Famous chef and author, Anthony Bourdain, has spent the last 10 years of his life traveling around the world, trying to experience and reveal the importance of cuisine and cooking for various cultures and countries.
The host of the Travel Channel show No Reservations has come out with a new book called Medium Raw, which is more or less a stream of Bourdain’s witty and curious conscience trying to sum up what it really means to cook well.
Residents of the Triangle, if you’re avid cooks, fans of Bourdain or interested in the inner workings of the restaurant business, take note. Bourdain will be in Raleigh Nov. 13 at the Progress Energy Center to talk about his new book.
Just recently, Bourdain and Harper Collins Publishing conducted an essay contest to find an upcoming food aficionado/writer to come up with an introduction to the book, revolving around the book’s theme—what is cooking well?
What does it mean to cook well? That is just about as ambiguous as asking, “What does it mean to be an interpretive dancer?” However, after delving deeper into the question, I don’t think Bourdain was looking for the straight skinny on cooking.
Even throughout his long list of books and in his commentary on his television show, Bourdain intentionally avoided generalizing the significance of cuisine. Defining cooking well is nearly impossible, but the emotions and sentiments it evokes provide a more tangible metric.
Bourdain’s new book is a compilation of what he refers to as “love letters to the industry.” However, through this assortment of essays and commentary Bourdain has accumulated over the years, the chef does not aim to talk just about cooking, but also the progression of his life.
“Medium Raw is a book kind of about me trying to come to terms with where my life is now and where I was then,” Bourdain said in a promo for the new book. “I’m working through conflicting feelings about the business that I was in for about all of my adult life since I was 17. The business has changed. There is a lot of prestige. People now care about what chefs think.”
Only 30 years ago, Bourdain was addicted to hard drugs and trudged through his career. Upon straightening up his act, the crude yet clever chef started to write a book about the hidden and unsung experiences of working in the restaurant business. Kitchen Confidential, which was published in 2000, completely turned Bourdain’s life around.
“Ten years ago, I guess Kitchen Confidential had just come out and I was very much under the impression, ‘I better keep my day job,'” Bourdain said on his television program. “When I wrote the thing, I had no expectation that it would sell outside of New York. I was hoping at best for a little cult success in the New York area.”
The instant success of Kitchen Confidential threw Bourdain into celebrity-chef stardom, yet he was reluctant to catch onto the fame.
As a loather of the kitchen personalities on the Food Network, Bourdain continued to cook for a few years while he cautiously started his new show, No Reservations, with the Travel Channel.
Since the beginning of No Reservations, Bourdain has produced more than 100 episodes in which he travels around the world, sampling local cuisine varying from street food to Michelin-rated dishes from some of the best restaurants in order to try to comprehensively reveal a cross section of culture.
Medium Raw heavily incorporates the experiences Bourdain recounts in his television show and delves deeper into his thoughts about the restaurant business.
In response to Medium Raw, food writer and dear friend of Bourdain, Michael Ruhlman posted a video on his food blog of him rambling why it is important to cook.
“Look at where we are today,” Ruhlman said. “We basically gave our cooking away in the 1950s to the multinational corporations. We let them do the work for us. We bought the advertising that said, ‘We’ll make it so easy for you.’ But what happens when we don’t cook for half a century? Again, we forget how important how food is.”
Bourdain’s essay contest was thought-provoking for me, and after making little manifestos to myself, I came to the realization that the one thing people like Bourdain and Ruhlman have dedicated their lives to, cooking, surrounds us.
These days it’s not hard to find a slew of people shoveling cheap and nasty food into their faces while in a rush. Not that there is anything wrong with cheap food or eating on the fly, but it seems that many people have forgotten what it means to enjoy food and, moreover, what it means to cook—well or not.
We all have become alienated from true cooking. I have Orwellian nightmares that humanity is losing touch with its “human” aspect, and that we’re all regressing back into cultureless beasts.
“Cooking made us human, cooking can keep us human and cooking can make us even more human,” Ruhlman said. “I think that being human is a good thing. I think that cooking making us even more human is a better thing!”
Bourdain and Ruhlman make the point that cooking is an integral part of culture, but sadly the most transient.
Picasso’s painting of Guernica will be in Madrid forever, and there will always be a copy of Charles Dickens’ works, but cooking must be learned, practiced, and appreciated. Recipes can vanish within generations if not passed along.
Bourdain stresses this point in his sarcastic remarks in which he refers to many chain restaurants as “TGI Mc-Funsters.” His witty yet poignant statement does have validity. Why have we disregarded our relationship with food and cooking? Cuisine existed prior to language. It is what separates us from beasts. I’m not going off on some Nietzsche-inspired tangent, but unlike wild animals, we have the capacity to enjoy food, so we cook.
However, with all humanity nonsense aside, Bourdain ironically makes the point that we are ravenous animals. Food plays a primal role in the grand scheme of life, which basically boils down to eating and reproducing – it’s no wonder they complement each other so well.
Nonetheless, we are ravenous animals with some compassion and generosity. We cook to share. That is what it is all about.
When food tastes good, it is easy to act smug and describe it unintelligibly like notes on the side of a wine bottle. However, when food is truly good and honestly cooked, there are no words expressed.
There are no “notes of cinnamon” or “essence of black fruits.” It is just pure, unadulterated emotion — nostalgia, first love, guilt or maybe absolute self-loathing. Ever eaten a street gyro? The taste is trivial. It is all about the personal disrespect — done ever so deliciously. That is what makes cooking an art.
Cooking provides us with a catharsis for comfort. We cook to express the subtle feelings that manifest themselves in hunger.
Good cooking is not a product of good intentions in the kitchen. Hell is full of those, like the Krispy Kreme burger combo from the State Fair. Rather, cooking well is the respect of established recipes and techniques that have survived the trials of history, and a healthy dose of creativity to transcend the prescriptions of a traditional kitchen.
Good cooking can be found all over the place, whether it is from some Michelin-rated restaurant or from the comal of some dodgy taquería. So what does all of this mean? I don’t really know, and I won’t pretend to.
