Camels are strange beasts, and they have an alarming habit of napping to pass time in the heat of the afternoon. To a casual observer, a napping camel looks like it has just keeled over and died. There is something deeply unnerving about watching a dirty-blond pile of motionless camel bits suddenly animate and, defying more than a few laws of physics, right itself into a cohesive animal.

Hello! It’s Sasha Goldstein, and for the last few weeks I have been floating around on the trade winds: Spain, Portugal, a circuit of France, Belgium, and Morocco. As I write this I am back in Canada, where I will stay for the next few months.

I have finished culinary school. The last month was intense, and culminated with a five-hour long practical examination presided over by not one or two, but six chefs. The test was exacting and difficult; the kind of precision acrobatics performance where nothing is allowed to go wrong and a single misstep can cost you, at worst, success.

Of course, everything went wrong and I failed the test. The school delivered the news in a generic form letter: I would not graduate, unless I opted for an expensive re-take, and if I failed again, I would be denied a diploma. No pressure.

So, after a bit of tantrum-ing I dusted myself off, paid an exorbitant re-take fee, and re-did the thing — this time sans-mistakes.

Then I spent a week prancing reluctantly around in whites, accepting my diploma and posing for the school PR-department people along with the other graduating students (we were not enough for a soft-ball team — of my original thirty-student cohort, only two other students finished).

And just like that, it was over. The whole furious thing. I had planned to spend my remaining weeks in France quietly, recovering mentally and physically, while making arrangements and plans for my departure and pending transition.

What actually happened was that spring arrived and with it, tax-season and a conga-line of visiting friends and family. After doing some rudimentary napkin-math, I arrived at the conclusions that: A — I was about to be broke, and B — traveling around Europe is actually cheaper than entertaining visitors in Paris for any amount of time exceeding five days.

Thus, I found myself sitting at a small desk in the town of Taghazout, Morocco, gloriously bored, staring at a distressingly flat ocean and watching camels nap. .

As is wont to happen during such periods, my mind began to wander over the past ten years. I am nearly thirty-three now. Ten years doesn’t seem like such a long time, but ten years ago I was twenty-three, merely a wene by any yardstick.

Ten years is a peculiar period; it is long enough to encapsulate the complete transformation of a life, and yet brief enough that it can pass almost without notice. Taken as a parcel to be used with intention, a decade is potent. It can swallow the vicissitudes of focus, time, and energy that characterize real long-term ambitions, but its end looms nearly enough to eradicate “somedayisms”. You can do a lot with commitment on a ten-year scale: master a language, become a musician, learn to paint, reimagine a career, turn an infant into a small human, build and sell a business, or become somebody so foreign to your younger self that you are almost unrecognizable.

And the most astounding thing is that a life contains so many decades.

There is a Dillard quote that I love and think about often (from The Writing Life):

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one.

That last part — a day that closely resembles every other day… — that is Dillard saying “Don’t get too comfortable, or too complacent, or too distracted because if you let time pass it most certainly will.” It is both a warning and a reassurance.

Richard Linklater, in his fabulous documentary-on-acid Waking Life, includes a conversation between Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell about how film has a unique ability to capture what Zahedi calls ubiquitous “holy moments”.

"You know, like this moment, it's holy. But we walk around like it's not holy. We walk around like there's some holy moments and there are all the other moments that are not holy, right, but this moment is holy, right? And if film can let us see that, like frame it so that we see, like, 'Ah, this moment. Holy.' And it's like 'Holy, holy, holy', moment by moment.

The idea that holiness is everywhere, but we just can’t see it, is sort of… buddhist? And he’s right. Film has this ability to make us attend to the mundane preciousness of things — a fleeting expression, a sunset, an empty street in the rain.

Other things can evoke holiness. Meditation can evoke holiness. Nature can. Art can. So can food. Perhaps a useful analog for holiness in all of these examples is wonder.

Being in Morocco reminded me that travel — of a certain kind — can be an awesome tool for revealing holiness too. You go somewhere sufficiently foreign, you loosen your grip, just a little, on control and comfort and predictability in order just be. You eat the food, drink the water, fumble your way through the language, and cram yourself into rickety old vans that swerve into oncoming traffic to get around obstacles like camels, mopeds, and other buses.

In “Neither Here nor There”, Bill Bryson writes:

“Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”

I love that premise: travel as a kind of state-modifier, allowing you to see holiness in ubiquitous moments. You bumble around in a foreign place, which to everyone else is totally unremarkable, noticing how crazy and weird it all is, and making interesting guesses about where you might go and what you might do and what might happen. We actually refer to the state Bill is describing, in another context, as “childlike wonder.”

What’s more: seeing your guesses through, absorbing their consequences, adjusting them as you learn about a place, a people, a culture, or a way of life, requires total presence. You reinvent yourself in a some small way, each time you encounter new ideas and models for living. It is impossible not to come out of such experiences changed.

Of course, different folks have different tolerances for weirdness. And there’s not a thing wrong with munching on chicken fingers at a Hard Rock Cafe in some remote corner of the world, or hiring a tour guide instead of wandering around a city on your own, or opting for the air conditioned tourist bus instead of local transportation (yours truly: an outspoken fan of such buses). It just takes some intention, and some courage, to reconcile the desire for “safe,” “known,” and “simple” with actual exposure to a place; to walk the line between indulging oneself and insulating oneself against the many benefits of traveling. Used with such intention, unpredictability and discomfort can become a kind of currency, to be used when possible to enrich your connection to the people and places that surround you.

This all sounds a lot like “adventure”.

In his cult classic “Vagabonding,” Rolf Potts writes:

The secret of adventure … is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact — a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain.

The notion of adventure (cultivating wonder, courage, presence; revealing holiness) as a practice — as something to be practiced — is, in a word, holy. It is an antidote to an existence in which each day closely resembles every other one.

And herein lies this most excellent and awesome power. All of these things: things that seem bound to such exotic sensory stimuli as camel races or a near-death experiences in rusty old vans in the middle of the desert — are imminently portable. You can return home after travel and bring with you the ability to notice and appreciate, even simply be present with, such mundane triumphs as functional traffic systems or public parks. I have a memory of returning to Vancouver after one of my first long stints abroad and thinking “Damn. The air smells like pine needles and rain here. I love that.” That memory still makes me smile every time I come home.

So travel, with permission and intention, begets adventure. Adventure, with practice, begets presence and wonder, qualities that you can keep with you when you are no longer on the road. Presence and wonder beget days lived well; days of years-long (ten years long!) cycles, that can be repeated, with passion and purpose, over and over ad-nauseam until The Big Sleep.

Salaam,

Sasha

Before I set foot in a professional kitchen I understood sauces vaguely, mostly in the affirmative. As in “yes, I’ll have more sauce with that” or “this sauce is SO good.” I could wave my hands and tell you that sauces were a keystone of French cooking, or that any half-decent kitchen had a huge pot of stock burbling to itself at all hours of the day on a burner somewhere, destined to become sauce.

What is a sauce, really? A liquid, some aromats, some bones and meat for flavor and collagen. Thickened, reduced, puréed.

There is more to a sauce than parts. A sauce can start a dish or complete it. It is not reflexive; cannot exist alone, but at the right moment, in the right proportion, can imbue a dead plate with something a little like soul.

The style of a sauce is indelible to the language of food, a language bound by soil and culture and obliged by time. In the French style a sauce is a blanket, or maybe a négligée. A French sauce is cooked alone, often fussed over, tenderly re-made fresh each day. Its best expression is complex, sumptuous, layered with flavours and aromas. There is texture to a French sauce. It is the texture of satin, silk and velvet; of opulence.

In Japan sauces are spare, dignified, nuanced; used for dipping, for seasoning, to enliven or elevate the flavours of a chopstick-laden morsel. There is a story about a famous French chef training with Daisuke Nomura, the executive chef of a celebrated Shōjin Ryōri restaurant in Tokyo. Nomura began the training by gently placing a sheet of kombu and a handful of sun-dried bonito flakes in a pot of hot water. Ten minutes later, he announced it finished. The Frenchman objected. How could you possibly create anything worthwhile with so few ingredients in just ten minutes? After chuckling Nomura responded: “we only need to spend ten minutes in the kitchen because we spent two years making the ingredients.”

In China, sauce forms the underlying structure and medium of food. Meats and vegetables are braised, stewed or fried in sauce, and flavours lean towards the muscular, savoury, and intense. One Chinese master sauce called Lu is made by brining meat in salted water, then adding soy, sugar, and aromats like anise, szechuan and garlic. A single batch of Lu is refreshed, like a sourdough, and can be kept for decades — eating a single batch of fifty-year old Lu-braised duck is like eating the essence of 7,000 ducks. In other parts of China, Lu is flavoured with fermented glutinous rice mash left over after brewing Huangjiu (rice wine).

Like people, sauces are mutable. Sauces tell us stories about our colonies, our conflicts, our technologies, and our hopes for the future. Today they are lighter, more delicate, and more complex than those of our forebears’. Tomorrow, the world will change. Borders will bend, people will migrate, ideas will go in and out of fashion. How will our sauces evolve?

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: an impressionist painting of nigiri being dipped into soy sauce, black & white; Firefly Model 2 & Generative Fill; 5 attempts

The basement of the houseboat is dark, almost dingy. Like a proper dive. And like a proper dive, the bar serves only watered-down pints with the mildly soapy aftertaste of dirty keg-lines. When the crowd starts jumping, you can feel the pressure of the water undulate through the floorboards, as if standing on a wooden water-bed. The question “how can a houseboat have a basement?” can be explained in simple, if not surprising, engineering terms. But the question of why this booze-filled underwater coffin on a Parisian river is filled with humans and cigarette smoke at 11pm on a Wednesday?

The answer to that lies centre-stage. He is silhouetted in smoke, and his curly blond hair is halo’d by stage lights. Erik Bandt. Behind him the rest of the band, only visible as shadows, take their positions. The smoke clears and without saying a word, the quartet launches into an energetic musical ear-orgy of Chinese stringed instruments, groovy bass-lines, furious pentatonic finger picking and syncopated drum-patterns. The crowd starts to dance. And oh, does it dance. Arms, legs, heads flail. Between songs, Robbert Verwijlen, the keyboardist, yells at the crowd in broken French. The crowd, not understanding in the least, roar back enthusiastically. Spilled beer and sweat mingle on the increasingly soppy floor. Smoke machines pump and lights illuminate joyous revelry as the band, speaking a language entirely instrumental and entirely universal, riles us all up until we are left, four hours later, sweaty and exhausted and elated, to filter back up, through the houseboat, and into the night from which we came.

