soup

Last weekend I made French onion soup*. This is my way of creeping back into cooking after basically retreating into heating up and taking out since mid September. This soup was one of the first from scratch things I learned how to cook. I bought Julia Child's French Cook cookbook. This isn't the two volume version with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholt. No, this was the little paperback based on the tv show. As I remember, the recipe is different in the paperback. I think that it calls for thyme or bay leaf or something. In the Mastering the Art version (the one I use now, I've got both volumes), the soup is basically onions, beef broth, a little salt, a little sugar, a little flour, and some vermouth. The trick is waiting the carmelization process out. When I first made the soup, I'd stand over it, worrying the onions along. Sometimes I'd just not be able to stand it another minute and dump the broth on the not-quite-golden onion slices. The soup always came out ok, but never as good as it can be when the onions get good and browned. So now, I find other stuff to do while they're in the pan. I read. I fold clothes. I wash dishes. I swing back and check out the pan and give it a stir every five or ten minutes. After a while, it's ready to go.

I know things about cooking now that I simply couldn't have at 20 or whenever I bought that little paperback. Some of the things I know, I know because of that book (soon covered in grease and gravy and egg and who knows what). But many of the things I know, I know simply because I've been cooking for a long time now. It's sheer practice, making mistakes, learning to think my way around fuckups or missing ingredients. My skills are the result of both theory (any new recipe) and practice (every dish executed).

I'm thinking about soup because I have to develop next semester's class on writing and writing is a lot like cooking. It's theory (the nuts and bolts and widgets of written English) and it's practice (every written communication). But since I'm trying to teach students how to write sort of formal prose, I have to figure out how to write the recipes . . .

Oh, forget this metaphor. I'm having the worst time trying to think about this class. The soup was great. Also great is Harold Pinter's Nobel speech. This man can write. My students, well, some are sort of interested in writing. But I'm having this incredibly hard time getting the writerlyness about writing across to them. For one thing, there's this whole problem of patience. Some find it difficult to understand why someone would write something that's fifty pages long, when you could say the same thing in a paragraph. The point that fifty pages make possible something that a single paragraph doesn't is probably the root of my failure to communicate.

* I made gingerbread too.