space
Lately i have had a great need for space.
I think I first started thinking about the concept of space last summer when I heard Jeff Tweedy mention it in that movie about his band, Wilco - he said on the new album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) he was always trying to give the songs their space.
Space is a hard concept to understand and use, but it is something that every creative person needs to learn (and hopefully we are all creative people in one way or another.)
For me the concept of space means exactly this:
this and no more.
Knowing when to stop.
There is very little space in America today – physically, metaphorically, psychically. We are constantly overfed on every level. I am constantly striving to reach a level of saturation and not to go beyond it. It takes practice and the best thing about it is that it takes awareness. Living by granting things their space means living mindfully.
The antidote to all of this is the concept of space. Because space also means mindfulness, when I am in the kitchen mindfully I will not only put on pot holders so I don’t have to spend the next hour gulping homeopathic burn remedies, I am also more apt not to dump in 4 times too much oregano in a dish just because I have it and want to use it up. I have done things like that, and it’s the epitome of not allowing a dish its space -- not letting the dish itself breathe by highlighting what flavors you really want.
Since I’ve started with the cooking metaphors already, the first example is the women of Bloodroot, the feminist-vegetarian restaurant where I work.
I sent my mother one of the Bloodroot cookbooks for her birthday. When she first started making their soups, she called me up, somewhat incredulous. She had just made the minestrone and was trying to figure out why it was so good. "I don’t know...I can’t explain why it’s so good, but I honestly feel like it’s sort of changed my whole view of soup. I mean, I used to make soups, from scratch and all that, and I guess I just figured soup is what you make from what you have on hand. They don’t do that. I don’t know."
I know. When I was in cooking school, we were taught that stocks were the gods of the kitchen. Too much stock was not enough seemed to be the idea from most mainstream chefs. I dutifully filled my freezer with vegetable stock, curry stock, mushroom stock, reduced vegetable stock, double mushroom stock. I filled ice trays with stock so I could dole it out 2 tablespoons at a time. I made cheesecloth bags filled with parsley stems,
When I interned at Bloodroot the summer after graduating from cooking school, I wrote in my cooking journal: "Bloodroot’s soups are good but they don’t use stocks and they use too much shoyu (soy sauce)." Now, two years later, I make a Bloodroot soup practically every week. I haven’t made stock in a year and I use shoyu all the time in my soups.
I realized that Bloodroot understands space. They don’t put an ingredient in a soup (or anything, but we’re talking soup here) unless it has a place. It sounds so simple to say, but it’s not. I read and use recipes all the time that have completely inexplicable ingredients in them, and the only reason I can think of to explain why they are there is because they always have been there. For example, this thing called a mirepoix. It’s a blend of perfectly diced celery, carrots, and onions and to hear a French chef talk, life without it would be useless. Almost every fancyass frenchie soup recipe has a mirepoix AND a stock (which itself starts with a
Elizabeth David, this great food writer, has a passage where she talks about bouillon cubes. She says that wherever she calls for stock in a recipe, her editors will say "can we just tell readers they can substitute a bullion cube?" She is exasperated by this idea, and says that the thing with bullion cubes is that they give a dish a familiar but not desirable background flavor that permeates every mouthful. That's exactly what I think about most stock soup recipes, and, like everything else in the world, I learned it from watching Bloodroot.
It’s no coincidence that Bloodroot and Elizabeth David are both women, I don’t think, because it makes sense to me that women would be the ones to dismantle old, male ways of thinking about everything, including food. I like the fact that Bloodroot is an overtly feminist group of women and their feminism extends even to their ideas on soup – when creating a world that made sense to women, they left no stone unturned.
But it’s not just the lack of stock that makes Bloodroot’s soups so lovely (I could talk about soup forever!).
Here is a typical soup recipe I got in cooking school.
ESCAROLE AND WHITE BEAN SOUP
1 head escarole (1 lb), tough ribs discarded and leaves thinly sliced (8 cups)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large garlic clove, chopped
1 large celery rib, cut diagonally into 1/8-inch-thick slices
2 carrots, cut diagonally into 1/8-inch-thick slices
4 roma tomatoes, concasse
3 cups quick vegetable stock (see recipe)
3 cups water
1 cup soaked and cooked white beans such as cannellini
1/4 cup chopped parsley
Accompaniment: grated parmesan
Cook escarole in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water until tender, about 5 minutes, then transfer with slotted spoon to a large bowl of ice and cold water to stop cooking. Drain escarole in a colander, pressing gently to remove excess water.
