I watched this video recently and decided I must try to fry eggs masterfully. Jacques Pépin makes it look very easy and it would seem if you repeated all his steps faithfully you could do it too. And so I did and there were so many points of failure that it wasn't worth enumerating them. The experience gave me a lot to think about. I have been cooking since my teens - for myself when I felt like trying something new and then over the years cooking more routinely. So in terms of years of experience, I have more than plenty. But mastery over a very simple dish is the hardest thing to achieve. Pépin's eggs will take me many more attempts until I figure out which steps went slightly wrong to create the long list of defects. It is a teachable moment for anyone trying to master anything and being deceived by the simplicity of the first task.
It made me think also of the dish that I have indeed mastered over decades of trial and error. It is my grandmother's signature fish stew with a bunch of vegetables and potatoes. It takes very few ingredients - salt, turmeric, green chilies, ginger, cumin and coriander. My first attempts came out a far cry from the taste I loved so much. She suffered terribly the last several years of her life and the closer we got to losing her, the more I was desperate to master the stew so it would taste as if she had cooked it.
I arrived at point a few years after her passing. It was like the sun has broken through the clouds. Finally, the ingredients did what they were meant to do and it was like I was eating at my grandmother's house. This is one of the simplest, humblest Bengali dishes. Grandma was able to whip it up in under fifteen minutes. It took me a couple of decades to match her. When I watched her in her kitchen cooking this stew, I never thought it would be so much time and effort. Like Pépin she made it look dead simple.
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