Nook Cookery

I once made a cake that involved boiling an orange in sugar syrup for one hour. Why? Because it was the only recipe in the only cookbook I had¹, that used (almost) only the tools available to me in Peg’s emergency fallout shelter of a kitchen.(I only had to buy a loaf pan at the grocery store.) I’d never have given the recipe a second glance, had it not been forced upon me by dire straits, but you know what? It was delicious and I was glad to have been forced.

I actually like cooking in less-than-ideal conditions. I love little cottage kitchens stocked with the things their owners believe vacationers need most (six sets of corn-on-the-cob skewers; paper plate holders, no sharp knives), the apartment kitchens whose drawers are filled with oddments left by their last occupants (many knives—none sharp). Peg once accused me of loving wilderness camping just because it lets me create a new kitchen-in-the-woods every night of the trip. (It’s only partly true. I also like the tents.)

I presently find myself cooking in a tiny nook of a kitchen that reminds me of nothing so much as a galley on a good-sized sailboat; covered with cunning hooks and hidden crannies, all it wants are latches to hold everything down in rough seas. It came stocked with a remarkably large number of the things one needs to cook an actual meal. Almost everything you need, in fact. The fun begins when you realize what’s missing, midway through a task. That’s when your skill as a cook comes to the fore, as you simultaneously search drawers and brain to figure out a substitute for…a cheese grater. A spice. A colander. A big container—anything big! Quickly!

So, what is it about cooking in-a-closet-with-a-candle that I love, anyway? Well, I’ve made a list:

1. I love the challenge of being resourceful; trying to do what I always do, with none of my familiar tools. (I love it most when I’m successful.)

2. I love moving in the creative, albeit simple, culinary direction that a rudimentary kitchen demands. How many very basic, but delicious things can I make, using only the very small number of ingredients that we can keep stocked (in The Cupboard) at any one time? (I also love those lists of “kitchen essentials” that cooking magazines always publish—the ones that say “in order to be prepared for drop-in guests, always keep on hand a tin of smoked oysters, capers, fig paste….” The list I’m presently composing begins, “In order to have something immediately available to eat after yoga gets done at seven, always have on hand….”)

3. I love looking at recipes with an eye that says “what’s possible in this space, with these few tools?” instead of “given that virtually anything is possible, what do I pick?”

In short, I love cooking with extreme limitations for some of the same reasons I loved sixteenth century contrapuntal music when I studied it in college. In both cases, you’re handed a big long list of rules, restrictions, proscriptions and absolutes, and then told, “make something beautiful. Or delicious. Be creative! Surprise us!” Who can resist that challenge? I can’t! For instance, that cake I made? I didn’t have to make a cake to take to Peg’s colleagues’ home for dinner; I wanted to. There was something about the challenge of trying to bake in a kitchen without even the most rudimentary of baking equipment² ) that I just couldn’t pass up.

¹ Let the record show that it was Claudia Roden’s first book of Middle Eastern cookery—I forget its name at the moment. I happened to have it along while visiting one weekend, because I was doing research on it.

² “I have measuring sticks!” Peg announced proudly, at some point in this process. I thought she meant a ruler; she meant a teaspoon-tablespoon set.