Mimicry & Nigella Neurons

28 November, 2010 – Why does every post set out with a question? I’ve done it again.

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At the checkout the lady didn’t raise an eyebrow. 225 flexible straws, a bottle of basics vodka, prunes, oatcakes. JM Turner lived off rum and milk in his reclusive final years. There are worse diets. I had asked for a smaller box of straws. “They won’t go off,” the shop assistant reassured me.

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I want to find my voice – that is what this is about. I want to know if I actually have an original voice. I feel a pressure to be original; this has always been with me, perversely valuing originality and eccentric individuality above much else. I have not wanted to excel at anything so much as be different at something. This hasn’t made me easy to employ or to be-boyfriend. I thought that I had found a voice with the Maximalist – we never did too little talking, anyway – but we never really got through to each other, clearly.

I worry that I can’t hear my own voice; that I get sucked in by, suckered by, the tastes of others, which are absorbed to the point that my own tastes are lost. I speak the lines of others. In the last year I found myself saying, it is supposed to take half the time of the relationship to get over the breakup. My friend pointed out that I was parroting Sex and the City. Just one example of feeling a veritable, copper-bottomed charlatan.

And so I want to find my taste, my voice, a writing voice. Work involves writing of a sort, but it is mechanical writing, minting lifeless corporate argot. Cutting and pasting then tinkering to hide my tracks. I am happy, so far, with everything I have written on the Unpalatable Truth. It is all me. Which is not to deny that there is plenty of plagiarism, some conscious, much more of which is unconscious (I have only vague hunches of where I might have pilfered a phrase from). I just searched the internet for one phrase which I thought might possibly be an original coinage. Over 3500 hits came up. That’s fine: absorptions and borrowings are inerasable, and now I think about it, every episode of Sex and the City started with a columnist posing a question. Plagiarism and the interrogative method are here to stay, nay? Answer me.

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Food is a tonic for the fear of being unoriginal, to my skewed preoccupation with making it novel. Originality can only be one possible part of the experience of enjoying food. We take as much pleasure from a familiar dish – a ‘classic’, or better an ‘old favourite’ – as from some novel concoction. Cookery can’t be precious about borrowings. “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” says Balzac. Behind every great dish there surely lies some joyous theft, or at least appropriation. (And, delightfully, I read that Balzac may actually have ‘adapted’ this quip from another writer.)

You can never eat the same dish twice, never mind cook it. A curry the next morning from the fridge is different to the night before, and not just because the flavours continue to develop. Each time we encounter a dish we are imperceptible altered, even if the food is ostensibly an identical copy. Not an original thought: Heraclitious got there first when he observed the impossibility of stepping in the same river twice.

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Remarkable ‘mirror neurons’ have been identified which fire in an identical way whether we actually do something or if we merely see others performing the action. There is no difference between doing and observing in their response. These neurons are implicated in our human capacity for imitation and mimicry. They are the neurons that fire when we watch Saturday Kitchen, or Nigella and Nigel on TV; it is suggested that they have played significant role in cultural transmission and the evolution of our species.

Preparing food is a slap in the face to the notion that originality can or should be an end in itself: as human animals, mimicry is a fundamental skill, a meta-skill. Some skills can be learned through mechanical and explicit methods; cooking is not one of them. We don’t learn to cook by rote, we learn by observation and imitation and by letting it seep in. The neuroscience even suggests that there an empathetic element to learning such skills. Through imitation we transform what we perceive into something we experience. It becomes alive.

So I have learned to try and stop fretting about originality (or at least to over-intellectualise it to the point that I worry about other things, namely thinking too much about it). Of course sameness dulls the palate, but there is no merit, indeed it is meaningless, to strive for impeccable originally – fine gradations, subtle differences are just as arousing to the taste buds, just as good at getting the taste receptor neurons firing. All our sense modalities respond to relative differences, not to absolute values. The relationship’s the thing.

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I wanted to cook something thoroughly derivative, and also something which ‘flows’, in the spirit of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the ones who, from my understanding of philosophy, didn’t kick off by posing a question, the ones who didn’t have the Sex & the City box set.

I thought of soup, perhaps I could emulate Heinz tomato soup, but it’s November and there is no glut of ripe tomatoes. So, I fixed myself a Moscow Mule.

Moscow Mule, a sophisticated alcopop, at least to my strange adolescent self. It was one of the first drinks to ever make me tipsy. It came in a faux copper bottle which Smirnoff derived from the tankards in which it was first drunk. It is not seasonal either. I associate it with barbeques years ago when I would make it with not a shot but a fusillade of vodka to strafe my colleagues who said they liked to drink vodka but who I always thought were cheating.

I first read a recipe for Moscow Mule in Nigella Lawson’s ‘Forever Summer’, so in a way perhaps it is seasonal. Certainly, Jamaican ginger beer is a drink for all seasons in these parts of London. And vodka I associate with the very cold, the Arctic Circle and the time I was ‘rolled over’ the line of latitude at 11am and handed a shot by an employee of Russian’s state gas monopoly.

I bought the straws to bypass the ulcer under my lip. I finely grate a lot of root ginger. Nigel Slater recipes often specify ‘a thumb of ginger’. Who’s thumb? Little Jack Horner’s? The thumb of a fairytale giant? I vote giant, and I used four times as many limes as Nigella suggests.

I made a tumbler full in a proper Gibraltar hi-ball, a glass I love for its sturdiness. It is a drink in which vodka meets its match; the vodka kicks hard but the ginger kicks harder, blistering yet refreshing, a fibrous, peppery pungency. A drink of infinite zest. Ginger is said to complement other flavours without overwhelming them but the maximalist in me wants excess of it.

While putting the ingredients together I sipped, gulping before I knew it. Drink gone I remembered the 225 straws. The ice, or the vodka, or the ginger, must have numbed the ulcer. Nothing else was deadened, but all a tingle, firing, and alive.