I came away from the evening with a slightly sore throat and a renewed appreciation for drumming. The band was Yin Yin, an East Asian-inspired psych-rock / disco / dance group hailing from the Netherlands. The show was excellent — but MAN was the drumming good. Kees Berkers, the percussionist, dressed in a fabulous one-piece that his girlfriend had sewn patches and strips of glitter into, played flawlessly, passionately, at times maniacally, like a man possessed. With sticks, arms, and legs ablur, he banged out math patterns, funk patterns, soul patterns. He played Mozambique, bongos, and jazz snare. I was so fascinated that I sat down the next day and spent an afternoon reading about drumming on Reddit. He played with the precision and looseness and pliant confidence of someone who has taken complete ownership of their craft through interminable rigor and discipline. Also, the onesie was awesome.

Kees, Erik, Robbert, the whole crew hung out at the record table after the show, selling vinyls, pins, and stickers from rolling suitcases and chatting with exhausted stragglers. We all shook hands, hung out, bullshitted a little. I left with some signed records and a shared new appreciation for the tribulations of independent touring (“I’m pretty poor right now” said Robbert when I told him I worked at a fancy restaurant in the second arrondissement. We had that in common).

I am reminded of a recent Threads… thread? that popped up in my feed recently about software versus hardware drums; that drumming has become mechanized so successfully that a machine is now more capable than the most technically proficient human drummer. The author’s observation: “I was a drummer before AI, and I’m still a drummer after AI.” Put another way: it’s not really about being perfect.

To me, the more interesting question when it comes to the arts is whether technical perfection was ever the point. There has been much hand-wringing over the invasion of AI tools into cultural creation, particularly into music and other quasi-digital arts. Yet, such anxiety seems to miss the fact that technical perfection in the arts is only ever a means to an end. It is impossible, after all, to practice art in any real sense if one has not mastered the basic underlying craft. But technically perfect, meaningless art isn’t art at all — it’s just pretty fluff.

Which is fine. But as anyone who has spent their lives making the real thing will tell you, truly compelling work always has something to say. Sometimes it’s a statement (Marcel Duchamp and his fountain spring to mind), but more often than not, it’s a question… and that question goes something like: “what will happen if I do this?”

Embedded inside that “what will happen” is a vast field of vulnerability and effort, but also of possibility. And because the answer might be “nothing” or “no one will care”, art (really, any type of public creative performance) is an inherently dangerous and risky undertaking.

Of course, none of this can be “learned by” or “taught to” machines since sentience is a necessary precursor to genuine inquiry and lived human experience is a precursor to vulnerability (aside: the presumption that AI can become sentient seems a little misguided. No matter how “smart” our models are, they are still just pattern matching algorithms working with big data).

Also, ironically: things created by humans contain within them the real drama of human experience, part of which is imperfection — for example, consider the savage energy that a sweaty, furious, slightly-off-key human brings to the entertainment quotient at a rock show. There’s a magnetism, an immeasurably compelling “something” there that beats the drum machine every time, no?

Mark Rothko, a monumental figure in abstract painting movement in the sixties, had this to say about his work:

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

Utter violence! Rothko’s paintings are vast, luminous fields of color, often in subdued monochromatic or richly tinted hues, and standing in front of one you kind of feel like you are falling into it, like the painting could just enfold and absorb you. To consider his life — that Rothko left his family late in his career and then tragically committed suicide — and imagine violence locked up in his beautiful and whimsical renderings dramatizes the experience and changes it into something else entirely.

The undeniable Story Club writer George Saunders, on emotion in drama (in writing), says this:

“Even a person raised alone, fed by a machine, out in a cave somewhere, exists in this atmosphere of pressure – because that pressure is intrinsic to the human mind. The mind makes the pressure, the tension, the longing, the hope. We want this thing, we get it…and then we want more. We always feel slightly off, somehow. We find ourselves at peace but not the right kind of peace.

And so on.

This is what drama is, really: it comes out of the truth that nothing is ever enough for us, that every human situation (even a quiet one, even a happy one, even a deeply contented one) always teeters on the brink of change, because of the restlessness of the mind.

So human experience is drama, and that drama can be encoded, by us, with our huge-yet-hilariously-imprecise think-nuggets in the artefacts we create, although not necessarily (cheap craft abounds in art, as in any field).

Most major religious myths teach this too — although the line, which is usually translated as “life is suffering”, reads a little differently, it is more similar than not (the first noble truth in Buddhism is better interpreted as “life does not satisfy”; In Christian/Islamic mythology, the central theme of Adam’s hedonic fall from grace is actually longing and discontent).

Speaking of drama, I recently went to see a retrospective of the iconic American portrait photographer Richard Avendon. The exhibition was held at an art gallery in Paris, with over 100 images by the artist hung in spot-lit matte-white frames, some of them towering well above the head in a series of entirely white rooms.

I love Avendon’s work. His high-key black-and-white images had this luminous, soft quality to them; the shadows wrapping, never harsh, alway inviting you to look at the eyes, the mouth of his sitters… I loved how he used his studio as just another tool; the stripping away of external content and environment as a creative constraint. With no environmental “props”, the body, the face, and a piece of white paper were free to do the storytelling… and that minimalism made his images so much more compelling.

Avendon was incredibly prolific during his life, and spent a lot of his career photographing titans of culture/counterculture in the 1960s. Some of my favourites: Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky posed hairy and somber and naked; a 62-year-old Charlie Chaplin beaming demonically into the camera; Marilyn Monroe, beglittered and looking pensively off-camera. But also: Andy Warhol, Twiggy, Ezra Pound, WH Auden, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, even Bob Dylan. Avendon had that rare ability to identify the split millisecond — the one frame in perhaps a thousand possible frames — where the composed artifice of an expression fades just enough to see through. Looking at some of his images you feel like you are looking into the depths of the sitter’s soul.

This was precisely what made him special. The exhibition included contact sheets for some of his more famous images, with red circles scrawled around the “finals”. And just following along on those sheets was like being beside him in the darkroom.

Most of all though, I loved the photo(s) of Dovima and the Elephants — there were a few in the series, although only one of them is well known. I couldn't stop staring at that image, occupying an entire wall next to the gallery entrance. It felt like I was there; Le Cirque d’Hiver, in 1955. The whole scene was beautiful and heartbreaking and... mysterious? Juxtapositions of human and nature, woman and beast; there were chains around the elephants’ feet, and the way their trunks were raised, it almost seemed they were wailing with despair. Dovima in that gorgeous Dior dress just posing (the Dior dress on a pedestal nearby — the first dress Yves Saint Laurent designed for the eponymous fashion house), almost as if she had been caught in some whimsical dance. Freedom and confinement. We are all prisoners, in our own ways, aren’t we? Prisoners to culture, to propriety, and to ourselves, chained to our own intellect.

In one photo, later in the series: the elephants and Dovima move together, as if choreographed. They look more at peace. That Avendon finally chose the more heartbreaking, more dramatic image. Is that a surprise?

Finally, a behind-the-scenes image of Dovima and Richard, at Le Cirque. Dovima is illuminated, staring intently into Richard’s face, which is looking out of the frame. The elephants, cast in shadow, are barely visible in the background. It is haunting.

I left the Avendon exhibition after four-and-a-half hours of intense looking, ready for lunch and a nap. Drama may be central to the human experience, but there is only so much of it a body can handle at once.

I never did get the nap.

Until next time,

-S

P.S. While we’re here: In one of the coolest marketing campaigns ever to grace fast food, Chipotle has started to print 2-minute short stories by some of Americas best writers on its bags — numbering among them are Saunders (truly excellent), Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, and even Judd Apatow. The whole thing is incredible — and I would gladly pay good money for a collection of these stories in paperback form.

Daniel Bouloud. Paul Bocuse. David Chang. Renne Redzepi. Joel Robuchon. Eric Ripert. Marcus Samson. Alain Pasard. Thomas Keller. These are just a few of the legends of cooking.

The lore of kitchen-work is entertaining, interesting, and often intimidating. But reading about famous chefs will not make you better at cooking. Only cooking will do that.

Yet, becoming something is so much more than simply knowing how to do it.

Part of the enigma of a craft is its lore, and to know the stories and their lessons and heroes and villains is to understand your place in history, and by extension to claim agency over your contribution to future.

It is a little like being a coal train. The coal that keeps the engine running is the physical and intellectual labor of the work. But the engine needs more than coal. It needs a conductor and an engineer and a brakeman to get it where it is going.

Here is some lore I have learned:

Joel Robuchon, the pre-eminent French chef of the 90s and one of the most revered late-contemporary names in cooking, waged intense psychological warfare on his staff, frequently causing nervous breakdowns in his own kitchens. He pushed his people so hard and so far that he reinvented what was possible in a kitchen, but he did it by breaking the backs and minds of the people who worked for him. To be revered and miserable is a terrible fate.

Alice Waters invented the “California-style” of reductionist farm-to-table cooking after being exposed to nouvelle cuisine in France, but the philosophies that inspired her actually came from Japan and other parts of Asia in the late 20th century. The history of food is actually a history travel.

Daniel Bouloud trained under the legendary George Blanc and has mentored many, many of the world’s most important chefs (including David Chang). It is almost guaranteed that any truly accomplished chef or restauranteur has worked for another one at some point in their career. Nobody succeeds on their own.

Chang and many other famous restauranteurs were successful mainly because they had cooking skills, creativity, and entrepreneurial drive. Many were also terrible managers, poor leaders, and chronically unhealthy egomaniacs. The best of them seem to grow out of these shortcomings.

Danny Meyer and Will Guidara were not cooks, but they became successful restauranteurs because they were kind, thoughtful, and driven to succeed. They figured out how to attract the right people to help them get where they wanted to go.

Learn the lore, and then decide: who will you be?

