106. Making Sandwiches is Halfway to Cooking

(Epistemic status: Believe in the me that believes in you, you had the power within you the whole time, the real treasure is the meals you made along the way, etc etc. For everyone who's ever claimed they can't cook while holding a sandwich they made, and everyone whose life would be improved by a move away from girldinner and boyslop and gender-inclusive Huel.)

  

Learned helplessness is a strange thing. Have you ever met someone who didn't even realize that they were lying to you, who claimed incapacity in one breath and in the next, undercut their own statement with an object-level display of competence? Possibly you've overheard someone singing serviceable counterpoint with their shower speaker and then, clad in terrycloth and embarrassment, express hope that they didn't bother you with their awful singing voice; or sat patiently tutoring someone who claimed they can't code or do math and then, as you return from getting a glass of water, quickly tab away from their bespoke cathedral for optimizing Cookie Clicker or Factorio wrought in Google Sheets? This is a pattern, for near everything that near everyone can do; for those simple clean skills that benefit everyone but which carry prestige and its associated shame. Cooking is one such: there's a mental block that many have that tells them that if they can't make eggs benedict and make it look effortless, or if they prefer to spruce up jarred red sauce, then they aren't a real cook, the food they make is a referendum on their self-worth, and they should largely stick to takeout. I cannot possibly disagree more strongly. 

Skills break down into smaller simpler skills. Master the subskills and how they play off each other, and gain competence in the skill itself. Can you hear a good chord and a bad one, sing a specific pitch to reasonable precision at speed, follow a melody line? You can sing. Can you think step-by-step, consider chains of causality, write down something simple and then chain them together? You can do math or code. The story for cooking is much the same. Can you select? Can you compose? Can you transform? Then you can cook. More precisely: you need to be able to select ingredients and flavors that you like, and which will pair well. You need to be able to compose them in such a way that each bite works well. And you need to be able to transform ingredients, apply one or more of salt, fat, acid, heat, and time, in order to turn simple ingredients into other, better ingredients. There's not much more to it, at least in the basics; that right there is the type signature of the skill that so intimidates you. Escoffier had it; your grandmother had it; the line cook who made your catered lunch had it. Takeshi Kaga probably had it. Just three factors, and then some more stuff on top that you don't need just yet.

 

Now consider: you can make a sandwich. I know you can; everyone does; it's the one act of cookery that survived the general twentieth-century amputation of kitchen competence, not least because no one thought to read it as Proper Cooking and thus be afraid of it. But what that means is, you already practice two of those three factors. You do! Not "sort of" practice, not practice "in some sense", you just straight up already can to some reasonable degree of competence. You're smart enough to pattern-match, and if you celebrate Thanksgiving, you know the delight of leftover sandwiches: turkey and cranberry and stuffing between slices of bread. But without knowing why, you know that you could swap in mustard or ketchup for cranberry; you see the logic of Innes Keeper's Formula for Fantastic Grilled Cheeses: how sharp cheese wants a source of sweetness, be that jam or honey. And you know in your bones that some combinations are home, and some are interesting adventures, and some are daring crimes - not all of which fail. (Never mind that I've written down in "49. A Partial Theory of Flavor Pairing in Foodcraft" the three deeper rules that such knowledge obeys - Familiarity, Harmony, Interesting Contrasts. You knew to do these things before I wrote it, just like you spoke grammatical sentences before anyone ever showed you a syntax tree.) And you know just as well that assembly order matters in a sandwich: that cheese goes against bread and juicy wet tomato lives at the center just like meat does; you know that lettuce and onions and that very cheese all make for decent gaskets to protect the crumb from water. The difference between a good sandwich and a soggy sad one is engineering, and you surely know engineering. You even know to salt the tomato. (...You do know to salt the tomato, right? Right??? For the love of the gods, salt the tomato!)

So that's selection and then composition, two factors of that major triad, and compositionality smiles on you today, because you really are most of the way to knowing how to cook. Indeed, those two factors that you already have are the hard ones to pick up quickly, the ones that are horribly difficult to look up. But transformation? Transformation is technique, and technique is legible and practiceable, and that means that you really can pick it up decently quickly. It lives in recipes, and videos, and the backs of boxes, and any number of silly or charming cooking channels you've watched longingly while eating something worse; it lives in the patient explanations of anyone who already cooks and fancies their technique a closely-guarded secret but when the chips are down is dying - simply dying! - to be asked how they do that thing they do with the spices or the vinegar or the hot milk. But selection and composition? Those are a matter of taste, of aesthetic, and while those can only be cultivated and honed, you've already been practicing that daily since childhood, if you know how to remember taste and know what you want.

