Feature

The pleasure of cooking

CONTENTMENT, satisfaction, gratification and pleasure from cooking can be achieved without much hassle. All there is to cooking is that one has to be interested, enthusiastic about their work, determined, and if all three are there, then skill will not be late to follow. Cooking can be a pastime, a profession and one can even cook just for fun.

A mother cooks with great love, each ingredient put together with affection, with the hope of how pleased she would feel when her family would be having the dish. The desires of a professional cook might be different, but the inner satisfaction one gets from coming up with a perfect dish remains the same. I can even remember, when I was really small, I used to have an inclination towards cooking. I always tried making up various dishes without even knowing what I was doing. The fact that I actually got satisfaction from thinking myself to be a cook makes me feel proud now.

Around the world, cuisines are diverse and intricate. Different cultures have different tastes and the elaborate variations cause the same dish to be served in various diverse ways in different parts of the world. Rice, for example is best liked when boiled by the South-Asian community, yet the western world like fried rice best. It is amazing to me when I see renowned cooks around the world make hybrid connections with different cuisines and come up with new and exciting new dishes.

Cooking is not only about how perfectly the dish is made, but a lot of the pleasure of having the dish lies in the way
it is presented to a person. Cooking varies from innumerable dishes, unimaginably variable combinations of spices ranging from the luxurious of meals to a mere salad. Presentation always has a great part to play when having food. The environment of making the dish along with the décor, the artistic endeavors of a cook, the imaginative designs of the cutlery in which dishes are presented, the table decoration with flowers and even food items cut or sliced in ways to represent various objects attract the person having the meal, and especially, gourmets tend to give equal importance to taste and presentation.

When we strip away the psychology of the eating experience, beyond the culture, the aesthetics, the social aspects, and nutritional needs, we are left with flavour. It is the quality of flavour that people seek most of all in food. Yet this flavour is present in a quantity too minute to be measured by any culinary terms such as grams, litres or teaspoons.

Cooking in an open atmosphere has its own pleasures. To Bar-B-Q in the open air, the fun of having a picnic is much more exciting than actually having to cook in the monotonous environment of a kitchen. Nonetheless, as technology advances, people will no longer have to face the kitchen at all times. The invention of the electric oven resulted in making baking very easy, even for laymen. The microwave-oven has enabled people to cook items which would take about half and hour in just a mere five minutes.

To me, cooking is a great pastime. A hobby, a source of entertainment and in turn it is a rare opportunity to have fun and present to people my inventions of dishes. I just hope that with advancement in technology and the busy lives of mankind, the significance of the splendid fragrance of well cooked food does not disappear and peoples' interest. Professional cooks have to be very well trained … cooking, is not as easy as it apparently seems.