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: watercolor, David Chang, Alice Waters, face in profile, side-by-side; Dall-E; 12 attempts

This week, just three interesting ideas:

Braised Cabbage

Braised cabbage is a most excellent contemporary French dish that most of the world seems to have overlooked. Should you find yourself lacking funds or creativity for something more exotic, try this:

• Section a whole white or red cabbage into quarters, keeping the stem on (this holds the leaves together)
• Pry open the leaves of each quarter. Rub olive oil and salt inside, along with whatever else feels right
• Place the 4 quarters face-down in a roasting pan. Add a few glugs of chicken stock, some shallots, garlic cloves, and chilis. Toss in more butter than you feel is necessary or safe
• Rub the tops with olive oil, season everything liberally with salt and pepper
• Blast that cabbage in a furnace-hot oven (200-225° C is a good starting temperature. Bonus if you have a convection setting), turning it down once the outer leaves are crispy. When a knife slides through the cabbage easily it’s ready

Scallop Parts

Scallops are fascinating. While we are all familiar with their circular adductor muscles, scallops have other parts and they are all excellent. Whole scallops contain roe sacks (the Portuguese call them “livers”, because their consistency is similar to chicken livers), and skirt muscles (sometimes called beards or mantles, and very popular in Japan as an otsumami, or drinking snack). Plus, their shells are beautiful and make great plate decorations. With a single batch of whole scallops, you could make:

• Scallop liver paté by blending the roe sacks with some heavy cream and liqueur (chicken paté uses Cognac but for scallop paté, maybe white port?)
• Scallop beard infused-butter by simmering beards in butter with tarragon and whole white pepper
• Scallop ceviche, by soaking sliced scallop adductors in citrus, salt, and pepper then drizzling them with warm beard-butter

Fish Fat

Speaking of interesting uses for whole sea creatures, fish fat — the visceral stuff around the organs — can be rendered down and used just like other rendered fats (i.e. chicken or duck fat). Josh Niland, the Australian chef who popularized this idea at his restaurant Saint Peter, makes confections, pastries, and even breads with fish fat. Not all varieties of fish have copious amounts of fat, but those that do are stripped of it (as well as edible fish livers and other interesting internal organs) by fishmongers before selling. Gutting/boning fish is certainly messy business, but it’s not particularly difficult — and as with chicken, you get lots of fun extras to play with.

• Brown fish spines in oil, then deglaze with wine, fennel, carrot, and celery, for an awesome alternative to a chicken stock base
• Replace some of the butter in a brioche recipe with rendered fish fat for a super-savory bread
• Roast whole fish heads or mine them for collars, jowls, and other choice cuts that can be pan-fried just like filets (bonus: this video of Niland breaking down a fish head into tongue and throat cuts is very awesome)
• Salt and lightly fry fish livers to eat as a snack with sourdough toast, green onions, and kewpie mayonnaise

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: pen-and-ink sketch of a scallop shell on a white background with space on all sides; Dall-E; 7 attempts

Hello again,

It’s Sasha. It’s still 2024. I’m two days late, but enthusiastically here for your reading pleasure.

January: a blur. Life has resumed mach speed again, and I expect it will continue to do so until I am at least finished with my training in April. Readers of Fooooood! may have caught the short essay I published about Tomatoes and Logistics, or another on Reference Points. I still feel like I’m banging around in the dark, finding my voice with the writing, but it is getting a teensy little bit easier.

The last week has also found me, in precious spare moments, cavorting around Paris visiting art museums on the occasion of a visiting painter-friend (Jordan Fritz) who is here on pilgrimage from Vancouver Island. This is wonderful as I have visited approximately zero museums since moving here, and have been irked by my own penchant to make plans and then cancel those plans at the last minute due to lack of time, energy, or both.

So it is with great gratitude that I allowed myself to be dragged along to a few galleries and museums, even for an hour or two. Jordan and I walked the wide-ranging contemporary ART3F exhibit at the Expo de Versailles and a truly excellent documentary photo exhibition (Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith and countless others) at The Centre Pompidou, alongside its permanent collection (Matisse, Picasso, etc).

Walking an art museum or gallery with another — particularly one knowledgeable about the art — is such a wonderful way to magnify your vision. You walk and then compare notes, discovering inspiration or details that might otherwise have been invisible, learning things about how the other person sees and what they are drawn to. At one point at the expo, we stood side-by-side staring at an impressionist still-life of a bright, plant-filled room. I asked Jordan what he was looking at. He said something that I have thought about since: “the brush strokes. It takes most artists their whole career to learn to make a brush stroke.”

La Dolce Vita

A light pulsed. A small furred animal stuck its torso above the seats a few rows in front of me. Actually it was an arm. Another followed it, holding a water bottle. It passed the bottle to another plumed sleeve, this one in the next row, so white it might have been composed of polar bear. The arm retreated, and a head and poof-adorned torso rose behind it, belonging to a perfect specimen of manicured Italian female: shining brown hair so straight it actually fell in sheets, like rain; face hidden beneath inimitable layers of expertly blended makeup, eyes and mouth shaped into almonds by lipstick and eyeliner. Beautiful, in a classic, young, rather loud Italian way. Somewhere, under those many layers of careful construction, was a regular human. But one would never know it – such are the powers of makeup and moon boots.

The creature pursed its pale flamingo lips, carefully slid out of its seat, blinked and walked off the plane. Three others of nearly (but not quite) equal majesty followed it.

So began my first moments in Italy. The country was for some reason revelatory, I think maybe because I have never seen so many Italians in their natural habitat being — well — Italians. Italians as a group are remarkably good at blending into other countries. Nearly every nation on earth has flocks of them, but their presence is not distinctly felt, even as their culture is omnipresent. In small concentrations, this presence, with all its loudly beautiful eccentricities, blends into the landscape.

But in the motherland, it is overwhelmingly evident. Italians fill peripheries of sight and sound: over-feeding each other, talking with their hands, chao’ing their mammas, arguing passionately about the weather or the price of fish or anything else that might engender loud conversation. The loquaciousness and ebullience of this group of wonderful dark-haired humans was of course, all the more conspicuous after having been immersed in the comparatively aloof and cool France for so long.

Milan, it is snarkily whispered, is a very un-Italian city: there are few cobblestones, much traffic, and a metropolitan affectation that goes against the grain of what most consider the true Italian “dolce vita”. I found myself in Milan with the better part of a day to occupy while awaiting a ride onwards.

So I spent a rainy day loping around Milan in search of nothing in particular, sometimes on the exceptionally well organized metro (“Kiss and Ride”), sometimes on rental bikes, but usually on foot.

Contrary to whatever expectations I may have had, I loved the Milanese sensibility. I loved the paradoxical, almost satirical way oddities emerged from the humdrum, mundane cityscape. Moon boots (always with the moon boots) and capes would appear amongst throngs of suits and formless muted grey jackets. When it rained, dark umbrellas would sprout like flowers from gloved hands at street-level, unbroken except by the occasional burst of peacockish brilliance. Thick-moustached Italian men sipped dark puddles of espresso in standing-room-only cafes while young professionals on their lunch breaks queued for Starbucks next-door. The gothic immensity of the Duomo next to Versace billboards and almost equally impressive shopping centres. I didn’t miss the cobblestones for a second.

In one such shopping centre I discovered a food court filled with vendors selling every possible Italian snack; strips of pizza al taglio, feathers of breaseola wrapped around chunks taken from an oozing block of gorgonzola so large it looked sentient, and maritozzo (sweet brioche filled with chantilly) so perfect they were almost painful to eat; plus enormous cases of glistening sea creatures ready to be fried, baked, or boiled on demand for throngs of hungry young business-people.

In a wine bar later that night I met a manicured Italian man with a daschund named Figaro. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the man sipped his glass of Nebbiolo, gabbing with the barman and absentmindedly slipping cornichons to the dachshund. The wine glass emptied and filled itself, and Figaro nibbled at the growing pile of pickles at his feet, man and dog a picture of perfect satisfaction.

The Luckiest Rodents

As much as I enjoyed the covert quirkiness of Milan, by the end of the day I was glad to escape to Alba, a town nestled in the rolling pastures of Piedmont, where I spent my remaining time immersed in the fascinating world of truffledom. There are six known varieties of edible truffles (technically tubers — subterranean fungi that grow and fruit underground), but I had undertaken this pilgrimage to learn about the mother of them all: the Piedmontese white.

My interest in the tubers was a matter of professional curiosity: within European and American gastronomic circles, the white truffle (Tuber Magnatum) is generally regarded as a pinnacle noble ingredient — which is to say that fresh tubers are highly sought after, difficult to come by, and come with appropriately dumbfounding price tags (actual fact: white truffles from Piedmont have been known to sell for as much as US $4,800.00 per kilo, with a larger specimen famously selling to a Chinese casino magnate for $330,000.00). Magnatum is the kind of stuff, like Beluga Caviar, that the majority of the dining public will never encounter, and would probably regard with suspicion, confusion, or even disgust if they ever did. This is because, like so many darlings of the culinary sophisticate, truffles are expensive adventure food; they are nuanced, heady, unusual, and a little bit mysterious.

Naturally, news of the festival caught my attention and held it. For a small fee, attendees could enrol in classes on procurement and sensory analysis, and the esoteric and generally indulgent notion of spending an entire weekend engrossed in the universe of rarified, eccentric vegetables was too tempting to ignore.

So I found myself sitting in a small room in the attic of the natural science museum in Alba on a brisk Saturday afternoon in November, alongside a raggedy assortment of tourists and food/wine professionals, listening to a thin-lipped, soft-spoken Italian man whose name might have been Mariano lecture us about truffles through a translator.

Mariano introduced himself to the quiet room while a few stragglers arrived. He had gotten about sixteen words into an explanation of the history of truffles in Italy when a wide-set, thickly moustached American hippopotamus of a man strode in, introducing himself as “sorry m’late” in a forceful, vaguely southern drawl.

The man, who we’ll call Al, remained standing at the back of the room shuffling his substantial paunch from foot to foot like an agitated walrus, and proceeded to interrupt Mariano every two or three minutes with a different question. Mariano explained sporulation. Al wanted to know, “could you eat them truffles whole”? Mariano told us about the different non-edible varieties and their interest to the scientific community. Al wanted to know where could he get some “good’uns for cheap”? And how would he know he was “gettin’ a deal” if all the truffles looked the same? The heat of his desire to find bargain truffles would not abate.

