Cooking and Writing

I do a lot of cooking.  And I love cooking.  I like baking, too, even though I don’t do as much of that.  I’m sure some of you are questioning the difference between cooking and baking. Yes, there is a difference in answer to your question. While baking is a type of cooking, the techniques are different with different outcomes.

Cooking uses moist heat, e.g., boiling water, steam or oil, to cook food from the inside out.  Baking though is a dry heat method that uses an oven to cook food from the outside in.

I’m far from being a chef and let’s be honest most of us will never be award winning chefs, but anyone that is willing can be a pretty good cook or baker.  What does it take to be a good cook? Practice, failure, messes, more failure and then more practice. 

In the 2009 movie ‘Julie & Julia’, we find two women, generations apart, who solace in the culinary arts.  The movie is based on two non-fiction books – ‘My Life in France’, Julia Child’s autobiography and Julie Powell’s memoir ‘Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen’.  Through this movie we see Julia Child’s early years as a culinary artist, receiving formal training and writing her first cookbook. On the other side we have Julie, who finds herself in a funk, and takes on an ambitious challenge to cook all 524 recipes from Child’s book in 365 days.

I won’t go into any more detail about the movie – watch it if you haven’t yet – but both women face failures and misadventures along the way.  What they both do is keep on going.  Cooking, cooking, cooking, messing up and cooking some more.  They were persistent. 

Julie had a goal to reach, and she kept at it.  She had multiple failures, big messes and more failures but managed to make all the 524 recipes, in 365 days.

Now Julia Child wasn’t an instant TV star or cookbook author.  She didn’t even start cooking until she met her husband.  Julia enrolled in school and worked long hours on her craft of cooking.  It took her nine years to get her first cookbook published!

So what does all this cooking have to do with writing or books or anything?!

Well, being a cook means trying different and new recipes all the time.  Some turn out good, while others not so good.  Some are eaten and some go in the trash. But we keep cooking, and cooking some more, and we learn new techniques and taste combinations along the way.  Eventually, we try our own recipes or adapt a recipe to our tastes.  That’s how we learn to cook.

Writing is the same way.  In order to write we must read.  Read different things, some will be good and some definitely won’t.  We learn from other writers just as we learn from other cooks.

So read, read, read and then write!

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner