a culinary dance

I love to cook. As with most anything, cooking is a much richer, more joyful experience when shared with ones you love. My most cherished memories at CNU to date are cooking with friends; I love the collaboration of it.

    One of my favorite memories came with the outrageous amount of snow we got last semester and the cancelling of classes. A house of boys that I befriended about two blocks away did not have a working heating system when the snow and freezing temperatures came, so decided to get snowed in at the house I lived in. We were happy to have them. They brought their groceries in and, as dinnertime was approaching, we took inventory of our collective items to see what we could come up with. Chili. Two or three of us undertook the task as the less culinarily inclined engaged us with their conversation. We went round and round sharing things that nobody in the room would have previously known about us; going on a tangent every now and then returning to the game. Music was played and the cooking - and dancing - began. Cooking together often resulted in overly spicy food, as one friend in particular would get so swept up in the music, dance, and joy of the moment that he’d get carried away with the cayenne. But it was always a good meal especially, maybe entirely, because it was shared.

When reflecting on these wonderful memories the other day, it struck me how cooking is so much like a dance as Van Der Leeuw describes it. He describes dance as a game, one that requires participation in order for it to be understood. This is certainly true in my experience of cooking with friends; it’s very much a game. Ingredients are tossed from one person to another, knowing glances  are exchanged, laughter ensues. The meal we made was always dependent on the participation of the whole group. Each brought what they had to share, and something grander was created from our collective resources than we would have come up with on our own. In step with Van Der Leeuw’s description, this culinary dance was not a performance. Rather, the participants got swept up in genuine dance, loosing from themselves the heaviness of being bound to earth. Worries and stress relating to our studies or other things seemed to slip right off our weary shoulders, leaving us free and burdenless in the joy of dance. It’s almost as though we danced our meals right onto the plate, every moment in preparing the meal beforehand was both so free and so deliberate. This reminds me of Van Der Leeuw speaking of dance as exploding and controlled passion. I wish to enjoy more meals prepared in such a beautiful, exhilarating manner.