Cooking Dinner and Design Thinking, or; my father’s greatest “What if…” idea
My father had all his meals cooked for him — either by his family’s cook, or his schools— until he was in his 20s. After aggressively flunking out of a few different colleges, he ended up at NYU, which in the 60’s was a commuter school — no dorms, no dining halls. On the hunt for an apartment, he headed to the NYU housing office, and an endless line of young men in similar need. He hit it off with the guy in front of him, and they decided to find a place together. The guy (my future godfather) asked my dad would he rather cook or clean. My dad knew nothing about cooking but he knew he hated cleaning, so he chose cooking. Lucky for him, Craig Claiborne had just started writing his cooking column in the NYTimes, and so every Sunday my father learned to cook whatever it was that Craig Claiborne was throwing down. It was the early 60s, and my dad (known as Snyder) and his roomate (known as Nikirk) liked to play at being the louche sons of 19th century country earls, living high on the hog in Town; I am sure it made them feel like slumming aristocracy (their goal) to eat Dad’s home-cooked coq-au-vin in their (according to my mom, DISGUSTINGLY FILTHY) West Village apartment. In this way my father learned to cook, and to love cooking.
The Syntax of Cuisine
My dad was inquisitive — a food explorer. He worked through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes 1 and 2. Claiborne introduced him to Chinese cooking, and from there he ventured on his own into Japanese. There was a delicious foray into South-West France: Dad learned how to make duck confit; to Emilia-Romagna: Dad learned to make egg pasta; to North Africa: Dad learned how to preserve lemons; the Eastern Mediterranean: Dad learned how to bake bread and make yogurt.
But it was more than just the recipes: he identified the underlying patterns and logics of different cuisines — figuring out the core taste/ingredient elements that distinguished specific cuisines, and learning the ‘rules’ of interaction: which things “went together” and which didn’t. Knowing these foundational elements and their connective patterns let him then improvise and play with them in ways that stretched boundaries and still made (delicious) sense.
Prototype and Test in the Kitchen
I learned to become a good cook by hanging out with him in the kitchen and learning his skills. I came to love cooking because of the conversations and the experiments. We took recipes apart to figure out how they worked, and we made changes — both planned and spontaneous: a new idea might come to mind in the moment of cooking, and we’d go with it. As a result, our dinner table conversations started with sentences like “Can you taste that we ran out of anchovy paste? Did the miso substitution work?” “I think the recipe was wrong. We should have cooked the lamb a bit more — the tendons didn’t completely melt — or maybe the oven thermometer is off?” “What if next time we added some pomegranate syrup?” This drove my mom up the wall. “It tastes delicious!” she would angrily snap at us; “why are you criticizing it??” To which we would both respond in synch,“We’re not criticizing it — we’re figuring out how to make it even better next time!”
The Scientific Method at Work … and at Home
There is a wonderful connective line that runs between what I do at work and what I do in the kitchen. At work I design, lead, and facilitate workshops that use the principles and practices of Design Thinking. At home I design, lead and facilitate the development and consumption of dinner, using the same Design Thinking practices, which have their roots in the scientific method.
- Design Thinking (DT) and Cooking Dinner (CD) both start by asking people questions, as a means to understand their world from their perspective, and empathise with their situation. “What’s your feeling about kale?” “How hungry are you right now?” — that’s how I figure out what problems need solving.
- Both DT and CD depend on both qualitative and quantitative data. The most pertinent CD data for me is generally ‘what do I have on hand RIGHT NOW that can be turned into a meal?’
- Both rely on the innate inquisitiveness of human beings to come up with hypotheses about the future — “What if….(I secretly added what my son calls “gross green-ness” to soup in the form of pureed kale — would he eat it?)”
- Both design experiments(CD translation — recipes) to test their hypotheses, and both actively observe the results (CD: did he try it before telling me it was disgusting? did he figure out it had ‘green-ness’ in it?) so they can learn if and how their hypothesis (CD: this recipe will secretly deliver vitamins to my son) was accurate, and if and how their experiment design was effective (CD: did I make a mistake by adding the ‘green-ness’ to a light colored soup?)
“What if…..”