In between questions and Mariano’s increasingly terse answers about truffle shopping, we learned that Magnatum are a particularly interesting specimen of evolutionary lunacy. While most truffles grow in myriad conditions, Magnatums grow only in fall/winter and are picky to the point of absurdity. By virtue of sheer luck, a Magnatum spore must find itself within shouting distance of a particular tree (usually Oak, Willow, or Poplar), at which point it forms a partnership with the tree’s roots that results, if all appropriate conditions are met, in the growth of its odiferous fruit.

But Magnatums are picky beasts. They will not grow if the soil pH is too high, or too low, or too dry, or too wet. A Magnatum requires moderately sloping ground with fair surface moisture, even during drier months. It prefers valley bottoms. It dislikes real estate above 700 meters or dirt too far away from water. Even when all these conditions are met, Magnatums often fail to fruit, as their spores are delicate and ill-adapted to reproduction.

Such pickiness makes ripened fruits rare, but it is their aroma that makes them precious. This we learned when Mariano passed a collection of small glass jars containing ping-pong-ball-sized tubers around the classroom and asked us to sniff (Al’s eyes nearly popped out of his forehead. You could see him start to perspire). Just a whiff of air at the top was intense; like having your head stuffed into a wine-barrel of sauerkraut and vanilla and fresh honeycomb and wet hay.

This aroma has captivated aesthetes throughout history, from Pliny the Elder to Plutarch to Caterina de' Medici, and according to the consortium of Italian truffle people is an evolved characteristic. Growing entirely underground and being unable to reproduce on their own, truffles need a way to attract predators so that they can be eaten and eventually pooped out, spreading their spores to trees nearby. The amusing sidebar here is that each year in early winter the truffle-hunting dogs and squirrels/voles/mice of Piedmont begin an annual competition to see who can get to local tubers first. Often the critters win. I picture a small rodent crouched by an oak tree in the moonlight nibbling happily on a tuber worth over $2,500 USD. The Italians have some lucky rats.

If all this were not enough, truffles have an incredibly short shelf life — once plucked from the earth, they begin to spoil immediately and cannot be preserved. A truffle more than two weeks old is mostly useless (oils, cheeses, and other such truffle condiments are almost always flavoured with synthetic perfumes, occasionally containing dried, aroma-less pieces of truffle for marketing purposes). This creates an interesting paradox: a truffle-hunter, who carefully guards his hunting spots and searches for produce under the cover of night using only hand-signals, does not dare leave ripened fruit underground lest it be dug up by a competitor, BUT if he finds too many truffles and supply outpaces demand, he must sell them in a hurry. Thus the price of truffles during truffle season can fluctuate wildly, particularly during boom cycles in Alba.

In the end, I imagine that Al satisfied his truffle lust. While 2023 wasn’t a boom year, the festival was nearing its end, and many vendors had lowered their prices modestly in hopes of getting rid of errant stock. The whole experience was absurd, bizarro, and while I may or may not ever use the compendium of truffle facts I acquired over the weekend, I loved every minute of it.

Fish are like this: strange little aliens... in the ocean as under the knife and on the plate. There is a peculiar and beautiful, even delicate sort of otherness to fish. We cannot relate to them as terrestrial creatures. Their parts are not ours, and they lack the ruddy physicality of terra firma. They are shrouded in mystery. We know less of what is in our oceans and waterways than we do of our galaxies.

Slippery and obstinate under the knife, fish resist intervention. Microscopic bones and nearly-transparent scales evade even the most surgical scrubbing. Their ungainly forms react to heat in surprising ways, often shrinking and warping into shapes that resist perfection unless attended to with care.

Yet for the courageous and for the curious, the ethereal and complex and bizarre world of fish contains multitudes. A life spent contemplating, catching, manipulating, cooking, and eating fish is a life well spent.

Here are some things I have learned about fish:

• Stick your nose in it, raw. If it smells like ocean or nothing at all, it is fresh
• Never buy a fish with cloudy eyes
• Fish begins spoiling the second it leaves the water
• A perfectly cooked piece of fish is just barely opaque. White excretion from fish meat means it is overcooked
• Overcooked fish tastes dull and flat. Well-cooked fish is delicate and complex and often sweet
• Nearly every fish on earth is excellent if seasoned with salt, cooked lightly in butter, and finished with a squeeze of citrus or a dash of vinegar

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: scorpionfish, pen and ink, white background; Firefly; 6 attempts

Ruth Reichl (American writer/elaborate-wig-wearer/restaurant critic) once wrote that a great steak is bought, not made. Anyone who has ever had a truly magnificent steak knows it instinctively.

For the cook, a great steak begins with the procurement of a slab of raw animal.

One doesn't need any particular sophistication to recognize excellence in such a slab. A steak should be gorgeous. It should call to mind trappings of old money: garnet and ruby and mahogany, interwoven with fine marble veins; all swirling textures and colours and iridescent sheen.

There are so many ways to ruin a steak, a few ways to elevate one.

A quintessential steak, at its best, is a great piece of beef, seasoned with lots of salt, grilled in a very hot pan with plenty of fat, seasoned again (salt), and rested.

The salting and resting is magic. It begets all kinds of wacky chemistry. Muscle fibres expel and then reabsorb moisture, proteins denature, amino acids escape, sugars caramelize. The net effect is that a tough, mild hunk of muscle transmogrifies into something holy. It is honest labor, and the steak does most of the work.

The difference between an average steak and a great steak is not subtle or simple, but also not obvious. The cow is a myriad beast, genetically and environmentally. Its voluminous flesh, especially its fat, stores in its globules memory of life. We can taste this memory. Pasture-raised meat from the greatest breeds — Kobes, Wagyus, Galacian and Finnish beef — can be rich nutty, grassy, earthy, buttery, or even herbaceous. It can be subtle or concentrate, creamy, spicy, or smoky.

Great steak is finally about relationships. The cook’s quest for greatness starts at the butcher, and the butcher’s quest for greatness starts with a farmer or rancher, and the farmer’s quest for greatness starts with her land and her livestock. In this way, to prepare and cook and eat a great steak is to participate in a chain of greatness, but also a chain of goodness that can make the world a little better if we allow it.

The French refer to this as “respecting ingredients,” and this gesture of respect is expansive. It means purchasing the best you can find and treating them carefully; coaxing out maximal concentration and flavour every step of the way.

It also means caring enough about the products you cook with and the lineage of care that created them to learn how to let their greatness to shine. It is an edict of both deference and discipline.

To me, it also means caring about what's on your plate; taking time to eat it, to enjoy it, and if possible to share it. From Epicurus: “We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.”

This might not always be possible in the non-stop grocery aisle-dom of our times, but with a little effort maybe we can make it more so.

P.S. This looks interesting

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: Tomahawk steak in a frying pan, pen & ink, hand-drawn, birds-eye-view; Firefly; 13 attempts

There’s always a book.

In this case, it’s a little red one: the Michelin guide, thoroughly dog-eared, sitting on a deeply polished wood-grain shelf next to me as I stab my fork over and over again into the steaming, leathery, shiny exterior of perfect poulet in an iridescent pool of jus. Soft white light streams in through huge windows from all directions, illuminating diner, book, poulet, psychotically beautiful mosaic tiles, brass accents, sparkling glassware. I’m sitting at a bistro in Paris, a casual (casual!) French place that’s listed somewhere in the dog-eared pages behind me, eating lunch. It feels surreal, like dining in another era. And the food is so good.

As a kid, we never visited starred restaurants — I didn’t even really know what A Star was. Dining at such establishments wasn’t part of our family culture. As an adult, even as one who loved cooking and eating, I was aware that they existed, but mostly in the vague way that one is aware of luxury yachts and private jetliners.

It wasn’t until moving to Paris that Stars began to occupy my attention. Every single culinary heavyweight that I encountered had stars. Such status seems not only a marker of excellence, but perhaps a maker of excellence, in the sense that striving for one (training in starred kitchens as an underling, earning stars on behalf of an executive chef) actually made the greats great.

Still, this caliber of dining is one that most folks won’t enjoy on a regular basis, if ever. In Paris, the average customer at a 2-star or 3-star restaurant has a higher net worth than most nation states.

Yet in one view, the customers are almost besides the point — a prestigious source of private funding. The real value of these restaurants to their communities, and to the culinary industry as a whole, is that they serve as breeding grounds for culinary excellence, create demand for highly trained staff, and most importantly, create demand for a caliber of plant and animal stuff that you simply can’t get with pesticides and unscrupulous farming methods. It’s not so much sustainability for its own sake, but sustainability for the sake of a great meal — and that is a type of sustainability that everyone can get behind, no matter where their political allegiances lie.

Image created with generative AI. Prompt: Books standing up on a bookshelf, white wall; Firefly; 22 attempts

Food is not just food. It is everything. It is everything in the weird cosmic way that anything is everything. Your favourite neighbourhood restaurant is the confluence of the profoundly unique economic and geographic and social and political and cultural history of the land you live on. It is a unique moment in time, bred of the zeitgeist of its space in the continuum of existence. In this sense, it is the culmination of each and every hidden, invisible thread that weaves the tapestry upon which you exist.

But food is also an intensely human construction, even while its corollary, nourishment, is our shared connection to every living being on earth. Food is created by people, who have hopes and dreams and motivations and opinions and priorities.

Your neighbourhood restaurant is a place where you go to buy food, but it is also community. It is convenience. It is safety. It is a public space where people can see each other, be seen, be comfortable. Be cared for. It is a ward against the existential and physical loneliness of our splintered, hyper-individualized world. It is a balm, a place you can look forward to going and where you can go to forget, for a moment, the immediacy of life's ever-increasing pressures.

Food — real food — and the experience of sharing it, making it, and eating it, can connect us to all that is good.

Brillât Savarin famously said tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are. To this, I would add tell me where you eat and I'll tell you the story of your world.

Food, and eating publicly, is too important to marginalize as "just food". Keep eating. Keep enjoying. Keep patronizing. Stay curious. Appreciate innovation and courage. Keep instagramming your meals. Keep food alive.

