Recipes, Rules, and Relativism

It recently occurred to me how odd my recipe collection here in my posts is.
From reading here, one would get the impression that I cook mostly muffins; that is not the case. The recipes that I post are for things that I actually bother to follow a recipe Upsidedown Pineapple Piefor; most of the things I cook–the stews, pastas, potatoes & rice dishes that make up my day-to-day life aren’t necessarily planned, and certainly aren’t measured–and this is what most cooking, as well as most of my life, is like: I look at what’s available, and I make the best of it. I recently had a wonderful pineapple-coconut-upside-down-pie that long time reader and Bistro regular Rachel had made, but she couldn’t have told me the recipe–she just put in what she thought would be good (and it was).

There are people whom this drives crazy–they need to be able to measure everything, and they need to know exactly what to do and when to do it. They need hard, fast formulas that they can follow to the letter to be absolutely certain that it comes out right. Lots of recipes are a good thing when you are still just trying to find your way around a kitchen, but eventually, they just become “guidelines.” Apples, potatoes & carrots don’t come in uniform sizes, flour doesn’t come in uniform levels of moisture, even the difference in air pressure on different days can change food–you are working with food, not forcing it to do something.

Now, there are things that matter:
Proportion matters; in oatmeal or rice or other cooked grains, the amount of liquid will be twice that of the grain. The perfect biscuit has a perfect proportion of flour, leavening, shortening, and moisture. It is obviously possible to have too much salt.
For some dishes, recipes matter more; bread involves a great deal of time letting the dough rise and then bake, as do cakes, and there is really no way to alter the recipe in the middle of baking the way I constantly do with soups, stews, etc. Cooking for large groups, it is also necessary to have some recipe in mind, just because of the difficulties of scale.

But even with things that have no recipe, it is possible to say that you got it right Spatzle(Rachel’s pie, the Seitan Sauerbraten I made up), or that you got it wrong (the first attempt at the spun sugar nests). The balance, the flavors, how well, but not over-cooked things are–these are all there regardless of any recipe, regardless of even knowing what the experiment is supposed to taste like.

Some people need rules the way that other people need recipes.
They are not happy–well, generally, they just aren’t happy–but they just aren’t happy unless they have rigid rules and formulas to order their lives by. Anybody who doesn’t accept their rules is a danger, a challenge, a sinner, or–perish the thought–a relativist.

Rules are fine in certain circumstances.
Small children, like beginning cooks, need clear instructions and clear guidelines. There are also trickier situations, more complex situations where it is good to have worked out standards because the results could be so disastrous, and the long-term results are too difficult to see before it’s too late. In situations involving large groups of people, it is also good to have a clear understanding.

But virtue isn’t always dependent upon categorical imperatives or divine fiat. Sometimes we have to make decisions about how to react in an appropriate way, or how to be a good person, in the circumstances we find ourselves in. This isn’t relativism: a good cook doesn’t need a recipe to know that a dish is awful, and a good person does not need laws to understand that hurting another creature is wrong. A good cook knows that braising and slow roasting will give food more flavor, and a good person knows that patience and kindness make the world better.

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Timely Virtue

Last week, I sat in on a lecture on Ancient Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It was really enjoyable to see how well Brian Hook did the lecture, and also reassuring that there didn’t seem to be anything I was missing. When he was discussing Aristotle’s virtues, my mind began to wander, and I began to wonder what the virtues of our age are, or rather, what they should be. What habits of character do we need to cultivate?

For the Ancient Philosopher Aristotle, living a good life, living “well-souled” (eudaimonia) or happily, was a matter of cultivating virtues, or character traits that lead to living well. He describes these virtues as a proper balance between two extremes. This is sometimes discribed as the Via Media or middle path.Middle Road For example, Courage is a prominent Greek virtue—as Alexander the Great’s tutor, Aristotle was in tune with the Homeric warrior culture that underpinned their culture. For Aristotle, Courage is not an ideal like it would be for Plato, a perfection to be aimed at, but instead it was a balance between Cowardice on the one side, and Fool-heartiness on the other. A man shouldn’t run from every confrontation, but on the other hand, he shouldn’t run towards every confrontation, either. A person shouldn’t allow pleasure to rule them, but he or she shouldn’t be numb, either; a virtuous person should be temperate. Of course, part of the problem teaching Aristotle is that the English words—temperate, magnanimous, etc.—we use for virtues are outdated and almost as alien to our ears as the Greek would be.

We live in an age of speed. I can have books at my doorstep within days or on my device withMountain Time 3in seconds. I can communicate instantly with friends in Germany (if they are still up) or friends in on the Pacific Coast (if they are up yet). The town I live in and the town I work in used to be half a day apart, then were an hour apart, then were 45 minutes apart, when I moved here 30 years ago were 30 minutes apart, and now are 15 minutes apart.

Much of this is good: it is nice to be able to keep in touch with Lois or Daniel or Karyn & Rich or Katy or Brandon. I enjoy the fact that I am able to walk the Appalachian Trail outside of Hampton Tennessee in the morning and work at the Johnson City Tennessee Barnes & Noble in the evening. But for many people, this very speed of life has changed how we live. In order to keep up with all the places we have to be, Mountain Time 5 shadowwe spend more time in our cars. Because we can do soccer and zumba and school and work, most families do all these things. And other things become fast as well. As our employers continue to have to cut costs, and we have to do more and more with less and less, even professions which used to be leisurely, like medicine and teaching and selling books, are feeling more and more like conveyer belts. Fast food—either the drive-through joints or food that relies more and more upon processed food—becomes a bigger and bigger part of how we eat. Fast communication—not just texting and Facebooking, but even the quickness of passing conversations—become the norm. We are speed-dating our own lives.

Let me suggest that a virtue we need to cultivate to live well in this time is something between the speed at which life seems to be forcing us to run and an inertia of resignation, passivity and entertainment which seems to be the other alternative. Mountain Time 2Now, anybody who knows me will be amused that I would be the spokesperson for slowness—it does seem so natural. However, there is something to be said for taking a cue from the various slow movements that have started in the last decade.  I have already written about the importance of slow mail. I have friends who are involved with parts of the slow food movement. In particular, many of my friends have taken to preparing food from the ground up. The answer to fast food thrown from a drive-through window is planting (or raising) your meals, cultivating them, and then cooking them yourself. But there are other areas in which we can slow down. We can try to walk or bike instead of driving. Read instead of watching. Knit or sew.

Slowness seems negative, though, so let me suggest another term. In regard to the speed of life, the mean between the extremes of speed and inertiaMountain Time 4 is moving—and living—deliberately. We can cook and eat at a deliberate pace at which we can be aware of the food and cook it well, and enjoy it. We can communicate at a deliberate pace at which we can be aware of the unspoken cues of our partners, children, friends, coworkers, and clients, and take the time to follow up on questions, and—most of all—to connect. We can move through the world in such a way that we are aware of our surroundings, deliberately, so that we are also aware of ourselves.

In the words of the original hipster and inventor of the No.2 pencil (whose name, appropriately enough, is pronounced like “thorough”):

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

In an age where the only two options seem to be to join the frenentic rush or to resign ourselves and drop by the wayside, we must learn to choose our own way, and our own pace. What we choose to do, we can do with care, and do deliberately.315signature