Food As Metaphor - When Fodder Becomes Haute Cuisine

Barbery Blalock was a self-described foodie, although she abjured that term, a moniker put on her and people like her by those who never got past meat and potatoes and who considered reductions as small plate size, presentation as fol-de-rol, foraging Neanderthal, and multiple courses a waste of time.  No, Barbery was not a 'foodie', but a woman who had grown out of home-cooking and graduated into a new world of sensory delight. 

She conceived of dinner as one would any creation, one which required talent, art, practicality, and patience.  She would never simply throw something together, pull leftovers from the back of the refrigerator, reheat sauces, and recycle roasts.  It was a matter of pride to concoct something with 'a touch', an element of personal intimacy, a dish which tempted, satisfied, and was remembered. 

She had the kitchen remodeled to accommodate her new attention to cuisine - a five-burner Viking stove with convection oven, high-resolution temperature displays, ergonomic controls, and spotlighting; a center-island workspace, easy access to refrigerator, stove, and spice rack; track lighting, French copper saucepans, seasoned iron skillets, and cutlery imported directly from Dehillerin in Paris. 

The kitchen was 'bright and lovely', a place to live not just to work, and she appointed it with vases, food-themed art, and fanciful sculptures.  The music was carefully curated, changed according to mood and menu - Bach seemed to go with fish - and the ambient temperature calibrated for vigor and comfort. 

It is a tribute to the genius of  Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Jacques Pepin that this embrace of haute cuisine has become so universal.  Even farm families, used only to meat loaf and mashed potatoes have come around and begun to foray outside familiar, hand-me-down traditions.  Of course it is not so easy to go from pot roast to boeuf bourguignon, and Mrs. Clancy who deserved better, at least tried, but couldn't make heads or tails out of the thick, nasty mess that was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of French cooking. 

Barbery hated to feel superior, but excellence comes at a price, and she had not spent thousands on a remodeled kitchen, years learning appellations, vinicultural regions, the difference between a northern and southern Rhone vintage; and eating at the best restaurants in San Francisco for nothing.  

She even made a pilgrimage to Redzepi's Noma restaurant in Copenhagen.  Redzepi is famous for his foraging, and dinners are comprised exclusively from the flora and fauna he has harvested from local marshlands, estuaries, streams, and fields.   He was Japanese in his minimalism, but clearly European in culinary spirit.  His dishes were not only delicious with tastes and textures never before experienced, but exquisite in preparation - mini-tableaux of artistry and inspired design. 

Her husband pitched in on occasion, but it was clear that Barbery wanted no static in the kitchen.  Composition, preparation, and presentation all took concentration and intense creativity, so as generous as his willingness to help might be, his presence would simply grate. 

The kitchen was like a shrine, so perfectly placed and aligned were the gleaming pots and pans, the array of spices, the suspended cutlery, and the votive lighting, and every evening as she entered it ready to prepare the meal she felt an almost religious feeling.  There, preparing organic, locally-produced, humanely treated, and carefully husbanded products she felt that she was respectful, dutiful, and proper.  She was doing the right thing and making it something special in God's eyes. 

Ironically, Barbery's husband was one of these meat-and-potatoes kind of guys - a man who grew up in a simple household of hardworking parents, a father who went to work, travelled, and brought home the bacon, and a mother who dutifully took care of hearth and home, and who was happy to have a hearty meal at the end of the day. 

As much as he encouraged his wife in her new interest in food and very much enjoyed the results, he became increasingly concerned as her interest became a preoccupation and then an obsession.  Food after all was no more than fodder for human beings, necessary for life, a staple of existence without which existence would not be possible, but no more.

Of course he understood how modern, commercial American culture had a way of gussying things up.  The simple toys of his childhood were long gone, Christmas was now a festival not a devotion, and cars were showpieces not transportation.  

Yet everything has limits, and when he saw his wife becoming Baroque if not Rococo in her creations, and becoming desperate and frustrated when the intricate confections she attempted went out of kilter. The kitchen was eating up all her time and energy.  The house suffered, the children suffered, and her job suffered. She was headed around the bend and something had to be done to prevent her from going over the railing.  

'Honey, let's do take out tonight', he said one evening before she set to work in the kitchen.  She looked at him vacantly, nonplussed, and disoriented.  What? Take out? How could he even consider such an option when she had spent the better part of the morning thinking how to spice the coulis with a sprig of thyme without overwhelming the purity of the fresh raspberries and then ticking off in her mind the steps to making the perfect veal a la Normande. 

Professor Harlan Kuhn of the Duke Medical School, Head of the Department of Psychiatry wrote the following about what he called  The Psychosis of the Kitchen - When Nouvelle Cuisine Becomes Obsession

Food is fodder after all, a package of nutrients to enable life; but when it becomes more than a delivery vehicle for calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals, it risks dislocation of effort.  Today's well-educated, well-off, entitled Americans catching wind of haute cuisine and feeling it fill their sails are at risk.  While food enterprise - making something out of nothing - is as laudable as raising kicking a ball to an art, it can infect and maim the mind and distort judgment.  The 'foodie' can become neurotically obsessed and then, if one is not watchful, psychotic

 

When Barbery's husband saw his wife standing catatonic but trembling over a trimmed and tied veal roast, holding a sprig of fresh rosemary in one hand and a cleaver in the other, he knew something was wrong.  The bend in the road had been turned and there might be no safe return. 

Of course the case of Barbery Blalock might seem exaggerated and even invented, but upon consultation Professor Kuhn said, 'Nothing of the sort.  Mrs. Blalock is a classic case of 'sentient disruption', not unusual by any means, not inevitable, and certainly avoidable'. 

Her husband managed to take her out of the kitchen as stiff as a statue, holding knife and spring like scepter and dove of peace, into the living room where she waited, facing the wall until the ambulance came. 

The good news is that with drugs, electro-shock, and therapy she recovered enough to return home.  Her husband, advised by hospital psychiatrists to dismantle the kitchen and replace it with something more modest and 'down home' did so and welcomed Barbery back to what he hoped would be a less tenuous, more normal life. 'Good luck', said Professor Kuhn no stranger to psychiatric recidivism.