Dilettantism and duty
One thing I’ve noticed since from the beginning is how difficult is to make a dish exactly the same way as the previous time. It is quite like those statistics where the probability of something happening two times in a row equals some number preceded by a huge number of zeros.
We forget and change things, there are many steps and details all along the road, many quantities, times, and shapes. Usually I achieve a wonderful result on the first time and then ruin everything in the next and some following ones, not necessarily in a row. Usually we want to try something different or a different ingredient. And usually we have to bear the charge for the risk taken.
The biggest challenge of being an incidental cook is that cooking good is cooking every day, cooking as an obligation, never changing even the smallest detail. Constancy here is the virtue. That's the reason why the best meals were those used to be made once by those Tias Anastácias (a house servant from Monteiro Lobato’s stories, just like Mammy in "Gone with the Wind") and their inexorable duties of cooking day after day for the whole family, repeating the same recipes year after year with no room for errors or any ingenuity.
But thinking better about it, maybe that’s exactly what hobbies are intended for in modern societies: to free our adventurous spirit without risking the accurate performance of our day-by-day workings.
We forget and change things, there are many steps and details all along the road, many quantities, times, and shapes. Usually I achieve a wonderful result on the first time and then ruin everything in the next and some following ones, not necessarily in a row. Usually we want to try something different or a different ingredient. And usually we have to bear the charge for the risk taken.
The biggest challenge of being an incidental cook is that cooking good is cooking every day, cooking as an obligation, never changing even the smallest detail. Constancy here is the virtue. That's the reason why the best meals were those used to be made once by those Tias Anastácias (a house servant from Monteiro Lobato’s stories, just like Mammy in "Gone with the Wind") and their inexorable duties of cooking day after day for the whole family, repeating the same recipes year after year with no room for errors or any ingenuity.
But thinking better about it, maybe that’s exactly what hobbies are intended for in modern societies: to free our adventurous spirit without risking the accurate performance of our day-by-day workings.
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