Night readers,

Hi again. It’s me, Sasha. I’m covered in chocolate stains, tomato paste, and crayfish juice. My whites, most days mottled with some form of hastily-blotted-away water-soluble stain, make me feel like a walking impressionist painting, or maybe some weird kind of modernist art experiment — a canvas changing daily depending on the menu. The kitchen does strange things to a body. Imagine doing three to six hours of light to moderately difficult calisthenics in a booby-trapped medieval weapon showroom while eating small spoonfuls of Thanksgiving gravy and trying to win at jeopardy and you’ve got a close approximation. I often leave the institute in a stupor; my body, brain, and palate scrambled eggs.

Speaking of crayfish, there has perhaps never been a better example of the morphological development of Southern-American riverbank english. At some point in the 16th century, the Old French ‘crevisse’ (referring to all shrimp and crabs) transmogrified into the Middle English mispronunciation ‘crayfish’ through a shift in spelling (creveis) and pronunciation (emphasis on the -re-), and then in the 19th century split itself like a reproducing paramecium across the Appalachians. Crayfish went mostly North, while Crawfish settled in the South. Eventually, I imagine some enterprising river-dweller decided ‘fish’ was too much work for the vocal cords and replaced it with the -dad suffix (as in ‘doodad’)… which gave us the Crawdad that inhabits the lands West of the Appalachians. True to form across the ocean, the modern French word, écrevisse, remains stubbornly identical to its origin.

There is an interesting thread to pull on here regarding the etymology of language and socioeconomic evolution within groups of people. The American South, which history has been less-than-kind to, is more culturally insular than the North — particularly in rural areas. This makes sense: lack of wealth tends to correlate with less physical mobility in the world, and when people stay put culture tends to coagulate regionally, concentrating in the process. In the case of crayfish, such insulation has produced a cornucopia of wonderful appellations. Some of my favourites: crawdaddy, mudbug, crawlpappy, craydad, and waterdog. Crawjinny also has a nice twang to it (these and many other such appellations are painstakingly catalogued in the excellent and sadly pay-gated Database of American Regional English, AKA DARE, maintained by the folks over at Harvard Press).

Foundations

I am just beginning to turn a corner with my cookery training; going from a completely inept beginner to a kind-of-sort-of-maybe semi-capable novice. I have a very long way to go. My technical skills are still rough, and I’m nowhere near unconscious competence. I have eternities of mincing, chopping, tasting, reducing, and basting ahead of me, but I am forming, finally, what feels like a foundation.

This might not sound like much, but it is a gigantic step. Foundations are everything. Without foundational skills, one is more or less useless, to everyone including themselves. I spent much of my first three months here feeling like a legless blindfolded matador hobbling around in a ring of angry bulls, shrieking and flapping a muleta like some kind of fabulous, brain-damaged bat. In these situations the only way through is to trust in the process. Fail, fail, and try again.

Alongside this foundation, I am getting the hang of some basics. This is the wonderful thing about foundations: they allow you to move past survival mode, begin to form opinions, and appreciate nuance. You can even begin to refine technique, because there is technique to refine, and picking yourself up after a failure is a lot easier with few wins under your belt.

Westvleteren

On the travel front, I just returned from a brief, very wet bike trip to Belgium — which I intend to write about — to track down what is rumoured to be the world’s best beer: the Westvleteren 12. There is a mandatory amount of eye-rolling required when dealing with such grandiose claims, however I was intrigued because in this case the claims didn’t come from the brewers, and the beer seemed to have a near-mythical, axiomatic status among beer people.

Was it, in fact, the best beer in the word? Hard to say, given my incomplete knowledge of all beers and the subjective nature of taste, although I can confirm that it was exceedingly tasty. More probably in this case “best” is being used to mean “rare and really good.” The operation is small, and the brewers — Trappist monks who presumably have other duties and interests — brew just enough to support their work. The beer is not abundant, nor is it available anywhere outside the village of Westvleteren, which is really just a few buildings in a field. If you want it, you can get in line in the middle-of-nowhere-West-Flemish countryside in a pre-registered vehicle with an empty boot (or on a bike with a backpack. You will get many strange side-eyes) and buy exactly one case per day per vehicle — not a bottle more.

They do pour pints at a cafeteria next to the abbey, and word has obviously traveled. When I visited at lunch on a Sunday the place was packed like a tin of dehydrated sardines, and there was a lineup of cars around the abbey.

Fooood

I will soon be launching a new newsletter! It will be called “Foood!”

As with Mexico, Fooood will be an experiment in format and content, albeit one that I am thinking about a little differently. It is a way for me to make room for other subjects in the pages of these letters, and to give myself permission to experiment with a more pure form of food writing.

But more importantly: it will be a way for you to learn with me as I burrow into this odd foreign planet called professional cooking, to share the moments of “aha!” as I have them, and to explore a strata of cookery that exists outside of most literature; certainly outside your typical food publications (there will be no recipes for “weeknight baked ziti” here). This is food with a capital F; If you’ve ever wondered how to catch, cook and eat a pigeon, this is the type of place you might find out.

I’m planning to be more playful with the format than in the Mexico project, and unlike these rangy letters, I will be focussing on short-form content (most of the pieces I’ve written so far are 1-3 minute reads).

I’ll be sending another email out to this list when it’s ready, likely in the next week. If you’d like to sign up you can do so then (I will be maintaining an entirely separate mailing list as I prefer fully consenting readers. You will not be added automatically).

I’ve been hard at work on the first few sets of text. Usually, the formative days of writing on a new project are about as much fun as performing surgery with a rusty shovel, but words have been surprisingly forthcoming, likely because much of what I’m writing about has had five months to careen around my brain with no immediate outlet.

Unfortunately, a bunch of words don’t make a final product, no matter how easy or hard-won. As usual, I’ve spent at least as much time thinking about presentation, operational elements (newsletter publishing platform, list management, etc) and web presentation format as I have writing. Even though 95% of readers will read on their phones or in their email apps (ergo, bypassing the website entirely) there is a small subset that visits the website. This 5% is so small as to be almost insignificant, but I think of it kind of like matting, framing, and hanging a photo. Presentation matters, and insofar as I can add to the experience by enhancing the presentation, I want to.

With this in mind I’ve created a new custom template, specifically for Fooood. This gives me the ability to tweak it to better suit the content (I did something similar with the Mexico project). For example, since I intend the pieces to be shorter, I’ve reduced the column width and vertical margins to give the text a little more breathing space. These changes are all very subtle and unlikely to be noticed, but like any good design, that’s the point.

AI & Chicken Parts

Artwork in my projects can sometimes feel like an afterthought. While I put plenty of effort into the photographs that accompany my work, it is an order-of-magnitude less than the written stuff.

That’s not to say that I don’t care about images, merely that they are not usually the point. Yet, it is hard to imagine publishing without some kind of visual aid; there is a greater-than-the-sum thing about the way text and images play off one-another. Foood presented a new challenge, however, in that I just don’t have enough hours to tackle an on-demand still-life photography project every week.

In lieu of this, I was inspired to explore a medium I have become increasingly interested in over the last year: AI.

I’ve been mostly focused on Adobe Firefly, which belongs to the visual-art focused family of AI tools (Midjourney, DALL-E, Imagen, etc). You type in a prompt — “cartoon of a princess riding a cow in outer space” — and the LLM (short for Language Learning Model) will actually create novel artwork for you, training itself to do so by ingesting vast datasets of Adobe-owned and public-domain content.

In one sense, this is a new tool for an old process. Designing “prompts” for visual artists, and then working to refine their products for inclusion into larger pieces of intellectual property (books, advertisements, websites, apps) is something I’ve done for more than a decade as an art director and professional designer.

In another sense, this is entirely different, as the “artist” here is a piece of code with potentially unlimited artistic range but zero awareness and no conceptual accuracy. You get what you get, and there is no “explaining” to an AI. There is certainly no coercing or threatening it.

In this way, working with AI is mostly a “look ma, no hands” exercise. It may appear that you’re in control, but you really aren’t. No-one is. You just set some parameters, feed the model your prompt and then: hope for brilliance. More often, you get nonsense. In fact, the more specific your vision, the harder it is to get anything even remotely resembling it.

Looked at one way, this imprecision is actually a feature, and it turns the practice of “creating” images into something more akin to concepting art: your power as an author — if you can be called that — is both conceptual and curatorial: ideating, noticing details, inferring meaning, and refining vast, evanescent “maybes” into a singular primeval form… as opposed to the more technical and scrutable process of bringing a specific, contained vision to life.

Infuriatingly, brilliantly, the models often stumble over the most basic details. You may notice, for example, that the roast chicken at the top of this edition has, no wings, and some kind of pointy thigh-shaped appendage protruding from above its leg. It is exactly this wacky volatility that makes AI tools so fertile for experimental art, as the AI becomes an unwitting co-creator/conspirator in the artistic process.

To those who fear that AI will subsume and destroy the jobs of the writer, illustrator, photographer, etc, I say: “spend five minutes trying to get an AI to create anything more complex than a high-school history essay and your fears will be allayed. It is not so easy. I will concede that within the realm of purely technical content authoring this future is not far off — current LLMs seem to be able to do decent jobs of, for example, writing a 10 step tutorial for doing X thing within narrow context Y.

And yet: they get it wrong frequently enough that for now we still need a human on the other side of the screen. Someday soon, a single web-developer in India with an AI tool may replace a team of software engineers in Atlanta. Such is the way of the world. But to me, this is encouraging. It means that we become capable of reaching further and further, accomplishing what we thought, even in our own lifetimes, would be impossible. Every time a door closes another one opens, and for the curious, there will always be an open door beckoning.

I will leave you with a quote by Eric Hoffer, a migratory-worker and longshoreman who nearly lost his eye-sight, lived through the Depression, and went on to become a philosopher at UC Berkley.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Much love, talk soon,

Sasha

Parisians, I have discovered, know what to do with their hair. It is tucked behind their ears, perfectly combed, tied into a bun, with just a touch of spray or gel to hold it together. It is held, exactly in its place, by a perfectly positioned pin. It is styled. It is precisely shorn.

All Parisians, regardless of short-sightedness, have agreed to wear roundish, geometrically shaped glasses. They stride purposefully to and fro across their city in fashionably hideous sneakers, perfectly pressed tee-shirts, and blouses. They will probably not stop to talk to you, or even to regard you. They have places to be. They are constantly sipping coffee or clinking glasses of wine at one of six-trillion round white brasserie tables that dot the sidewalks here.

