Living and telling the tale

6 June, 2011 – I palisaded my mind, and did so for a little too long. Bolted the door and fortified from within. Immune to outward sensations, I stopped tasting, living, expressing myself. Stopped enjoying life’s absurdities. Rattled in ways that I didn’t begin to understand; both shaken and stirred. Taking down the spikes, cooking again, I emerge blinking in the sunlight. With scars, yes, but nothing more than briar prickles around the ankles. Roused, I ask a different and better hotchpotch of questions: not ‘Do I have a sense of taste’ and ‘Can I cook?’, but ‘Which tastes do I like?’, ‘What do I want to cook?’, ‘Which tastes do I want have?’.

As tastes aren’t plucked out of the air, I will simplify and work with what I know. Two tastes: which has the greater sway, which taste from within to allow oneself to be drawn to?

I don’t much like or believe in the so-called ‘modularity of mind’ hypothesis, the idea that there are neat departments of neurons, each fashioned by evolution and fine-tuned to perform some discrete function. (The brain is a lot messier and more interesting than that.) Because I don’t believe it, because I know it to be absurd, I will take it seriously and postulate two hypothetical modules of my own. Pompous – but as per the theory – let’s pretend that these two processing modules are innate, self-contained and universal, for who, at some point, doesn’t worry that they not enjoying the moment as much as they should, or that they are taking things a little too earnestly?

*****

The first module is stand-offish. It plays it cool and ambivalent. The Ironically Detached module excels in being aloof, wry and unengaged. By disposition its preoccupation is to be separate, be an individual, stand outside of life; to be unique. Witty on occasion (or so it thinks), it thrives at sniping but malfunctions at the first hint that it should buy in. It tuts. Says, “This will never work”. Is later chided: “You are not excited enough about me.”

The Ironically Detached module says, “Don’t even try writing about food. You will only end up Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner”. (Underscoring that it is vainglorious and ambitious to boot.)

By taste, the Ironically Detached module has its likes, and even stronger dislikes. It is not all bad. The ironic temperament produces a dogged appreciation of ambiguity, hidden meaning and a fascination with the small details which it processes as ‘revealing’. However, its default position is sarcasm; and married with detachment, its sin is its lifelessness. At its worse, assuming the mordant pose of the principled outsider, it is an extremely good hater of things. Obsessed with phoneyism and keeping it real, it knows nothing of genuine love for it is too distracted, always on the lookout for cant, hypocrisy and insincerity.

Every taste is caveated. Never happy with saying simply, “This is true; This is great”, this sardonic, glum, grey gargoyle bites its tongue. Ever-vigilant and proud it never gives an inch. Always qualifying its tastes and judgements and living but vicariously. Never far from its calcified lips is the phrase that premises its acerbic banalities, “In my humble opinion”.

It is the module that knows that you can’t tickle yourself. Dismissively, bitingly, as an aside, it says, “Why even try?”

****

A mythical beast. A logical impossibility: a disparaging, scornful cat that has got the cream. Even famously conceited felines cannot help but beam when served up silver top.

“I like”. “I love”. Not to be, and never to be, muttered detachedly. A lesson learned from food, for the enjoyment of food cannot be ironic and cannot be detached, for food is the great unmediated pleasure.

Obnoxious chefs and poisonous restaurant reviewers, risible, loathsome carpers who make a show of being bileful. Evidently, among professional food people there is plenty of outward display of scorn, but either this comes from a warped love of food or they simply don’t love. Either way, they are not worth worrying about. The genuinely contemptful cook, or food writer who hates, to me is as impossible as a nonplussed cat licking from its lips the last whisper of cream.

****

Matthew Fort says cook scrambled egg ever-so-patiently for an hour over a candle-like flame. So I do.

Serving up a very different form of sustenance, the module for Taking Things Literally And Plunging In also takes things very earnestly, but could not be less allied with the Ironically Detached module.

An ingénue, it wants only to rush in. If mental modules are to be defined by their function, then the purpose of the module for Taking Things Literally is to dive headlong, despite crashing repeatedly against the bottom. Oblivious to nuance and splitting the difference, too busy with that which feels reckless but right. The outside observer might think that the module acts this way to spite the Ironically Detached module. Except that the Taking Things Literally module does nothing out of spite. Unfettered, he wears his heart on his sleeve. From joyous error he knows, knows that you can tickle yourself by laughing at the things which you have got ludicrously wrong.

****

“Goodbye”, I announced. We were around the family dinner table.

“What?” said my parents in unison.

We were having a fish supper. I was young, but old enough to know better.

Parents perplexed. I had to explain.

“I have swallowed a bone. You said that if you swallow a bone, you will die. Goodbye.”

Taking things literally. I lived to tell the tale.