Heat oil in a 5- to 6-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then sauté onion, garlic, celery, carrots, and tomatoes, stirring occasionally, until golden, about 8 minutes.
Add stock and water and bring to a boil, then add escarole and beans and simmer, uncovered, until carrots and celery are tender, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and chopped parsley.
Makes 4 servings.
According to my school, all soups are basically the same: you got your stock, you got your spices, you got your beans/grains/vegetables. It’s all a matter of finding out in which combination they should be used. According to Bloodroot, each soup is a separate entity with it’s own space. 95% of their soups start out with frying onions and garlic in olive oil, because that’s what they have found is the magic formula that will never do you wrong. After that, what happens depends on what needs to happen. How can I explain the difference any differently? It’s a zen thing, this cooking thing, to me. You put into a soup what needs to be put into it. You fry the onions until they are done. At cooking school you cook the onions for 30 minutes, because that’s what the recipe says.
So anyway. Here is a typical, brilliant Bloodroot soup recipe.
- Makes lots, enough for about 10 people.
- This recipe freezes very well.
- Do not substitute or change anything, as this recipe is absolutely perfect.
2 cups soaked cannelini beans
3/4 cup olive oil
10 cloves garlic, chopped fine but not minced
1 teaspoon hot pepper flakes
2 heads escarole, washed and chopped
1 tablespoon salt
pepper
1/4 cup shoyu
6 oz cooked shell pasta
1. Cook soaked beans in water to cover until just done. Don’t let them break down.
2. Warm olive oil and add garlic and hot pepper flakes. Cook until fragrant but not burnt.
3. Add escarole and just cover with water. Bring to a boil, turn heat to a simmer, and cook 30 minutes.
4. Add beans with shoyu and salt and pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings.
5. To serve, add pasta to bowl then pour in hot soup.
What? What is that? That’s not a soup, it’s 3 ingredients with some flavorings. But make it. This is the soup you always think of on winter mornings when you wake up aching for soup in your bones. No flavors are masked, but somehow what it is ends up being so much more than what you put into it. That 3/4 of a cup of olive oil explains a lot, and don’t use a drop less.
The temptation is great to use stock instead of water, fancy it up a bit with some tomatoes, maybe a flurry of herbs. But these would all be grave mistakes. In this soup, every element has earned its place and there is no space for anything more. This is a soup that respects the concept of space.
There is a fine line between respecting space and settling for small flavors. In my personal cooking, I like to think of myself as a pushy cook. At home I am constantly thinking: if 1/2c of wine is good in this recipe, what if I took 2 cups and reduced it to 1/2c? What would happen if I replaced cashew butter for cashew milk in this ice cream recipe? I once made a lasagna for 100 people that involved almost 100 pounds of mushrooms.
Most of the time things work really well when I do things like this. Sometimes I feel these experiments have a lack of respect toward the concept of space, but I don’t think they do. Cashew butter serves the same purpose as cashew milk in an ice cream, it just tastes a lot better because it has a lot more fat. All I want to do is take a recipe to its absolute limits while still understanding the idea that nothing must be in there which has not earned its place. I want to take things to the point where they almost break down, where it’s so fermented it’s almost bad, where it’s such a strange combination you think you won’t be able to eat it, but you do, and your life is changed, and it was amazing. The idea of space is a tool I use to get me to that place without going overboard.
Ok, done with soup, done with cooking, I’m shutting up about it already!
The next example is this band I love, called Low. Low creates these spare, simple songs that always make me shudder. Their drumbeats are so minimalist even I can play them. But, like the escarole soup, they are always more than the sum of their parts. Their orchestrations
It takes a lot of wise restraint to constantly strip things down to their most essential parts, to pare down, simplify, delete. It takes a lot of courage, too, because it's easier just to throw everything in than to choose one thing and refine it until it's perfect.
Space has to do with being OK with not using everything that you have. In America we have too much, and people who feel guilty about that (as we all should) sometimes feel we should at least be using it all. I felt guilty throwing away 1 cup of icing because it wouldn’t look good on a birthday cake i recently made. Low could put so many more notes, harmonies, effects into their songs, and at times I ache with the pain of their simplicity, and I want more more more. Bloodroot has a kitchen full of things they could dump into their soups, and I often wander through it, thinking what this or that
would taste like if I squirted in some asian sesame paste or mixed some brandied fruit in with the tapioca pudding.
But I think we all have a greater craving for spare simplicity, for simple things perfectly executed.
July 2003