravaganza. We all look gloriously happy :)