Hello again! It is Sasha Goldstein. It’s October, and despite all odds I’m still in Paris. Moreover, in recent weeks I have become acutely aware of certain things — things that never felt important before: the unruly blond hydra atop my head; the inevitable wrinkles that permeate my clothing; the facts of my beat-up shoes — there are holes (holes!) in their cloth uppers, and while they may have been white in pre-historic times they are now stained a mottled, splotchy grey. They are a pax upon my feet.

The precise French stylishness, which I obviously do not share an affinity for, extends to everything here. It is both accidental and intentional. A palpably radical vibe emanates from the hewn cobblestone roads and patchwork pavement, towering gothic churches, street art, enormous Versace billboards and relics of art-nouveau and avant-garde littered about — an amalgamation of layers upon layers of social, cultural, and actual construction. But the French, knowing they’ve had a good thing going, have erected an empire of “fashionably cool” atop this bedrock in the form of innumerable wine bars, restaurants, boutiques, and other such establishments. The density has given rise to a near-hyperbolic level of fragmentation and invention among mercantile institutions, one that only occurs at such scales. Some favourites: a bookstore selling “Mooks" (magazines published in book format); a sandwich shop specializing in gourmet Arayes (fried, stuffed pitas from Jordan); a gym built inside an old church, complete with stained-glass; a cafe operating out of small room, smooshed between two adjacent business, that was once a cordonnerie (boot repair shop).

Everything, from shop signage to hospitals to government office buildings, effuses aesthetic, as if some royal decree centuries ago forbade anything or anyone to be ugly or boring. This wouldn’t actually be out of character. The French regulate with a fervour unmatched by mortals elsewhere on this planet. They regulate radio music. They regulate grape harvest. They regulate the precise weights of their baguettes. They regulate their swimwear. They regulate vacations. They regulate their language. They regulate regulate regulate, with a special intensity, the ingress and egress of anything or anyone born outside of France. If it exists, the French regulate it.

100% fact: In the airspace above the wine-producing village of Chateauneuf du Pape, it is illegal to fly a UFO. After a man in the 1950s reported that he saw two figures emerge from a cigar-shaped UFO, the mayor passed a law forbidding any aliens to fly above the town. This law remains in place today. If you are wondering what they put in the drinking water out there, you are not alone.

The Fucking Croquembouche

Life here is full of circular logic that must be side-stepped rather than met head-on: upon my arrival to France I was denied a SIM card because in order to purchase one I needed to supply record of a French utility service, which I couldn’t set up without a French phone number.

After days of head-scratching and attempts to establish utility accounts, I happened into another telecom shop down the road, where the salesman barely even glanced up from his Nintendo Switch before selling me a card. I was out the door in 5 minutes.

There is a French aphorism that translates loosely to “if being ridiculous was a crime we’d all be in jail” and most of the French I have met seem painfully aware — even apologetic — of the abundant paradoxes, double negatives, and absurdities embedded in their way of life. From afar, French society always seemed to me dignified and resolute, maybe a little lofty, but up close the ethos seems to wobble on a knife’s-edge between pride, conviction, bemused apathy and chagrin. There is an insistent belief in greatness here, yet there is also a sincere, almost melancholic acknowledgement, any time the subject surfaces, that much of this greatness was born of another age; pining for la belle époque seems to be as popular here as commenting on the weather (the waxing and waning of the French empire is a fascinating subject, and one that explains much about the French themselves).

Of course, you would have to be blind to ignore the cultural legacy of this country, and many of France’s artefacts have become so entrenched in the cultural production of the world that we don’t even realize they were born here: Modern dining, existentialism, wine, feminism, and modern cinema can all be traced back to France at some point or another. Even the declaration of independence was based on ideas imported from Paris. John Oliver summed it up perfectly in a short bit following the 2015 Paris Attacks:

If you are in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck. Go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Gauloise cigarettes, Camus, camembert, madeleines, macarons, Marcel Proust and the fucking croquembouche. You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friend.”

Such cultural riches, both past and present, supply no end of opportunities for entertainment. I was perusing a small, unassuming gallery space recently and nearly fell over when the gallerist told me, yawning, that the small clay vase I had ambled past about twelve times so far was a Picasso. I also spent a few joyful hours observing the outrageous circus/spectacle/bedazzling extravaganza that is Paris Fashion Week. While I am by no measure important or well-connected enough to have been invited to any of the actual events, I discovered to my delight that the general Parisian rabble have turned spectating at the entrances and exits of runway shows into a sport. From the balustrades above the courtyard of the stately Palais du Tokyo, we watched, for nearly an hour, processions of elaborately-festooned socialites bristling with self-importance jostle to pose for throngs of paparazzi and camera-wielding fans. My favourite thing about the whole ordeal was how, from our vantage point above the frenzy, we could see the rest of Paris going about its evening, completely oblivious to the empires of influence being created and destroyed beneath our gaze.

Headcheese for dinner

Of course, in the context of arts I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the food here. It is excellent, but to say that food in France is excellent is such a reductive statement it is almost criminal. The food is not merely excellent… it is everything. Bien-étre (literally: well-being, but probably better translated to “lifestyle”) is the center of the French universe, and living well here revolves around egalitarian, abundant, and widespread access to good food. Really, really good food. This is not just an ideology or aspiration as it remains in the United States, but a dictate enforced by laws (of course) and embraced by culture. From my small studio apartment in the north-eastern corner of the city, I can throw a stone at six produce markets, two wine shops, a cheese shop, a butcher, three grocers, three pâtisseries (pastry shops), and three boulangeries (bakeries), each carrying the type and quality of products that only exist in high-end, expensive North-Americans food boutiques. I do not live in a monied area — Paris’s 20th arrondissement is decidedly working class — and yet, I can stroll into any shop and, for a few euros, fill my kitchen with enough beef tongue, tripe, chorizo ibérico, fresh bread, pasta, straight-from-the-farm produce, raw cheese, and goat or sheep’s-milk yogurt to feed a legion of starving sumo wrestlers.

Of course, there are good reasons for such abundance. France is blessed with fertile soil, plenty of arable land, and moderate weather. But more importantly, they have venerated, enshrined and coddled own agricultural (and gastronomic) institutions since the middle-ages. Long before America began swindling itself out of the nutrition and flavour with commercial feedlots, GMOs, and ultra-refined grains, France was developing small-scale, seasonal farming practices, levying protections on traditional preservation methods, and developing social and economic value systems to support its farms, fields, and the people who worked them. French lords were status-signalling with extravagant meals prepared by highly trained cooks, and French writers were publishing elaborate books of recipes long before Columbus began massacring natives in the New World.

All of this adds up to a country that has enjoyed centuries of the kind of cultural and political support for food that Americans have only developed in the past decade, without the headwinds of already-embedded, politically powerful mass-agriculture and chemically addictive fast-food. French children grow up eating veal and beef cheek in their public school cafeterias, and then become French adults who don’t bat an eyelid at the pig’s head for sale in their local grocery store. This is wonderful and in many ways edenic, no matter where your opinions lie on the question of headcheese for dinner.

Upon This Rock

I have been reading some illuminating memoirs — David Chang’s Eat a Peach (insightful first-person account of the birth of the Momofuku/Chang empire), Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw (sequel to the famed Kitchen Confidential and fascinating ex-post account of the publishing career it flung him into), Eric Ripert’s 32 Yolks (chilling chronicle of exactly how maniacal and F’d up some of chefdom's most celebrated figures were in the 90’s/early aughts), Marcus Samuelson’s Yes, Chef (I think you can detect a theme here), alongside a smattering of other food and restaurant-related books. I have also put down Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life (my second read, but it may as well be my first — such is Annie’s mastery of prose and penchant for spinning a yarn out of pure blissful nothingness) for just long enough to pick up a collection of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan called Pulphead. On the latter: I am floored. Stunned into submission. I can’t believe I am just discovering Sullivan now, and feel foolish for my blindness. He is a masterful storyteller, a bit of a cowboy, and exactly the kind of writer I love most; honest, unabashed, intelligent and thoughtful, disarmingly casual, yet so emphatically hilarious he has me laughing out loud as I read.

One snippet of his prose, taken from an essay titled “Upon This Rock” — a story about the author’s visit to a huge Christian Rock Festival — pure comic excellence:

The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip to you ain’t sayin’ where, and all they want to know is: Credit or debit, tiny sir?

In other news, I have just begun my second semester of training here in Paris. I am roasting whole racks of lamb, shelling langoustines, peeling potatoes, and studying scallops. Did you know that scallops have beards? Neither did I. Did you know that you can make scallop stock out of those beards? And that you can spoon said stock into scallop shells, thusly cooking your scallops in their own beard-broth? It is almost sadistic. It is too much for my lunkish brain to handle.

I am also learning some things about wine, trying to carve out time for extracurricular practice (nearly impossible), and beginning work on another literary project, which I hope to be ready to announce by next month.

Until then — á bientôt,

Sasha

P.S. A letter from E.B. White to the children of Troy, on libraries.

P.P.S. In case you’re wondering, good headcheese is fantastic. It’s essentially a terrine; herby, gelatinous, melt-in-your-mouth-porkiness, often served with very nice spicy, rustic mustard. If you can find it, I highly recommend a taste.

Yes chef.

Or more specifically, “Oui, chef.”

This is how our group of thirty uniformed-clad students is to acknowledge orders and questions — both inside and outside of the kitchen.

We are to arrive precisely ten minutes early to each class, so that roll call can begin. Each student receives standard-issue whites, a knife set, and a key-card with their name on it. Any deviation from rules, including tardiness or a soiled uniform, is punished with a mark of absence. We sit in exceptionally clean, brightly lit rooms on blue plastic chairs — the type that have writing surfaces attached by means of a thin metal bar, protruding from below the seat. For three hours at a time, stern-faced instructors lecture in French while demonstrating the preparation of classic French dishes from behind long stainless-steel and granite counters, pausing to allow a translator to explain their instruction in English, and allowing, briefly, for each of us to catch up in our furious scribbling.

