Impatience, Intensity
Standing in the kitchen of Original Beef Of Chicagoland, head chef Carmy tells his new sous that he’d spoken to her previous employers and asked about her. “They said you were brilliant. Sharp. They also said you were impatient.” This last part sounds familiar.
The line between patience and impatience in the kitchen is a blurry one. You have to be quick and consistent. Smooth like a velveteen sauce. Chefs dance elegantly around each other: behind you, corner, yes chef. Go too slow and things don’t move; move too quickly and there’s a quart of veal stock spilling onto the floor. Things are a little different in a home cook’s kitchen. There’s only one of you moving between stove to counter. You can take your time. Still, that doesn’t stop me burning the sauce, firing up three pans at once to crisp up rice, char broccoli and fry eggs, all too eager with the salt, eternally impatient for the first bite. I eat a bowl too big for my appetite in swift bites. I’m not even sure if I’m tasting it; I’m simply voracious for something to fill me up. For the salt to hit my tongue. Not to feel empty. I finish it in less than 10 minutes and I am too full.
The part I am patient with: prep. Thinking about what to make. Ingredients rolling around in my head like water boiling in a pan. Chopping and separating for mise en place in my kitchen. But then, these intense, slow daydreams are always overpowered by bubbling overexcitement.
Intensity, another pastime of mine. Like the slow pour of honey or molasses; an irresistible state that blocks out all sense of time or reasoning. Does anyone yearn to be more intense? Is it learned behaviour or just something that arrives with you – a character flaw or a chink in your armour? Intensity holds hands with intention, yet flies along with impatience, accelerating and catalysing whatever emotion is being held inside. I don’t like to think of myself as an intense person, but I do feel deeply, and find it impossible not to translate that into conversations or a prolonged gaze or the convoluted narratives that I make up in my head as I try to fall asleep. I guess whether I like it or not, intensity is engrained.
I reduce a ragu to amplify its flavour. As Carmy says in The Bear about a dish that uses plums four ways, you reduce the plums with black vinegar for what seems like forever. You reduce, you reduce, you reduce; all to intensify the flavour. What irony, that to intensify – to create a flavour that feels bigger, more impactful – you first have to make it smaller.
No one tells you to be more impatient. The refrain, “just wait”, rings in my mind like a death knell, knocking against my insides every time I jolt with restlessness – eagerness – agitation. Recently, I’ve been impatient to write. To mark some sort of permanence on the page as if it were a declaration of purpose, rather than just an Internet pastime, a way of logging my life, another example of someone ordinary screaming into the void desperate to hear the faintest echo.
I’d always known that writing was art, and that art was important. Although I’d also always thought that art was static, that I couldn’t penetrate its canvas, and that words were fluid and could run through me like a tap that never turned off, each letter a slow drip seeping in and out of me. In many ways, I believe writing to be the pursuit of capturing intensity and finding a way to distil it so that it feels palatable (although not always in a good way). I try very hard to do this, which is perhaps intensity squared, at times a little jarring, as if I’m trying too hard, berating myself every time the words simply won’t spill out onto the page like the stock I drop on the floor.
Other things I’m impatient for: food, the bus, the destination, intimacy, the end, validation, a third drink, happiness.
A bus stops two stops away from where I’m getting off. The driver says we’ll pause for three minutes. I get off the bus and start walking. Three minutes later I’m at the next set of traffic lights and the 76 flies past, at least two stops ahead of me by the time I reach the station. That pretty much sums it up.
I should be more patient. By that I mean, I should trust myself more. I rush when I feel out of control; this is when I’m most impulsive, most intense. When I’m only thinking of myself, of short term gratification – not the bigger picture. Not about how other people might feel. I hate the idea of something passing me by. The thought that I might miss my chance. It comes from a crippling lack of trust in myself – that I’ll be forgotten unless I make myself known. That to be quiet, slow down, observe, simply be there, means fading into the background. Strangely, like the plum sauce that Carmy keeps reducing, I also like to make myself smaller, slowly slowly, smaller still. Perhaps if I let myself simmer, sit and settle for a while, I might make a bigger impact.