 ******

Mimesis. The human capacity for imitation, allowing our brains to escape the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another. I have measured out my life in memorable imitations, the times when I got things quite blazingly wrong, when the Taking Things Literally module ran the show.

The pattern was set, as a toddler, with a lesson in dental hygiene. Coaxed to improve my technique and brush my teeth “up and down”, I complaisantly started bobbing. Up and down.

Or, jogging near home. Or rather my father jogging, me galumphing – with one arm held rigidly out in front, palm upturned.

“What are you doing?” my father asked.

Doing, as I had seen someone do in the London Marathon, running in fancy dress, imitating a waiter.

While innate, the Taking Things Literally module can also be trained and developed through one’s teenage years. Throughout the ’90s, we went repeatedly to see The Official Tribute to the Blues Brothers. Fast forward a few years to the other side of adolescence. At 6^th form, a philosophy lecturer moonlighted in a Rhythm and Blues band. All students and parents welcome. Cue more incredulity from the parents, this time on the dance floor.

“What are you doing?”

Dancing the way I know how, all angular shapes and exaggerated throws, just like Jake and Elwood Blues, two fictional lampoons. When on full throttle, the Taking Things Literally module can take a deeply ironic act seriously, internalise dance moves and imitate quite unwittingly.

Which might be begin to explain why I went to my interview at Oxford University dressed as one of the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, a New York trio who released infectious, very self-consciously cool yet comical records. Presenting myself in a white shirt with an oversized collar and a sharp jet black suit, the interview was not a success. Perhaps the dons read the attire well (or perhaps they were familiar with Huey’s lyrics: “I don’t take myself too seriously…”)

****

Two ways of being in the world: ironic detachment and taking things literally and plunging in. The fear of thinking too much and feeling too little, while fearing that sometimes I don’t think at all, which in turn emboldens the Ironically Detached module to say, “Told you so”.

Incomprehensible to each other, the two modules truly do not mix (but can be combined, to give the appearance of one person at least). Food, naturally, leads the way out of this knotty contradiction, and into a realm where such philosophising trifles are cast in a soft light to be seen clearly for the first time as not worthy of worrying about.

Everything I have served up to date has been a canapé, let the real feast begin.

Food makes clear the absurdity of abstracting mental modules from the body. The physiological reaction – the salivating, the felt experience of flavour – is the thing. The key between the mind and body. We can play it cool all we like; be earnest and detached; fret about tastes, and whether we have a refined palate, but we might be well to remember that the body can’t be fooled. All it takes is the insuppressible smoulder in the nose from a mustard potent aioli to starkly bring roaring back the full power of taste, unmediated and unmistakable.

*******

Time for a dish that cannot but make you unashamedly blush.

Fish soup. Pick the bones out of that. Perhaps a bouillabaisse, for you can but try to comically take it literally. A soup for embracing the droll absurdity of having been gripped with phoneyism and keeping it real. A canonical dish. But with each cook insisting that theirs is the genuine article, with so many contradictory variations on a theme, just by imitating bouillabaisse you banish the question ‘Why even try?’

A tablespoon of lemon juice versus the juice of half a lemon? With four cookbooks propped open, I read between each; interpreting, choosing rather than second guessing the tastes others.

I do not separate the eggs delicately, just grasp the yolks with my fingers, letting the whites glupe away down the drain. (Not a dish for walking on eggshells.) Yolks, lemon juice, Dijon and garlic. One hand whisks while the other pours olive oil drop by drop, gradually becoming a trickle as the emulsion comes together. An emulsion, not a mixture, as tiny droplets of one liquid are evenly dispersed (not immersed) in the other. At a molecular level, an attraction of polar-charged opposites; at a taste level, a bitter, prickly olive oil and emollient yolks coming together to create something wonderfully unique. Mayonnaise.

One hand whisks furiously, the other is slow and steady. The kitchen equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your tummy. The ultimate cookery answer to counter ironic detachment: with eating, with movement, whether up and down, or Blues Brother dancing; or metaphorically patting my head and rubbing my tummy, congratulating myself on making mayonnaise and working up an appetite.

Sliced shallots and garlic, diced red pepper and celery, have been merrily sweating. I add chilli, two thick slices of orange, then water which is brought to the boil. The fish dives in, soon becomes tender and yields up its flavour, then is taken out and put aside while, with the hand blender, I blitz – orange peel and all. Return the fish and finally stir through the mustardy, garlic mayonnaise, turning the soup from limpid to thick and satisfying.

Piping hot and pumpkin orange. A light, ferruginous but irony-free soup. All the more subtle and fragrant for not being started with loud anchovies. Croutons, golden straw coloured, gently, pleasantly, graze the mouth. Even the cheapest, mass-produced baguette makes a wonderful crouton, dried out and smeared with black olive tapenade. With flushed, ruddy cheeks I cannot but help tilt the bowl to my lips.