After each lecture, another three hours with a different instructor. This time in a large, long kitchen-classroom, equally spotless; sixteen identical workspaces, each with a range, oven, and prep-station. We must prepare the dish we have just learned perfectly, using only handwritten notes and a list of ingredients. From the second we walk into the room, the chef bellows in a heavily accented mélange of English and French, urging us forward as if he is mush-mush-mushing a pack of huskies across the arctic circle. Only we aren’t huskies, we are three-legged, half-blind chihuahuas. We have no sense of direction, no animal instincts, no coordination, bearing, or poise. We are constantly behind; we run into each other, trip over our shoelaces, we cut and burn ourselves and our food. We race around the kitchen in half-panicked dazes.

The ritual repeats daily, as if we are rehearsing for a broadway show — probably a dark comedy. We bumble through our assigned tasks and the chefs act surprised and disappointed despite our obvious incompetence. They remind us, during our work and after we finish, that our workstations are not clean enough, our cuts not precise enough (we are to use rulers to measure them, and a single leek or tomato not perfectly square is grounds for reprimand). They contradict each-others’ instructions constantly, and even seem to disagree on such fundamentals as how to hold a knife. Yet, no matter how absurd the command, no objection will be sustained, only “yes chef.” Chef is the law, and the law must be obeyed unquestioningly.

At the end of each practical, we are timed and graded; marked on presentation, taste, seasoning, and organization. If the dish is incomplete, the student is failed. Everything must be perfect… yet, we are told that nobody is given a perfect mark — the message is clear: strive for perfection, have discipline, work very hard. If you fail, accept it and move on. If you succeed, don’t expect applause.

All of it — the rituals, the yelling, the gaslighting, the rushing, the obviously too-high standards — seem designed to instil the kind of resilience and blind discipline required for survival in the types of esteemed kitchens the school hopes to send students onwards to. Thankfully, the chef-instructors are not really psychopathic, although they sometimes play the part. Outside of the classroom they are jovial and kind, will wave at you with a quick “bonjour” as they rush by, then disappear into another practical room. Of course, this only adds to the notion that the whole thing is staged.

The speed and intensity of the coursework has been difficult to adjust to, but deep down, I love the challenge of the exacting standards and rigor. It is hard, but it is good hard; lungs-screaming-during-the-last-kilometer-of-a-marathon hard; so-focused-you-barely-notice-the-clock hard. I can feel myself slowly stretching. We students, all presumably having arrived here with some vestigial notion of competency, have learned — to put it bluntly — that we suck. We who gleefully roasted pork shoulders, baked sourdough, pressed tortillas or pickled vegetables for appreciative friends and family now know beyond any doubt that we have no real skills as professional cooks. I might be able to hack a flavourful meal out of whatever is in the fridge, but can I gut, scale, and filet a sole in two minutes flat? Nope. Dice ten kilos of onions without looking at my hands? Nope. Whip up a sabayon whilst trussing a chicken, blind-baking a quiche, preparing a tempura batter, and reducing a beurre-blanc? Not in my wildest dreams. The classes, which sometimes feel like slapstick re-imaginings of Top Chef episodes, have driven one thing home: we are all amateurs.

Beyond the Frustration Barrier

It is frustrating, oh-so-frustrating, to suck this much every day; to look forward to months, even to years of sucking. The school and its staff fail their students daily in this regard. The packed schedule and language barrier often make getting specific, nuanced feedback impossible, and the learning objectives are murky. Yet, despite these headwinds, each day's failure brings another lesson, and while before there was only a hazy notion of “better,” now it is an increasingly known quantity, a pinprick of light on a distant, dark horizon. We wander towards it, feeling our way forward as the landscape around us begins to emerge. It is like walking the Camino de Santiago or the Kumano Kodo. It is so far away, but every day we inch closer. The question I am asking myself now: how can I inch just one more inch? What can I do to get closer to the light?

Practice, certainly. Cooks talk about reaching a state where cooking is “in your bones” — and it is generally held that arriving at such a place requires many years of experience and long hours of devotion to the craft; a physical, autonomic set of reflexes more akin to those developed by professional athletes or performers than to the sharpened intellects of successful knowledge workers. As I continue to grapple with my own impatience to just “get on with it”, I am reminded of a TED talk by author Josh Kaufman, in which he discusses the “frustration barrier” at the top and bottom of the “S” shaped growth curve (one model used to chart proficiency against experience in skill development).

According to Kaufman, these levels — correlating to both beginner and expert — are the hardest to surpass, as the frustration involved in bungling your way through a new skill is actually a deterrent to putting in the practice needed to feel a little less silly every time you, say, pick up a chef’s knife.

His premise is that twenty hours of practice (not ten thousand, as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s oft-quoted-out-of-context book Outliers) is enough to get past a frustration barrier, which is probably true if you define a skill at its most practical atomic level (say, making an omelette or pedalling a bike), but less so for activities that require the coordination of many overlapping skills, like cooking or velodrome racing.

Yet if this is true, it explains why the amateur-to-professional chasm is so hard to cross: not only do you have to push past the frustration barriers found at the advanced levels of whatever skills you might already possess, but you must also develop entirely new skills; the net effect being a loss of any sense of competence you may have gained as an amateur. This experience is far more frustrating than never having been competent in the first place. It also speaks volumes to the cyclical nature of pursuing excellence… the moment you reach what you thought was a peak, another emerges behind it, each one more difficult and inconvenient to ascend. I’m thinking of Jiro Ono in Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

For a truly wonderful meditation on this subject set against an entirely different backdrop, I can’t recommend enough Patrick Imbert’s Summit of the Gods, a French animated film based on Jiro Taniguchi’s Japanese Manga series, depicting a young Japanese reporter’s ascent of Mt. Everest as he tries to solve one of the greatest mountaineering mysteries of all time. As much as I enjoyed nerding out on the actual climbing in the film (it is beautifully reproduced, even down to the choreography of the individual moves) — it is the story that is compelling, and its inquiry into the meaning of climbing and mountaineering.

In the final scene of the movie, the narrator Fukomachi answers the film’s central question, posed off-camera:

“Why climb? I know why. There doesn’t have to be a reason. For some, mountains aren’t a goal, but a path. And the summit, a step. Once there, all that’s left is to keep going.”

Neckerchiefs

In the tradition of all schools with pedigrees to uphold, Le Cordon Bleu is a little full of itself. In the lobby (open to the public) they sell branded smocks and bags and run afternoon cooking classes for wealthy British urbanites on vacation. The hallways, locker rooms, and waiting rooms are decorated with photographs of famous chefs associated with Le Cordon Bleu like Julia Child, alongside inscriptions describing, in French, La Gastronomie Francais. The message, implicit here and in every classroom and lecture, is that we are not just cooking, but participating in a tradition of service, art, and culture that has existed since the middle-ages. To ignore that importance, to treat any aspect of the work, the ingredients, or the school with disregard — even a transgression as simple as a wrinkled shirt or a missing neckerchief — is not simply a careless act, it is a middle finger to the entire institution of cooking, and a dismissal of anyone who has ever devoted their lives to the craft. While it may seem a little excessive, to me this gravitas and deeply held respect — a collective kneeling at the alter of the culinary arts and all they represent — is wonderful both because it is so distinctly European and because, in a world where we lionize a few famous chefs but generally dismiss or pity cooks, it elevates food-service from an abysmally-paid, quotidian vocation at the bottom of the social and cultural value-chain to a position right at the top — as important as art or social service; something not merely essential and desirable, but a critical element of the restaurant, a third space to be preserved, invested in, and protected. In my world, we always ate well at home but even casual restaurants were regarded as once-in-a-while indulgences. This reverence for the restaurant and all who contribute to them is inspiring.

Government Holidays & Alain the Harley Guy

Outside of school, life is occupied by other forms of labor. Uniforms must be washed and pressed, home study completed, and a never-ending litany of visa and social-security related paperwork must be downloaded, translated, notarized, signed, filed, organized, and mailed — by internet, post, and carrier pigeon — to a quintillion government and pseudo-government agencies. The French love paperwork. They are mired in process and bureaucracy. Their systems are obscure, vague, often unreasonable. Rules must not only be observed perfectly, but rigorously researched and interpreted (the French reject anything and everything non-French, including, obviously, English). When you have finally decoded the impossibly complex combination of correct forms to file and government agencies to address them to, you will encounter months, or even years-long delays due to the never-ending, round-robin holiday schedule of French bureaucrats (3 months in the summer, intermittently throughout the rest of the year).

Beyond official matters, the ordinary work of existing here is often punishing and onerous. Navigating the healthcare system is so difficult that many simply opt out, and renting an apartment can be costly and time consuming as achieving a doctorate in most countries.

On the subject of apartments, I am on my fourth. For my first month, I spent brief periods between exertion, sleeping and waking in a small 1-bedroom flat amidst boxes, peeling wallpaper, old junk furniture and piles of rubble. There was a bed and a dining table. The toilet usually worked, and there was an old sink in the demolished room where the kitchen had been. Unable to find a long-term bed before I arrived, I had negotiated a sublet from an Argentinian couple that owned the apartment and would be on holiday. They had planned a renovation, and plans changed at the last minute, leaving a large overlap with my stay. Luckily, the wifi was functional, so after returning from class each night I would sit at a table next to the router — the only place with a signal — and work. The contractor was a paunchy Frenchman named Alain who wore an old Harley tee-shirt nearly every time I saw him, and always spoke to me in rapid-fire, thickly-accented French despite my obvious incomprehension. He worked while I did, often late into the evening, muttering and swearing to himself quietly. Occasionally these monologues would crescendo into paroxysms of elaborate French curse-words accompanied by loud clangs, bangs, or thuds. We suffered through my first humid nights in Paris together.

As renovations finally rendered my urban campsite uninhabitable, I moved into a basement en-suite with a narrow window on the south side of town for a week, then to a furnished studio back on the north side — another short-term sub-lease — where I briefly luxuriated in the presence of a washing machine and a working shower. Earlier this month I moved yet again, this time across the Canal Saint-Martin to a third small studio with a dysfunctional fridge and plumbing issues, a privilege for which I pay the maximum legally-allowable rent. I will be here until I find a new home.

I fall asleep around midnight each night and often awake in darkness. I ride my bike, forty minutes to school through deserted streets, then home again afterward, stopping for groceries, coffee, or a quick meal before returning to my apartment to begin work for the evening. When I can find the time, I catch up on sleep.

