I recently read a New York Times food blog post, where its author Pete Wells disregards the idea of doing prep work before cooking. (You can read the blog post here.) He mentions how having your mise en place, your prep bowls of minced garlic, diced tomato, stripped rosemary, and so on, all laid out perfectly before starting the actual act of cooking is a fairy tale dream. It’s something that only snooty French chefs and those on cooking shows ever do.
Wells brings up the fact how many people do not simply have the time to cook this way. Commenting on his own life, he opens with the thought of his six year old son doing the prep work for him before he comes home. He also mentions how Sarah Moulton (who I do enjoy) is coming out with a cookbook and possibly a television show where the cooking is done while the next items are being prepped. While this is great for those “hurried” people out there and for these few select meals that can be done this way, it is not something that you should strive for. Imagine sitting down to your meal at Thanksgiving.
“Why Betsy this turkey is still frozen inside!”
“Oh that’s the way they do things now dear. No thawing. Cooking without any prep work is the way to do it.”
Ok, ok. I digress and will settle down a bit. Maybe it’s old fashioned to think so, but I believe preparation is the best way to start anything – especially a good meal. I equate doing the prep work for dinner to building IKEA furniture. You take out the instructions (the recipe), you lay out all the parts to build the entertainment center (the prep work), and then finally you take the odd Swedish uni-tool and start putting the pieces together (you take your mixing spoon in hand and combine your ingredients). There is a Benjamin Franklin quote stating that, “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”
Now do I mean to apply prep work to literally every meal? Well, no. Making macaroni and cheese from a box has a relatively low failure rate and such few ingredients that preparing a mise en place is just a waste of time. But take for example my most recent prep work. For dinner I was making mushroom risotto, so I minced the garlic and shallot, diced the mushrooms, measured out the rice and grated cheese ahead of time. My reasoning? What if I didn’t have the rice measured out before the garlic and shallot were softened? What if the rice had soaked up the chicken broth and it was ready for the cheese but I wasn’t? Things happen while cooking and you have to be prepared.
There is an episode of Julia Child’s French Chef, where she advises home cooks to lay out everything on a tray before cooking. That way you have all your prepared ingredients all in one spot and you don’t get surprised by the recipe and have to dash off to hunt for something in your pantry in the middle of cooking. (Oddly enough Moulton worked for Julia on one of Child’s later shows.) The idea of being ready for anything and focusing on one thing at a time is a time tested practice. Sure, you can talk on your cell phone and drive at the same time, but you can’t do either one well while doing the other. So why would you want to apply this doomed multi-tasking to cooking?