“What if” is one of my favorite parts of both Design Thinking and Dinner Cooking. You’ve done all the research, you’ve found the patterns, you’ve identified needs, and now it’s time to let yourself dream. One of my dad’s best What Ifs was — what if you could transform a favorite main dish into a delicious dessert? This idea came to him long before the current explosion of off-kilter artisanal food transformations (bacon-centered cocktails, fruit flavored potato chips); in fact, it happened very early in his cooking career.
As I mentioned before, my dad’s life as a cook started with classic French. The French created magical food chemistry with two ingredients — eggs and milk. Starting with the sauces — salty (Bechamel, Hollandaise, Mousseline) and sweet (Creme Anglaise, Creme Patissiere) — and moving on to the custards used in baking — salty (souffles, quiches) and sweet (Buche de Noel, clafouti, creme brulee) — just about everything yummy has some base in milk/cream and eggs. So, do you know what makes french vanilla ice cream French? It’s got a custard base — that food foundation that works equally well when sweet as when salty, and is tasty both cold and hot. It’s the utility player of foods. And here’s where he went next: what if I took a warm cream-based french dish and turned it into a cold cream-based dessert? What he did explicitly was ask himself: what if I made an ice cream version of coq-au-vin blanc, the delicious french dish that’s basically chicken cooked in cream with wine and onions? So he did. He made chicken ice cream. Salty creamy chicken ice cream. And he served it to Nikirk and my mom. And it was TERRIBLE. EXTREMELY TERRIBLE. And……it was a GREAT experiment.
The Less Good Idea
In December 2019 South African visual and theater artist William Kentridge kicked off an engagement at the Brooklyn Public Library called In Praise of Failure. It’s a project which celebrates the great importance of failure in any creative process. This effort is a partnership between the Library and Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea. In the Centre’s own words, “(it) celebrates artistic risk and creative experimentation, or secondary thinking — by which ideas give way to other more solid ones — and believes an ensemble sees the world differently to how one individual does. It is a safe space for failure, for projects to be tried and discarded; a space for short-form work which doesn’t have a natural home in a theatre or gallery.
I’m not saying my dad was an artist, but he was a culinary risk taker and up for creative culinary experimentation. Like the projects at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, dad’s chicken ice cream was a short-form work — just one dish. His idea was tried and discarded — into the trash can. The first idea he had — chicken ice cream — was a terrible idea. The willingness to try and fail gave him the ability to create some great ideas later, like adding pepper in addition to sugar and vanilla to whipped cream when it’s served with macerated strawberries (trust me — it’s subtle and wonderful) and steaming artichokes in a broth of fresh tomatoes, white vermouth, salted capers, kalamata olives, a few diced carrots, chopped shallots, garlic, italian parsley, olive oil and pancetta, which turns into a delicious artichoke-infused stew you sop up with bread while eating the artichokes (note: cook the pancetta first so that it caramelizes a bit.)
Get Cooking
Very often in workshops when we get to prototyping and testing people say things like, “I can’t draw at all,” or “I’m sorry this doesn’t make a lot of sense,” or “I’m sure this is a terrible idea…” It makes me a little sad when that happens, because perfection is not the goal. Prototypes are “less good ideas” — and less good ideas are where all good ideas come from. In fact, testing and iterating prototypes is perhaps the most creatively rich part of the process, because each time you test, you get loads of new data to work with that could lead to refiguring your prototype pretty substantively, or learning that you’ve got nothing, bub, and it’s back to the drawing board. Either way, your next step is, by definition, going to be a better idea, because you learned so much from the previous failures.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Coda: it’s a Friday night in December and I’ve got a fridge full of the last farm share vegetables, which means a lot of lumpy earth toned squash family/root vegetables of varied uninterestingness (no less than three celery roots).
DT to the rescue of CD. My problem statement: Corinna needs to find a way to get these ugly old vegetables eaten by humans asap because she feels super guilty about throwing away food especially this food which ended up costing way more than it should have given how many times she was too lazy to go pick up her share, which was also an overly ambitious double share, and as she feared, there was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much swiss chard, which even she doesn’t like.
Time to get What if-ing.
