Sizzling™
Cooking as feeling
We are past Memorial Day and trending upwards into the blistering months of crop tops and flops, ketel one vodka ads, and the only season worth being a pretentious verb. Where shall you summer this 4th? The city is slightly feral in a crazed, passionate way when temps rise above 80°f/27°c1 that I absolutely love.
There is nothing more classically American during this time than a nice flame-grilled burger slipped between two toasty, well sesame-d buns. Or a charred hot dog rotating ends while the juices drip down into the grates, buns awaiting nearby – giddy with carb-o delight. Summer is sex and food reflects. We are what we eat.
Grilling is inherently cool. There’s something masculine about it that has never quite lost its touch, in a Tom Cruise-esque sense while living in a Timmy Chalamet-centered sensibility. Hunky and timeless. Meat slabs and Americana.
No, grilling is not a Niche Fringe concept.
What grilling does conjure up is Sound and Smell. As in, Sizzle and Smoke. A rather lukewarm take is that you can know how to cook and not how to grill and vice-versa. (Primarily because turning the grill on is half the battle.) Cooking can be inventive and brilliant, but it can also be methodical and tedious. Prep work. Spices. Garnishes. Multi step. Multi layered.
Personally I love to chef it up in the kitchen but recognize the barrier to entry for cooking as a Labor of Love vs one of necessity.
On the other hand, Grilling is a pursuit of cooking as Feeling. You get some meat. You sprinkle salt and pepper on it. You rub it in. You crack open a cold one. You wait. You take the meat. You chuck it on the grill. You watch it go up in flames, charring in all the right places. Sizzzlllling. All the while, you’ve been enjoying the sun on your skin.
What if we considered cooking as one simple thing: going from nothing to the sound of the Sizzle.
As Julianne Moore might say in her darkly brilliant yet disturbing turn as Gracie,
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.”
Food as Community
If food is community, which it is, then the grill is the ultimate avenue of connection. Who grills alone? Bruh.
This poses another question. Have our collective skills as cooks gone up or down in the millennial+ generations? It’s hard to say. We must consider the dissolution of the nuclear family, the rise of fast casual, the grind™.
In Michael Pollan’s 2013 book “Cooked”, he discusses how cooking connects us and how cooks stand between nature and culture. He also highlights that the average American in 2013 spent half the time on all food prep (27 min a day) compared to their parents generation. 10+ years later, I can’t imagine that number has gone up.
We are cooking less and therefore chilling less. Goddamn we need to be chilling more.
To revisit the cooking can be intimidating point above, a previous generation had the courage to “Flip” a la Julia Child. To quite Pollan:
When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show (or, as Julia pronounced it, “the poh-TAY-toh show!”), one of the episodes that Meryl Streep recreates brilliantly on screen. Millions of Americans of a certain age claim to remember Julia Child dropping a chicken or a goose on the floor, but the memory is apocryphal: what she dropped was a potato pancake, and it didn’t quite make it to the floor. Still, this was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.
Let’s pay homage to Julia and watch her OG 1:40 glory of flipping and dropping a potato on TV in the ‘60s.
Two things to note
“I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should’ve… but the only way you learn how to flip things is just to flip them” (Julia dolling life advice vis-à-vis potato)
“We don’t care about calories, we know that potatoes don’t have too many” (potatoes hit different in the ‘60s)
A re-frame
When something is too planned, too measured, too perfect, it sucks the fun out of it. Hence, cooking > baking. But even cooking vs cooking – you can get stuck before you even start with the recipe instructions. How about a bit more feeling.
The 1960s brought us the flip. But the 2020s needs a new concept tailor made for ASMR and our fracked minds.
How about that beautiful sound when hot oil and fresh ingredients hit the pan/wok/dutch oven/skillet/grill and the world goes up in beautiful flames. The fears fade away. All that’s left is you and the cooking utensil in your hand. Tongs maybe. Sizzle sizzle. It’s the summer of sizzle.
You are welcome. You have now unlocked the mindset of what cooking should be. A journey. Step 1: Sizzle. Step 2: Feel. Step 3: Eat.
“Dude, I’m sizzling right now.”
“Dinner will be ready in 5, just finishing up sizzling.”
“What do you want to eat? I might Sizzle tonight.”
“Gonna Sizzle breakfast this morning, you want some?”
“Do you sizzle?”, “I dabble”, “Damn she’s a chef”
Cooking as journey, as exploration of the soul. A Niche Fringe gift to you for a guide to master in your own way.
May you Sizzle and chill more.
For the Niche Fringe international scene yw