I’m the Rachel Ray of microwaving, able to estimate cooking times down to the second. I spread peanut butter on bread as smoothly as Usain Bolt runs the 100-meter dash. If you need water boiled, I’m your person. But anything more skill-intensive than heating up canned soup is Greek—er, Turkish—to me.
I am culinarily challenged. I cannot poach, roast, or sauté. Four years of eating HUHDS did not help matters. It also didn’t teach me how to cook. Sure, during summers on my own, I took on the occasional recipe, but after graduating from Harvard last May, I needed to expand my repertoire beyond boxed pasta a la carte.
I spent most of the past year in Istanbul, on a George Peabody Gardner fellowship I received from Harvard to study Turkish percussion and music. While my time abroad was full of cultural, linguistic, and personal challenges, I can state with confidence that signing up for a cooking class in Istanbul was truly one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made.
The eight-week, introductory cooking class would be conducted entirely in Turkish, and I would be starting it just three months into my study of Turkish language. It was audacious to think I could keep up. But I really wanted to learn how to cook. It was a personal goal of mine, and a part of becoming an adult, of leaving the coziness of the Currier House dining hall and entering the real world. As I would find out, however, the greater handicap would be not my language skills, but my complete lack of culinary intuition.
I arrived at the first session almost an hour early. Week one would focus on kitchen prep, skills such as basic cutting techniques. For someone who had grown up setting the table, how hard could it be?
Oh, so, so hard. We learned the techniques for slicing and cutting vegetables into various sizes, such as mirepoix and batonnette. Struggling to keep up linguistically, I learned, sort of, by observation, wowed as the chef demonstrated on an onion, which collapsed into equally sized bits after a few quick rotations of the vegetable and slight flicks of a knife. It looked like magic.
Alas, I lacked the magic touch. In other words, I was no Julia Child when it came time to julienne the carrots. My vegetables did not fall perfectly into uniform pieces, instead looking as though someone had taken a large, blunt weapon from the Middle Ages to them. Quickly identified as The Moron, various chefs would come by to amend my ogre-like efforts.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Barefoot Contessa was at the station next to mine. She was unbelievable, turning whole vegetables into sparkling gems. Though I resented the fact that this master chef had enrolled in a basic cooking-skills class, she quickly became the person whom I would watch to determine just how wrong I was doing everything.
Oh, so, so wrong. After an apparently hectic-looking endeavor, I came up for air and saw, on my counter, that one of the chefs had preemptively given me bandages. They actually anticipated that I would cut myself. (I didn’t, though I would burn two fingers in week four.)
For week one’s larger projects – cheese soup, a roasted chicken, a risotto-esque potato dish – I failed to grasp the workflow, the rhythm of cooking. Still, my efforts felt epic, encouraged as they were by the Beyoncé and Justin Bieber songs blasting in the background. I was pleasantly surprised to find my chicken came out somewhat moist.
Those moments of pleasant surprise were rare over the two months I spent in the course.
There was the one time I became sick from the food I made myself. There was the other time I became sick from the food I made myself. In other words, I poisoned myself, twice.
In the final week, there was the time when, as I was kneading pasta dough, the head chef told me I looked sad.
I was actually decent at butchering meat, but that fact is rendered void by the fact that there is no way I will butcher meat ever again.
Every week became something I dreaded. I felt like Lucy Ricardo in the chocolate factory.
Even so, I missed only two sessions. Both times, I was out of town, and on only one of those occasions did I actually extend my trip in order to miss the class. Greg Mankiw, my former Ec 10 professor, would remind me that I had already paid for the course. It was a sunk cost—why continue attending something that caused me so much pain? Because literally, it gave me physical pain. What did I get out of it?
I picked up some useful Turkish food vocabulary along the way, such as “hardal” (mustard), “zencefil” (ginger), and “t-bone” (t-bone). I also received a certificate of completion, which I can only assume used a loose interpretation of the word complete.
I suppose I got a window into the process of cooking, which had always seemed so mysterious to me. Plus, I felt satisfied, almost proud, on those few occasions when a dish I made came out well—usually something that had been fried in lots of olive oil, such as my rendition of sole tempura, which tasted like Chicken McNuggets and was, therefore, delicious.
There is value, I think, to sticking something out, even mistakes, even things that don’t always make us happy. This is a lesson I learned at Harvard, and I relearned it all the time during my year abroad. Writing a senior thesis taught me how to manage a significant project, even if that process was often grueling. Taking classes in certain Gen Ed categories taught me how to pick better classes. Negotiating the culture, language, and bureaucracy of a foreign country provided me with insight into Turkish society that a vacation never would. The difficult parts were often as worthwhile as the fun ones. They are a part of growing up, no matter how you slice it—even with a jagged julienne.
