Serve It Forth

On getting back to cooking--and writing--for an audience

This past Tuesday, I walked into a room and talked for an hour about my dissertation in front of a committee of readers, three of whom had worked with me since the beginning, one of whom was an outside reader fresh to the text. Though I had anguished over the potential direction such a conversation would take for weeks (or, let’s be honest, years), I was thrilled to find that much of their feedback focused on the future of my work—the transition it would eventually take from graduate thesis to published book. They assured me that there was indeed an audience for what I was putting out there, and they even spent some time talking about the nitty-gritty of the right imprint to potentially pitch to. Instead of verifying my deep-seated imposter syndrome, they encouraged me to strip out unnecessary quotes from secondary scholars and excessively theoretical asides and to bolster my own voice and argument with a new sense of authority. To use a food analogy, I cut the mustard; it’s now up to me to own my voice, to go forth and establish myself in the larger conversation of American food history.

It’s a strange thing, to go from imagining the worst possible reception for your work from a group of four to imagining the best-possible reception from an audience of unknown readers. Part of the reason I started this Substack was to force myself to release work to the world before I had total confidence in it. Now that I’m gaining some distance from the event, I keep thinking about what I found most painful about the dissertation-writing experience. It wasn’t the research per se—countless syllabi and exam lists of rich secondary sources, generous archivists and librarians, and compassionate friends and colleagues pointed me over and over again in the right direction. Nor was it necessarily the writing and revising, though I have learned the hard way that I need to be more rigorous with my proofreading. Rather, the part I found most exhausting was constantly feeling as though I was in dialogue only with myself, with the imagined voices of my committee, or with the chorus of imagined critiques I might receive. I assumed that the audience I was writing for was sharpening their knives to have at my prose, to savage any attempts I might make towards an original contribution. I never imagined that they might be hungry to savor what I had to offer, or believe in the inherent value of my perspective. The time I wasted assuming the worst, imagining the least receptive of audiences, could’ve made two or three dissertations extra just for kicks. So why did I do it? Because I assumed that anything I was making for the first time would be inherently, fatally flawed—unfit for consumption. I didn’t even stop to think that what I was doing was learning how to cook for an audience.

When we invent dishes at home, we have a limited audience in mind, sometimes even smaller than that of a dissertation committee. We start with a single provocation—a beautiful pork chop with a thick rind of fat, a bundle of aromatic greens, a perfectly ripe peach—and start to put elements together into something that converts the impulsive into the edible. The peach is too soft to be cooked, so it must be used raw, sliced thin and drizzled with a light vinaigrette that incorporates any juices from the cutting board. Greens are torn rather than sliced, to give them a hand-hewn aesthetic and to break along their natural fault lines. The pork should be cooked to medium-rare, but a sliver of its rind should be cut off and crisped separately as a garnish for maximum textural contrast. We put things together on our own aesthetic criteria—what we think tastes good—but we also anticipate how those elements will resonate through another’s eyes and taste buds. I know that my daughter relishes the opportunity to layer ingredients as she desires, composing faces in her dish before consuming them with gusto. I can’t expect her to assemble the perfect bite, so I yield some control to her interpretation. But I have enough confidence to know that each element can sing on its own, even if my ideal presentation would be a more composed experience. Moreover, I can sit back at the end of a meal and see that everything was tasted, everything was savored, and nothing was deemed entirely unnecessary to the experience.

When writing, as with cooking, having an audience in mind isn’t necessarily a problem, especially if you can think of the audience as a reason to move your work forward. Even as graduate students are generally told to go forth with a sense of total mastery—each of us being the lone expert on our topic—it helps to imagine the potential positive reaction on the other side of our project. This is not part of the recommended process, as students are routinely told over and over again that they’re not supposed to be writing a book, a piece of advice designed to help students cross the finish line of crafting a work of research without worrying exactly what it will do or who it will engage. (As someone once said, “With a dissertation, you have something to prove. With a book, you have something to say.”) Yet feeling that you have the power to have something to say, and moreover that your voice matters, is a far more compelling argument to embark on seven years of work than an exercise in self-determination. It took me far too long to realize that the desire to satisfy an audience was not necessarily a problem; in fact, it might be the greatest impetus I have to what I do next—to researching, writing, and revising with my ideal reader in mind.

A quick note: now that my weeks are less occupied with dissertation research, I’ll be moving the general pub date for posts to Fridays, starting with the next post on Friday April 26th. So stay tuned for that!

Recommended reading: Two fantastic pieces I’m so happy to move forward this week. First, this oh-so-important expose of Trader Joe’s via Adam Reiner at Taste, exposing their regular practice of ripping off their supposed partners in building an inclusive food culture. Secondly, I’ve been avidly following The Guardian’s coverage of David Chang’s attempt to trademark “chile crunch,” a condiment that has significant meaning in the AAPI and a foundational product of many immigrant entrepreneurs. While Chang seems to have rolled back his efforts, an overdue acknowledgement of the community he claims to respect so deeply, it should give everyone sincere pause about the implications of the trademarking of historically resonant ingredients and dishes.

The Perfect Bite: The French Fries and martini I enjoyed the day of my defense were perfect and thoroughly Proustian in their power, but I don’t need to extol their virtues any more on this platform. Instead, I’m happy to celebrate the simple power of the drink that followed during my celebratory meal with family—the “Ranch Water” cocktail at bartaco, a local chain of taco restaurants. A squeeze of lime juice, a generous portion of their in-house tequila, and a topping of Topo Chico mineral water (which I never fully appreciated until the great KC Hysmith turned me onto it, and now would like to buy by the case), it makes for the beautifully balanced, totally refreshing drink.

Cooked & Consumed: The morning of my defense, I made the omelette from The Bear, which I now consider a masterpiece of intentional cooking and a bit of a good-luck charm whenever I need it. Though I’m happy to sub out goat cheese for the Boursin and am more than a little impatient with the egg straining, the experience of eating it still offers me a transcendent moment of self-care. (With the side bonus of having more than a few sour cream and onion potato chips to munch on in the interim…) Using it to demarcate all future major life events.