Cooking is like Restoration comedy: not as fun as it sounds, full of tedious business, and very likely to involve a fruity fop swooning onto a fainting couch.
In the case of food prep, the fruit liable to feel overwhelmed is me. The task I find especially tiresome is the chopping of vegetables. What a drag.
I recently mentioned this to one of my husband’s coworkers at a get-together, whereupon she suggested we enroll in a knife skills class.
“Absolutely!” I replied, for I had been drinking.
I didn’t really expect any follow-up. After all, I will eagerly agree to pretty much anything when I’ve been drinking. That doesn’t mean I’m actually going to learn salsa dancing or take ayahuasca or invest in crypto. It’s simply that the booze makes me highly suggestible.
Anyhow, that’s what I tell myself when reviewing my romantic history from the George W. Bush years.
Nevertheless, my husband’s coworker did indeed follow up, booking the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts’ knife skills workshop for me, herself, and another coworker. It was a 4-hour class held on a Sunday morning—or, as I described it in the days leading up to the event, a 4-HOUR class on a SUNDAY MORNING.
Alongside about a dozen other people, we learned to slice, dice, mince, chop, julienne, brunoise, and tournée various items, including onions, potatoes, carrots, celery, cucumbers, garlic, butternut squash, pineapples, oranges, and herbs. Then we turned our expertly cut vegetables into a delicious feast.
That’s what the course catalog says, anyway. Seems like I mostly stood around and snacked.
When cooking, I have a habit of popping the ingredients into my mouth—nothing dangerous like raw eggs or anything. But I have been known to sample uncooked onions or potatoes or maybe even a brittle sheaf of dried spaghetti.
“I’m getting hungry,” someone said during the knife class. “I can’t wait till we get to eat.”
I was like, Hold on, let me swallow these poorly tournéed carrot chunks so that I may reply.
Don’t ask me where this compulsion of mine comes from. Do you think it’s relevant that I was one of those kids who’d nibble on school supplies such as paper, erasers, and the salty delicacy that is Play-Doh?
Nowadays I suppose they’d haul me before a specialist of some kind for exhibiting such behavior. But I was a child in the 1980s, when the preferred way of treating abnormal conduct was basically for everybody to tease you until you knocked it off.
At any rate, here’s what I have retained from the knife skills class.
• What makes vegetables tricky to cut is their rounded shapes. Do whatever it takes with the knife to give the vegetable a flat side for stability, and you should be more or less fine.
• While you’re chopping the vegetable, your nonchopping hand should hold the carrot or whatever in place, but with your hand in this unattractive, knuckle-forward, clawlike shape that’s supposed to keep you from lopping your fingers off.
• My instructor claimed that putting a bowl of water near your cutting board while chopping onions will prevent you from crying, but then I found an (off-puttingly enthusiastic) online video posted by Boston’s Museum of Science debunking that supposed hack.
• People who dislike cilantro—and there were a lot of them in my class—really need you to know they dislike cilantro. That aversion seems to be something they are very proud of and passionate about expressing. They will not rest until you have heard their unique and insightful opinion that cilantro tastes like soap.
As for me, I just think it’s a pity it doesn’t taste like Play-Doh.
Indirect Objects 