He Said… transcendent Cooking: An Act of Love - Part I

I just finished reading Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. This self-help book, designed to help couples improve their relationships by learning and practicing to speak each other’s primary love language, provides a simple and practical approach to improving relationships by outlining the five ways in which we, as individuals, express our love to others. The love languages include: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Services, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time and Physical Touch. Chapman offers a common sense approach to demonstrate how much we love and care for our significant other. The book suggests that we all have a primary love language. We express love in this primary love language and we crave to be loved by others in the same way. Some professional therapists may poo-poo this idea as “cheesy” and trite, and they may have a case after The Bachelorette, the epitome of everything tacky, featured the five love languages in one of their episodes this season.

 But I digress… My goal is not to produce a book report or op-ed piece extolling the book's virtues.  I am only a chef.  However, I found a baseline truth to the book's underlying message.  As I contemplate what my primary love language might be, I focus not on how it relates to my marriage, but instead, on how chefs express their love to the people they feed.  As servants of the hospitality industry, and I am sure other chefs will agree, our obvious love language is Acts of Service and the dialect through which we speak is food.  We express our love by feeding others.  

Often, you hear about love as an included ingredient in a dish. The secret to grandma’s chicken pot pie is the love she puts into it.  Or, I put a lot of love into that dish.  But what exactly does it mean to add love to our food?  We cannot add a tangible amount of love to a dish. We cannot simply add one and a half tablespoons of love at the end of the cooking process to brighten up the pasta alla norma con scamorza affumicata. Can we?  How do we add a little love into our food?  Or, more specifically, how do we speak in the dialect of food and demonstrate how much we love someone?  Further still, does this describe another form of cooking, a transcendent way of cooking?  This type of cooking instantaneously makes someone you are dating fall in love after one bite of your chicken marsala.  It’s the type of cooking that causes the stepchildren you tried to win over to remember with great fondness the chicken, broccoli and penne alfredo you made for them when they were younger.  Moreover, this type of cooking can instantly bring a tear to someone’s eye as it takes them to a place of nostalgia. 

One of my aunts speaks this sub-dialect of love. She makes a lasagna that is out of this world.  As I mentioned, making a lasagna from scratch is a great example of adding love into your food. However, her lasagna is a perfect example of transcendent cooking.  Many things separate my aunt’s lasagna from a basic homemade lasagna. First, she constructs her lasagna with homemade pasta sheets.  Next, she uses the tomatoes from her own jarred tomatoes to make the lasagna sauce.  That’s impressive, but it does not end there.  Now get this...she makes her own ricotta! (insert a head exploding emoji here). Her lasagna epitomizes what I’m categorizing as transcendent cooking and how one uses food to express love to others.

Now, I can almost hear the naysayers with their backlash. “Chef, are you telling me that I don’t love my children because I feed them Kraft mac & cheese!?” That most certainly is not the message I am trying to convey. Instead, speaking food may not be your dialect. You may speak the love language Acts of Service in a different dialect to your children.

You might immerse yourself in their extracurricular activities or you might exhaust yourself driving them everywhere everyday.  Or, as raising children is inherently an Act of Service, it may not be your primary love language.  You might prefer to show your children love in a different way.  Perhaps, Words of Affirmation or Quality Time is how you primarily express love to your kids.  Many of us simply do not have the time or knowhow to cook at this maniacal level...until now.

Fortunately, although hardly fortunate, the current state of the world has awarded many of us with the luxury of time. The global pandemic pushed people to learn the sub dialect of food and explore transcendent cooking.  People spend more time at home baking, as evidenced by the low supply of yeast on the grocery shelves. Due to the challenge of finding yeast, a good portion of the population, certainly many more than the pre-pandemic era, learned to cultivate their own yeast by creating sourdough starters at home.  This exemplifies the difference between speaking the dialect of food, or homemade cooking, and speaking the sub-dialect, a transcendental type of cooking.  Baking homemade bread with active or instant yeast is one way to show our love for others, but the laborious task of nurturing and caring for a dough starter every day, in order to produce a more flavorful and nuanced type of bread, is, well, transcendent. Those doing so learn not only how to cook, but also learn a new language. This new language qualifies as a subset of the food dialect, under the Acts of Service language defined by Chapman, and defined by me as a transcendent way of cooking for and feeding others. 

This blog consists of four parts. The remaining three parts will appear over the next few weeks.  In the subsequent blogs, I will further detail these personal stories and provide recipes that illustrate how I dove into this transcendent way of cooking.