29. Make a good salad dressing from scratch

Begin it, and the work will be completed! -Goethe

Being able to cook is a hotly contested topic on the Internet, which I find very exciting. Like everyone who is poisoned by constant social media discourse, I need a slow drip drip drip of the antidote, made from the same venom. Low stakes issues that trigger high emotions are often the best mix of aggravation and meaninglessness. But if you have no idea what I’m talking about, allow me to summarise some of the most popular points about cooking on X, concurrently known as Twitter.

1. Everyone should know how to cook.

2. No they shouldn’t.

3. Being able to cook is a sign of privilege/classist.

4. No it’s not.

5. With grocery prices this high, it’s cheaper to eat take out.

6. No it’s not.

7. Ordering Uber Eats is Praxis.

8. No it’s not, unless I’m doing it.

I don’t have an opinion about this for anyone except myself. Whether or not people know how to cook is their business, just like whether they floss before or after brushing. I hope they floss at all and if they don’t that’s unfortunate for them. From my personal experience, however, I grew up not really knowing how to cook because I was a heinously picky eater. I ate chicken, bread, corn, broccoli, tofu in margarine, spaghetti with cheese and butter, French fries, most fruits, and ice cream: chocolate or green tea. I would drink miso soup with rice if there was no scallions or seaweed in them. I was terrified of seaweed or floating green things in soup and in the ocean. I was afraid of flies buzzing around the ceiling fan. I was afraid of cockroaches and crickets and butterflies, too. Sometimes when I think about how terrifying being a child was, I feel so brave to have done it.

By the time I was in college, a lot of these fears had receded, thankfully, or they were channeled into questions about life, the universe, and everything. A friend from Massachusetts, a wealthy friend if that matters, was a great cook. She made eggs and I was too embarrassed to admit I don’t eat eggs so I ate them. Peer pressure is good for some stuff. Now I eat eggs almost everyday! Is that weird? Am I a freak? Are eggs my friend?

Eggs opened the door and soon I learned to not only eat new things, but cook them, too. Now, I’m a pretty okay cook. Some of the things I make are great. But I do encounter strange holes in my abilities that seem very simple and which I might have learned at an earlier point in my progression with more guidance.

My mom is not a good cook, which she claims is because I was a bad eater, but there’s no way in hell that’s true. Her favorite dinner is eating chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie and then putting the leavings back in the bag and the bag up on a shelf. She once packed me a lunch with pretzels she’d already licked the salt off of. I wish I could say I didn’t eat one before realizing. She once brought me a red onion as an after school snack, handing it to me with a big smile in front of all the other children and their aghast parents. She thought it was an apple. If I sound resentful, I’m sorry, but you can only open so many bags of cookies to find they’ve been de-cookie-fied before a relationship sours.

Her mother was a decent cook, so I sense pointless rebellion. I have also inherited her spitefulness and angrily respond to things in ways that only hurt me, too. My great-grandmother was a professional cook, working in the house of someone who presumably didn’t know how. Her husband was their chauffeur. My mom can’t drive either. What does it all mean?!

Nothing! Except it does make me think about recipes and how the flavor of something can become a part of your family history. Now, I know the recipes did exist at one point—I remember my grandmother describing how her mom would hang Christmas puddings from the ceiling—they just didn’t make it to me. I have never been able to recreate the taste of my grandmother’s mashed potatoes, which were 90 percent butter. Obviously, my mom couldn’t make them. I don’t have children, so there’s no one I’d pass the butter-to-boiled-spud ratio down to anyway. So a lineage of taste ends, perhaps for the better. 

This past year, I decided to tackle one of the biggest holes in my cooking knowledge and make a salad dressing. It is actually absurd how hard this has always been for me, especially because it became so easy as soon as I decided it was time to really do it. It was suddenly important, because I wanted to eat more salads and dressings are expensive and go bad or are full of oils made in a mown down rainforest. I had a roommate in my twenties who made the best salad dressings and I remember her leaning over the Kitchen-Aid, adding in vinegar and onions and bits of carrots, sampling it and shaking her head or confidently spooning it in a jar. It did seem like alchemy and when I finally decided to figure the magic of salad dressings out sometime last fall, I understood that our limitations are often solely mental.

Here’s the salad dressing I make now after about fifteen minutes of Google research:

2-3 tablespoons of olive oil

2 tablespoons of vinegar, I like red wine

1 tablespoon of honey or maple syrup

A teaspoon of Dijon mustard

Sprinkle of garlic powder

Salt and pepper to taste

A squeeze of lemon if you’re nasty

Shake it up and it oxidizes and looks all syrupy and good. Lasts for a week and usually makes three servings. Ta da. If you want to be fancy, add fresh herbs or chopped shallots, though it won’t last as long. 

The point of this story is that if there is something you have been putting off learning how to do or figuring out, do it today. I bet it’s much easier than you think it is and I bet it will change your life. My salad dressing has changed mine. And though it will not be passed down from me to my descendants, it will perhaps be circulated into someone’s leaves who is reading this. I can think of no greater honor.

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• A friend ate my dressing and called it “zesty” and “very French.” So there ya go.

• I went to double-check that line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, but turns out it should probably be attributed to a translator, John Anster. But you know what? Still great advice:

Lose this day loitering—’twill be the same story
To-morrow–and the next more dilatory;
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? seize this very minute–
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it,
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it, and the work will be completed!

• Salad dressing inspired me to make good guacamole, also one of the simplest recipes I have fucked up consistently for 20 years. Any other great simple recipes out there that you can recommend? What else have you learned lately that has changed your life?