Without a doubt, the Sisyphean effort required to abide here has taken a toll. I remain ring-side, ready for the next round, thanks largely to the support of a good therapist, friends, and family from afar. To be on the receiving end of so many votes of confidence and love is a profound reminder: no demonstration of care to another is ever too small to be worthwhile, and one never knows how a kind word or gesture might brighten someone’s darkness.

So it goes. Mostly, I am tired, sometimes overwhelmed, usually distracted, and doing my best to take it all in as I zigzag back and forth across the city. In rare moments of quietude, I am present and speechless. The charm of Paris abounds. To sit on a curb beneath a 400-year-old church, watching electric scooters hum back-and-forth under streetlights and listening to French and Arabic revelry spill from bistros onto cobblestone streets, is to feel, palpably, what it is like to live in two eras at once. To recline at an ornate, circular, street-side brasserie table with a shot of cheap espresso in the morning or glass of iridescent wine in the evening; to bite into a still-warm baguette outside of a crowded boulangerie — these are diurnal acts of goodness overflowing, even bursting, with centuries of culture. The scents of tobacco and grape must and the faint tang of the sweat and perfumes of two million people hanging in heavy air are constant reminders of the passionate energy of this place. I love the primeval, turbulent, beautiful chaos of it all.

In moments like these, a truth, intermittently lost and then found again, comes flooding back to me. Why I am here: to learn, to metamorphose, to search for something missing. It is hard, but I knew it might be. In such a world, to endure so that we might strive again tomorrow, is precisely the point.

Moves are funny, hellish things.

Halfway between packaging one’s entire life into a series of bags and boxes, and unpacking that life again somewhere else, lies a vast field of chaos.

Hello from deep in the deranged void of Just Moved To A Foreign Country. It is evening in France. I am tired, oh so tired, and very, very late sending this letter.

Much has transpired in the past eight weeks. Visas have been stamped, belongings carefully squirreled away, customs cleared, rooms rented. I have, as briefly mentioned at the end of May’s Night Letter, just hauled my expectant body across the Atlantic Ocean. I will be here for nine months.

What I did not allude to in said letter was why, or specifically where. The where: Paris. The why: to study — in French parlance — gastronomie. The second collection of whys (Why culinary school? Why Paris? Why now? — or to put it more crassly: “What the hell?”) is slightly more complicated. In fact, it felt sufficiently complicated to warrant a short essay, which I’ve included here.

Cooking, My Stupid Soul-Mate

I began cooking for myself as most people do, at eighteen, shortly after I moved away from home for the first time. In the tradition of college students throughout history, I ate stale leftover pizza and Kraft Dinner until shame and frugality compelled me to begin visiting grocery stores and preparing meals. It was fun. I liked exploring recipes, the thoughtful selection of dinner, the alchemy of watching raw ingredients transform themselves into complete meals, and the rush of pride and satisfaction when a new recipe yielded a complete dish. I cooked enthusiastically, regularly, but not skillfully.

I’m not really sure when cooking changed from an entertaining pastime to an all-consuming obsession, but I think it was at some point during my early twenties. At twenty-three in Indonesia, I remember meeting a surfer — this Irish guy — who was executive cheffing for some famous Australian restauranteur. He had just helped open a small cafe near my house. I remember my first visit, oblivious. I was only there for coffee. I ordered an egg sandwich as an afterthought. The dish, delivered so casually that in hindsight it was a little ironic, arrived unadorned, centered neatly on its small white plate. I took a bite. Chaos ensued. My mind was bewildered. It knew that I was chewing on bread but my taste buds were telling it that it was biting into a pillow covered in a caramelized, buttery, crunchy sheath. The soft eggs underneath effused egginess. No cheese, soft fatty bacon, creamy aioli, piquant sambal, a touch of rocket. Each ingredient was so fresh it tasted as if it had been harvested just for this sandwich. It was a masterpiece between slices. I left that encounter changed, although I didn’t know it at the time. To be able to create food like that seemed like a supernatural endowment.

Years later in Seattle, I was working for a gigantic tech firm (rhymes with “positron”) and desperately needing something to tether me to life outside the tech bubble. I was new to town, had made a friend who was a sous-chef at a hip, upmarket beef restaurant (the kind that has its own farm and runs a butchery program). One night, I asked him if I could help cook for a dinner party he was hosting in his tiny apartment. We cooked together for an entire day, me mostly trying to stay out of his way while cleaning, chopping, washing, and mixing; scrutinizing his every move out of the corners of my eyes. I was enthralled. He moved like a ballet dancer: careful, precise; never rushing, rarely stopping. By the end of the evening we had fed twenty, maybe thirty people — all strangers. Everyone was gushing, ebullient, fed, grateful. The rush of having been responsible for pleasure on such a scale was dizzying.

I left Seattle and big tech behind, but cooking followed me like a salacious shadow. I was completely ensorcelled — devoured anything I could find in the library or on the internet. The universe obliged and brought me into contact with more food people. I shamelessly emulated them, studied earnestly, spent evenings and weekends experimenting on my own. I learned about lactic-acid development and lava-cake theory and spherification and the Maillard reaction; dry-roasting and salt-curing and farce-meat. Learned that there are over 200 different varieties of asparagus, all of ‘em different. Learned the difference between Mirepoix and Sofrito. At one point, I even took a second part-time job doing entry-level evening work in kitchens — first at a small Irish joint, then at the wine bar next-door.

In hindsight, the social immersion and the learning of the basic patterns really opened doors for me. In a relatively short amount of time, I came to learn enough that I could go off-script, invent — say — an interesting recipe for bolognaise or ragu or ramen from scratch; look at a template and understand how to riff on it. Cooking became improv jazz; a new creative outlet, but one with a physicality that was tactile and intensely sensory, rather than the pure intellectualism of design work. It was revelatory.

Yet, the delta between my skills and ambitions was vast. My food was usually good, occasionally great, never exceptional. I felt uncomfortable — even a little guilty — about my infatuation. “I love food” is perhaps as uninformative and reductive a statement as “I love travel” (or indeed, “I love breathing”). Food, being one of the most universal objects of adoration on the planet, and food such an obvious thing to be loved, to be a reasonably adjusted human and to love food — even to be a self-proclaimed “foodie” — seems nearly besides the point. As my pantry began to resemble something out of a Réne Redzepi cookbook, cooking came to occupy a murky hinterland between after-hours pastime and professional vocation. I considered culinary school, but such a commitment felt so unfathomable that it remained mostly the domain of my daydreams.

Then I moved to the mountains: a land of bland produce, expensive groceries, and abundant distractions. I quit more-or-less cold turkey; decided to funnel my time and energy into other things. Had to acknowledge that there are only so many hours in the day and just couldn’t justify spending all of them in the kitchen.

Time passed. I cooked, I ate. But outside of the occasional dinner party I didn’t cook. Not much at least. I was missing the energy and ambition of the kitchens and people back in Seattle and Vancouver. It was convenient, because my career was demanding and I had been cooking so much that it had been impacting other parts of my life.

So I lost a few years. It was good. I was good. I had deep, difficult work to keep me occupied. I was learning how to show up consistently, put intention and discipline into my work, let go of my ego, trust process, and be accountable to long feedback loops. Much growth came from this period. I thought about cooking sometimes, wondered if I would ever get serious about it again. I kinda-sorta forgot what it was like. But the memory never fully disappeared.

Then at the end of 2022 I hit some rough concrete — lost my job, broke my elbow in a climbing accident, found myself burnt out, reduced to a smouldering pile of cinders — fertile soil for some soul-searching. I did what I usually do when life feels full of big, emphatic question marks: I took a long walk alone in a strange place, drank a lot of coffee, talked to strangers, moved my bones, ate everything I could find. It was balm for the spirit. I met more food people: service folks, a mezcal importer, a recovering chef, an upstart caterer. I thought a lot about how life is very long and very short at the same time and how “maybe later” is dangerous because it’s fuzzy and forces nothing, while conversely the accountability of “now” is a kind of insurance against the unknown desires and circumstances of a future self.

More than anything, with this flooding of stimuli I felt the urge to cook again; to truly and deeply engage with the craft and matter of food. I felt it despite years inert, despite committed relationships with other pursuits and another career. The compulsion was no weaker for having lain dormant for so long.

Here’s the thing: in a lot of ways, cooking is stupid. It's stupid in the way art is stupid. It doesn't solve big problems for the world. It's indulgent. It’s hard. The hours are long. The pay is shameful. But after so many years spent in a state of resistance in service of reason, more resistance begins to seem stupid too. To quote an oft-quoted aphorism: the heart wants what the heart wants.

So I decided to bring cooking forcefully back into my life, lest a future self look back wistfully on a lifetime spent sidelining such a powerful attraction; in Paris for no other reason than to plonk my butt down as geographically close to the institution of gastronomy as possible, and to do it in such a way that maximizes accountability and puts definitive edges around the effort (I can neither quit early nor prolong the effort without a great deal of cost and difficulty).

To say that this has been disruptive in nearly every way is an extraordinary understatement. Simply arriving at the starting line has taken an act of god. I’ve felt (am still feeling) all the feels: excitement, fear, anxiety, apprehension, doubt. Yet, on a fundamental level this also feels like a very right thing at a very right time; I have no kids, no debt, am single, have energy, motivation, a few shreds of humility. I plan to complete my studies in the spring. Beyond that: nothing. Not the tiniest glimmer of an iota of a plan. My mind and arms are open. As when navigating in the backcountry: climb to a high point, survey the landscape, choose a sensible direction, continue moving.

Of the writing: as ever, it continues. The work may suffer, get eaten by the dog, stuck in the printer, lit on fire and dunked in the toilet… but it will persist.

From the first iteration of these letters:

I don't have the answers, but I can share the questions, the process, the progress, the experiments, and the moments of “Aha!” as I continue to write and create and work it all out. It will be vulnerable, maybe a little weird. It might digress, it might ramble a bit, and it might mutate a few times before it finds its voice.

So in many ways, this episode is right on brand. I am still figuring out how to create in the service of others, how to apply serious rigour to that work, how to build a fulfilling, meaningful life on my own terms; how to navigate without a map. Sometimes to take a step forwards you have to take a step back.

Until next month,

XO, Sasha

P.S. There is a wonderful (short) essay by C.K. Dixon about changing careers called Climbing the Wrong Hill. The analogy doesn’t apply perfectly, but I think about it often. If you can relate at all to such stuff, I highly recommend it.