Building the family – be a cook, not a chef

Marcella Hazan, one of the foremost experts of Italian cooking, offers some sage advice for human relations in her recent column for the NYT.

I’m a big fan of Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks, in part because they’re not overly complicated. They’re very Italian. A recipe, for example, will call for one onion. She won’t say a small, yellow onion that was harvested on a full moon. It’s just an onion. That’s all you need.

Her simplicity and authenticity shows itself in this piece where she discusses the difference between a “chef” and a “cook.” In keeping with the general trends of our society, people tend toward the word “chef” because it connotes a higher status than a lowly cook. But Hazan cautions against this based on how important she sees the role of the cook in the family.

I am my family’s cook. It is the food prepared and shared at home that, for more than 50 years, has provided a solid center for our lives. In the context of the values that cement human relations, the clamor of restaurants and the facelessness of takeout are no match for what the well-laid family table has to offer. A restaurant will never strengthen familial bonds.

Which is why, as we come together over the holidays, we should take a moment to think about how we might become cooks again. We could even begin, in these financially straitened times, by replacing store-bought presents with meals cooked at home.

After all, what experience of food can compare with eating something good made by someone you can hug? Like other forms of human affection, cooking delivers its truest and most enduring gifts when it is savored in intimacy — prepared not by a chef but by a cook and with love.

So here’s to all the cooks out there. Here’s to building the bonds of friendship and family.