Cooking Classes

I admit it—I’m fudging it a little. After all, there are no towns in the U.S. (nor, likely, the world) that send letters off with the postmark “Kitchen.” I’ve spent the summer making various small trips, none of which was truly postcard-worthy on its own. Yet, as wide a spread as Los Angeles, New York, and my home base of Boston might be, the kitchens I cooked in seemed an appropriately singular subject for my missive. I’ve never been an awfully talented cook. Actually, scratch that—“awful” is probably the right word. Before my freshman year, most of my meals were prepared for me. Once I came to Harvard, though, living on my own forced my hand. Despite the exorbitant prices at Broadway Market, self-preparation was usually the easiest way to feed myself while avoiding HUDS. Self-sustenance was definitely a useful skill to learn, but something was missing. This isn’t a postcard about how I learned to cook; I’m still pretty bad at it. Let’s just say that the satisfaction of having made them myself didn’t make my dishes taste any better. But this summer I found that I wasn’t the only new cook. I used my travels this summer to reconnect with my high school friends. The first I visited was living and working at his college, the California Institute of Technology. The night I spent there was eerily reminiscent of freshman year: The two of us were left to our own culinary devices. I half expected us to use blowtorches to grill burgers or a Rube Goldberg device to flip pancakes—this was Caltech, after all. But instead, my friend and I got up early to make breakfast the old-fashioned way. There was no fusion-powered dishwasher or chromium frying pan—just the two of us, some elbow grease, and some bacon grease. Caltech’s ubiquitous kitchens (one per hallway) are really the centers of its house life. So, as we toasted bread like mere mortals, I met a number of my friend’s classmates. Fascinating as they all were, it was really my friend whom I got to know that day—his cooking skills were a new side to him that I had never seen in high school physics. Even when we lost an eggshell in the pan and broke the yolk trying to fish it out, it didn’t matter. We both laughed. After Pasadena, I took a road trip to see another of my old pals, this one at the United States Military Academy. Two friends and I packed up a barbecue and drove to West Point, where our cadet was in the midst of summer field training. It wasn’t important that none of us knew how to grill—or, rather, it didn’t occur to us. First, the barbecue needed assembly. Before we could concoct our meal, we would have to build our kitchen from the dozens of loose nuts, bolts, screws, and rods in the box. Our friend wowed us with his military-issue resourcefulness (and Swiss army knife, which included a screwdriver). It shaped up to be a pretty big grill, so we all had to work together to hold pieces in place at awkward angles in midair. The teasing and cooperation that permeated the Catskill silence was more candid than anything from our sheltered Boston suburb. Of course, after all that work, one of the pieces was missing, but we put our heads together and fashioned a new one from an aluminum tin. (It stood up to the propane for almost three minutes.) Then on went the hamburgers and hot dogs. They too were mutilated a bit when we poked them to check the pinkness of the interior, but after running through a few packages of meat, we four grill novices had it down to a science. As we lay back and munched on our fare doused with condiments courtesy of the mess hall, we all had the same accomplished looks on our faces. And the bacon, toast, eggs, burgers, and dogs all tasted as if they had come from a gourmet restaurant. For me, the missing ingredient was company—and not just because it meant that I personally didn’t do all the cooking. Regardless of our friendship’s span, eating our way through a shared experience memorializes it—and my sous-chef—in my heart (and stomach) for far longer than the meal. Imagine my delight, then, when I got my rooming assignment for next year. While wondering how I would make friends with my new housemates, I got my answer from the online floor plan: right down the hall, we’ve got a kitchen. Nathaniel S. Rakich ’10 is a Crimson editorial editor in Cabot House.