So the only thing standing between you and knowing yourself for a serviceable cook is that third factor. The punchline is the part that'll make you shout in frustrated disbelief: not only can you scale its heights one rung at a time, but pretty much every one of those rungs... can be cashed out as a sandwich.

The first rung: once you assemble the sandwich, apply heat. The simplest such is a grilled cheese, as above, and you have probably already made one, and on the day that you made one, you first sautéed. And if you can fry a sandwich or a pancake, then you can use the same pan, the same fat, the same careful listening for the change from bubble to sizzle to oh-no-crackle, the same peek-and-flip that you'd use on salmon or steak or tofu. (Or you could be especially clever and use cream for those proteins: fat with water along for the ride, a quick little improvised bain-marie, butter with training wheels on. Just mind that you wipe the pan out or you'll burn the milk sugars.) Butter the outside faces, or more fancifully mayo them after the French. A quesadilla is the very same rung with a different accent; a panini, likewise.

The second rung: transform an ingredient first. Caramelize some onions (gently, with some garlic and a dash of baking soda) before you top a sandwich with them; congrats, you can now solidly upgrade a good half of all dinners. Frankly, you could hop right for this rung first, forget the application of heat, especially if you're once-burned-twice-shy - pickle the onions instead: half water, half white vinegar, a bit of sugar, a bit of salt, maybe some whole peppercorns. Roast some peppers; fry an egg for the top, or boil one. Toast the bread deliberately, to your favorite shade of crunch and Maillard, and then ponder the fact that roasting a tray of oiled vegetables or a tray of bacon is just making toast out of things that aren't bread. You'll use the same oven, get the same rich browning, and spend twenty minutes you'd otherwise spend on your phone. (You can still spend them on your phone, if you set a timer and are willing to live a little dangerously. But you're here for a good time, not a long one, right?)

The third rung: radically alter the bread's aspect ratio, or swap it out entirely for a different starch. Starches are easy: water, maybe a bit of salt, heat, time, done. A sandwich filling tossed with hot pasta is a pasta dish, which is a dinner. A jam sandwich taken apart and put back together again just right with a few add-ins is an excellent bread pudding. An open-faced sandwich run under the broiler is - in more than one country whose food you respect - simply cuisine. And if you should serve a soup alongside your sandwich? Well, first off, soup is largely a matter of transforming an allium in some fat, adding liquid to things that you already know to taste good together, and introducing it all to each other; secondly, you now have a minimal two-course meal. Why do you keep mulling over that expensive culinary school weekend lesson again? You don't need it, except for the finer points and a nice-but-well-overpriced weekend.

The fourth and final of the simple rungs: feed the result to someone else. No, this isn't a technique, but it's the most load-bearing of them all; "I can't cook" isn't really a claim about heat and knifework (sharper is safer; walk, don't run; smash garlic firmly with the flat and roll basil up first). It's instead a timid humility about claims to standing. You owe yourself more than that, and the delight on their face will prove as much to you; that day, you'll strike through an outdated line about yourself and write something new, at their silent behest - that contented transported silence which every chef delights in; the silence of being too busy enjoying, with too full a mouth to speak and too delightfully cluttered a sensorium to want to.

Let me close with the confession that makes this post a more honest one. One of the best cooks I know personally - she will tell you I have surpassed her, and I will try to take that in the spirit she means it - has fed four generations from memory, with recipes I have spent years extracting and notating and replicating like some cross between an oral historian and a chemical reverse-engineer. But she would never tell you that she cooks fancily; that was her late husband's domain. (He made a mean tangsuyook, to hear them tell it.) She assembles what's good - main ingredients and seasonings - in the right order, and applies heat until it's right. Selection, composition, transformation, all over again. I've been lucky - I grew up getting taught to cook, or at least encouraged to by a combination of a special interest in food and the prospect of not having to do the dishes. So it took me a while to understand that the entire tower of cookery rests on the same three moves as her packed lunch - or yours, but when I did, I stopped could only ever hear "oh, I can't cook" in the exact same register as "oh, I can't do math". The capacity's been within you all along.

So prove it to yourself. The next night you're home, and in need of dinner or just a snack, make that sandwich, but make it hot. Salt the tomato, butter the outside, mind the sizzle, flip when your nose says to, and then eat it standing right there over the pan, like you're a person with a delicious secret, because you've become one. You always were; over halfway before you even started reading. The other half is nothing more than toast and a little courage, and you can make toast.