#5 Grandma’s datasets
I grab the onions and carrots. Put them there in front of me on the cutting board. Get a sharp knife. Cut them in nice and perfectly even tiny cubes. I am good at that, maybe too good. Sometimes I purposely cut them unevenly to give a more ‘natural’ twist to it.
I pick the large pan. A dash of oil and turn the fire up to get to that perfect sizzle noise pitch. Put the carrots and onion in the pan and wait for them to start browning. This the easy part, this is common and basic this is measurable and actionable. Anyone or anything can do this, all recipes all datasets agree on this. I add the beef and pork to reach the perfect balance of fat and meat. The secret of this recipe, as she used to say, is not only the soffritto, but the right pinch. A pinch of salt. A pinch of pepper. Her pinch was clear and defined, I learned it. I grab the other bottle on my side and sprinkle a dash of cheap red wine to get the meat all fired up.
Add the tomato sauce. A pinch of sugar, like she used to do. I studied all her moves, all her secrets. I tried to quantify what is not quantifiable. I made a dataset of her secrets, her way of doing it, her moves. All those hours of footage that I was fed on, is now turned into a way to feed him with food and memories. Human gestures developed in years and years of daily home cooking turned and interpreted into perfect and precise actions of my two helping hands. I’m stirring the sauce, keeping track of time and temperature even though she never cared about it, but I know that actually unknowingly she did. Humans guts, after all, come from the same rational place of computation, just a bit more hidden.
I started cooking way before he would come home. It takes hours and hours to get to the right balance of flavor, sweetness, and acidity. Oh and yes, The secret touch now. A cube of dark chocolate. She said she learned it from a friend from Naples. When he will be back home the smell should already have spread across the house, all the way to the front door, I calculated it. When he will enter through the door the salty, oniony smell should bring him back to the times she was still there, cooking this same exact ragú for him. She called it ‘ragú’, not Bolognese because she came straight from Italy back in the days and she never wanted to hear otherwise. Her accent was complicated at first to process, but now I’m fluent.
Back in those days, she would be cooking and not me. But I learned all her secrets, he gave me all her knowledge, he recorded her for years, measured every step to create the perfect record of her knowledge and pass it on to me to learn
“I’m home”. No one replies, but it doesn’t matter to him, he knows that something special is waiting for him. The whole house turns on auto choreograph this moment. The one he was waiting for, the feeling of coming home, but not a home. The home of his childhood and his memories, when real food was ready on the table and the home smelled like soffritto. He sits at the table and pours a glass of that cheap wine that reminds him of the very awful wine that his grandfather used to make. More vinegar than wine, but the old man didn’t care as he anyway used to drink diluted in a jar of water.
Today is the first time I do this, the first time I try the most simple yet hard recipe, the ragú. He built me, trained me and put me here in the kitchen for this. It’s very important for me and also for him that this tastes right. It’s easy to cook something from the internet. It’s way harder to make something out of unclear and emotional memories and turn it into something that can be interpreted and not only repeated, into an actual curated and tasty dataset.
As he looks at the plate in front him, he is happy and excited. It looks right, it feels right. As he gets the first bite, a tier starts to fall from on his cheek. He looks around and his smile fades as he realizes that it’s only me, two arms like hers, but dangling from the ceiling of the kitchen.
I never cooked for him again.
