Food: The Art You Make Everyday

The most delicious creative act of all...

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I have a distinct memory of being a 19-year-old art school student in sculpture class. The professor, who was probably in his 50s, had a grey ponytail and wore grey sweatpants to class each day that slopped around his lower half like pancake mix dripping over a wooden spoon. I don’t know if he wore underwear, but he always seemed exposed.

As his tall frame stirred behind us, cooing our young hearts with ideas that can be summed up as: be as weird and messy as you want; I remember his enthusiasm for sculpture jostling with frequent mentions of his love for cooking.

That class was the first time the idea occurred to me that cooking is sculpture. It is something that artists do, and it is fitting that a sculptor would consider it divine.

I didn’t grow up with the impression that cooking was an artform, but made some attempts for it to be. Around age five, I created a signature dish christened Apple Candida — a large glass baking tray filled with a litre of milk, bobbing green apples, and a sprinkle of cinnamon — which I was certain would be a crowd-pleasing entree at our next family gathering. It seemed sophisticated compared to the unseasoned steamed spinach that was our regular dinner guest, but this was an era of life when the discovery of white vinegar was so exciting that I lapped it up from the kitchen’s off-white linoleum floor; blissful at the prospect of living like a dog. (Apple Candida was not met with the grateful applause I had anticipated.)

In the course, I met and then dated a fellow student who had somehow, as a teen, briefly been the head cook at a curry restaurant in his small town. Though he could not always afford the best ingredients — he once tried to buy a single apple on his debit card, and had to exchange it for a smaller apple, due to insufficient funds — his meals were rich and imaginative.

He loved shopping in Toronto’s Chinatown, where he would pick up tamarind to make pad Thai from scratch, and cardamom pods to whip up chai with condensed milk and black tea. He once made an unforgettable earl grey and lavender-infused tapioca pudding, whose secrets I still wonder about, more than a decade later.

In the kitchen, much like in his art practice, he was a skinny wizard whose shoulder I looked over, marvelling at his potions and spells. An iterative cook, he would taste a dish repeatedly until it was just right. It’s a habit I do now—like for a fiddly squash soup where I tasted my way through every spoon in the drawer, twice—looking for a balance of flavours and texture, brightness and depth. Too many flutes, not enough bass drum. Add soy sauce and cashews.

He never said the words out loud: art is cooking, and cooking is art, but he lived that way.

After university, I worked full time in a textile designer’s retail store, helping people buy tunics and tote bags. I was lucky to work for a mentor, but retail was not my passion, and I didn’t know how to build a functioning life out of the things that were. In that strange space between identifying as a creative person, and then as the girl in the shop, I felt like the ghost of an artist.

Walking home from work, sidewalk sandwich boards often caught my eye, their specials scrawled in chalk. Spaghetti carbonara with salmon. Arugula salad with caramelised pears, candied walnuts and blue cheese.

I still shared an apartment with the skinny wizard, but we were on the outs, and I frequently ate alone. It became a habit to head straight from work to the grocery store, where I would try and recreate whatever local chefs were making that day. Then I would eat my lonely arugula salad with caramelised pears, candied walnuts, blue cheese, and think, not bad.

At a time when I was trying to unwrap the future, food became my art studio. A place to experiment and mix things together with nothing to lose.

It still is.

And it has no relation to how I make a living.

Sometimes I get up from a day of sitting at the computer and stiffly move towards the fridge, dreaming of possibilities. Like a song, I often get stuck on one rhythm, and then play the same meal on repeat, serving it to anyone who will listen. It happened with shakshuka, then jewelled saffron rice with raisins and dried cranberries. Now it’s a friend’s vegan bolognese recipe.

Usually these frenzied replays begin after I eat something someone made and then obsessively try to recreate the flavour memory, like a song sparrow that heard a tune in Alaska and is now singing it for friends in Alabama. My aunt’s banana bread, served warm on a cutting board in her lush Saskatoon garden. This bolognese, which I first had at a friend’s stone house on a country road, overlooking a late-summer meadow. I want to taste that scent again.

The dreaded vegan bolognese, which I made day after day, and have now settled upon as a weekly thing.

I practice two well-known kitchen adages:

You can taste the love. Don’t bother serving anything you made while feeling angry or uncharitable. Spiritual stinginess hinders flavour.

You eat with your eyes first. I love plating food, even for my dog, whose five-dollar tin bowl sometimes holds things like smoked salmon on a bed of roasted sweet potatoes, with fresh blueberries and chopped parsley sprinkled on top. She doesn’t appreciate the blueberry touch, and recently removed each one individually with her tunnelled, 80-lb-shepherd mouth, daintily placing them on the floor for me to sweep up.

A recent gourmet dog meal, this time no blueberries.

Last week, I left a specialty spice shop with a paper bag full of flavours that I am still learning to understand: saffron; bay leaves; paprika; cardamom pods; whole white pepper; and a blend called Rose Harissa, which includes dried rose petals and various chiles. I brought them home and put them on the shelf next to Aleppo pepper and sumac. I use these things, I know these things, I thought, like Banksy admiring new bottles of gold and silver spray paint.

This is my safe creative space, I say to the gold and silver spray paint, where steamed spinach can’t get me.

In the kitchen, it doesn’t matter if I am working on a novel, or composing an album, now or ever. On the plate, for myself and the loved ones who I serve, I am a painter, a sculptor, an artist, a composer. And so are you.

The wobbly chocolate mousse cake that we made for my mother’s 75th birthday, topped with raspberries and pomegranate. Everyone took turns beating the eggs into fluffy white peaks by hand, to the chagrin of our guest, who had to speak over the constant din of a whisk hitting a tin bowl.

David Lynch… :(

There has been lots written about David Lynch since his passing last week, and no doubt lots more still to come. But still we felt compelled to add our voices and tip our preverbal hats to one of the most creatively brave filmmakers the world has ever seen. Love his work, or be confused and offended by it, you had to admit that his creative vision was a singular one and his commitment to that vision created some of the worlds amazing cinema. Plus his mock iPhone video is still one of the greatest things to every grace the internet.

A Call for Submissions!

We’ve been so incredibly delighted to be able to feature a bunch of new writers in The Creativity Guild over the past year, a growing club that we’re thrilled to be able to add today’s guest writer Miriam Ward too.

Do you have an idea for something that you think may work for this newsletter? If so, then please reach out! You can respond to this email directly with any ideas.