As someone who does most of the cooking in the house, I’ve come to recognise two types of cooking. There are some meals that contain something beyond its ingredients. The vegetables are chopped more evenly, the sauce mixed with more precision, the meat seasoned more uniformly, the salad dressing more balanced. This is different to cooking ‘fancy’ (it could be a boiled egg boiled just right) but some meals just get more attention and, as a result, the meal is nicer.
Then there are some meals which, for whatever reason (I’m distracted, tired, just don’t feel like it) are just ingredients on a plate: uncohesive. It might look like a stirfry, or a roast dinner, or a spaghetti bolognese, but it’s lacking that attention (my mother-in-law calls it love) in it’s preparation.
I suspect most home cooks know this feeling and perhaps professionals do to. I suspect it’s a familiar feeling with anyone who makes anything with their hands; something the things we make have something beyond their raw materials in them; a piece of us, our care, effort, and attention. Or love.
In our culture of incremental optimisation it’s tempting to try and ‘hack’ our brains to have more careful days than careless ones, or see more careless days as some sort of failing. But making anything at all should be celebrated. At the end of the day, the food still needs to get on the table and so does our art; there will be good days and bad ones, but that’s all part of the process.