Glamour

In my house there is one kind of food that is not tolerated -- bland food.

I can stand too much of almost anything, but not enough flavor is an abomination. A sin of omission by commission. Intolerable!

But look at that photo above, that's country ham and sweet carrots. The green is fresh turnip greens and you may spy a chunk or two of the turnips themselves peeking through. And barley for bulk -- it's not expected to add much flavor, nor does it. But the rest of the soup, simmered for a couple of hours in a stock made from a smoked ham hock that also spent about three hours simmering, should have been packed with savory goodness. In fact when I made it for a client last week it was excellent.

Aside from the primary ingredients, there's salt and freshly-ground black pepper, a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, perhaps two teaspoons of dried sage. But this batch had no punch. It wasn't good. It wasn't serious. It was a joke.

What went wrong?

I added a splash of vinegar to it for more brightness, more salt, pepper, and tomato paste as well. A pinch of MSG. Then I let it age for a couple of days before returning to it. Better, but no star.

As I sat here, eating that insipid bowl of soup and trying to figure out how to bestow it with flavor, I was reminded of my years as a computer programmer and writing control software for RS-232 communications. I must have written nearly one such program every year I spent as a programmer. I knew that specification inside and out. I knew it's every weakness (and there were many) and I knew the ideal it sought to define. I knew it like my ass knows my wallet. And yet...

I never managed to write a single program using it that worked exactly the way I intended. Sometimes I figured the problem out -- as I did with a chip that had an instruction backward -- but more often I found a solution I didn't understand. And at least once I found a solution that shouldn't have worked at all.

The more time I spent working with that damned communications protocol the more I came to realize my fundamental mistake. RS-232 wasn't based on science and engineering, it was based on magic.

I have a stack of cooking references (as opposed to cookbooks) a couple of feet high. I read McGee's second edition of On Food and Cooking in two weeks. I've done extensive literary research on Maillard reactions and understand how they differ from caramelization. I know How to Read a French Fry and I understand how simmering differs from boiling even though it is, actually, boiling.

But sometimes cooking, real cooking with real ingredients, is just magic. The lamb shanks I made last week were good magic. They were far better than I'd any right to expect. And sometimes the magic turns black, or, at least, bleak, and what should have been a good soup suitable for a rainy winter's evening is instead nothing more than a bowl of balanced nutrition -- no more appetizing than a bowl of Special K.

Despite my engineering proclivities, it's the magic in cooking that enraptures me. Food is glamour in the original sense of the word.

Kevin Weeks is a Gather food correspondent (Paisano), personal chef, cooking teacher, and writer in Knoxville, Tennessee who spends too many hours on his feet, cooking. "Paisano" is a column focused on peasant dishes from around the world. To read more of Kevin's writings or connect to him click here. His blog,Seriously Good, is read by 75,000 cooks a month and in addition he writes a weekly column forSpot-On.