Musings: Guilt is not an Ingredient

The most widely used ingredient in North America is guilt. There’s hardly a dish cooked without it. Pepper… salt…thyme — they’re the standards, maybe a little curry powder or, for them as likes things hot, a couple of good pinches of cayenne. We go through the recipes like astronauts at countdown, checking and double checking, how many teaspoons in half a millilitre, how medium is an onion and is a cup still a cup even if it’s made of glass?

These are all the small guilts, the little worries that are as basic to all kitchens as the kitchen sink. Butter is a medium guilt, along with the extra-virgin olive oil (“ours just says Virgin, will that be okay? “) and “room temperature” — how do you take the temperature of a room, with a thermometer tucked under the carpet?

Finally we get to the really big guilts, like garlic, because somehow we know that nobody eats it, despite the indisputable fact of 3000 tons being sold in B.C. last year. So we sneak it in to our cooking, with our eyes closed, as though it were an accident (“my hand slipped”).

Wine is a big guilt (” will they know it had a screwtop?”) and from then on things get worse and worse and guilts of all shapes and sizes accumulate like odd socks in the laundry basket. The china’s wrong, the salt isn’t sea salt, the peppercorns don’t come from Madagascar but from Kitchener, Ontario, and the pastry, the bread, the steak and even the tomatoes just don’t look like they should. Neither do we, we look in the mirror, none of us is centrefold material and we feel guilty about it, every minute until the guests go home.

Pretty soon it becomes a habit, something to put on, like an apron, every time we go into the kitchen, and we look for ways to reinforce it, to starch it stiff, this terrible guilt. One of the easiest, and least recognized of guilts is the kitchen work ethic, which simply says that if you haven’t worked yourself stupid, spent hours worrying about the shopping for dinner and even more hours peeling, chopping, rolling, dicing, icing, stuffing, shaping and peering into the oven, then dinner will be worthless, and our friends and families, those world renowned gourmets with palates more delicate than nightingales and tastebuds as sensitive as the latest radar detectors, they will know and they will tell, so that we will permanently be branded as uncaring, incompetent and socially unacceptable cooks.

The basic truth is that most guests are simply grateful. They get a free dinner, no dishes to wash and the chance to go through your bathroom cupboard. They have a mild case of guilt, about things they don’t think they should eat (like the aforementioned garlic) but just so long as you don’t tell them they can live with it. That’s what foreign names are all about — nobody wants to eat snails, but everybody loves escargots. Liver is almost universally unpopular, but call it foie gras and you’ll get rave reviews. Meat loaf is not acceptable, but the same ingredients called pate — that’s a matter for compliments.