Mise En Place: The Art of Everything In Its Place
Or putting it all back together, one meal at a time.
A year to properly move into a place, I think, to learn the dance of that particular kitchen. Time enough to rearrange a few drawers and move things from left to right. Time to settle in. Time to break things once again. The calendar rises and falls and some cycles, like daffodils, appear at the same time each year. The emptiness, the loss, the remembering of what it is to be full.
Is it always August when the rains fall so hard and the sky seems to exert extra effort into grey? When the fortitude and perseverance we held to, falters at the edge of winter and the levy breaks. The lessons accumulated, year on year, flow again like debris-laden floodwaters over the soil you’ve tended.
Thus September becomes always about the putting back together of things. The mise-en-place of rearrangement and preparation, the restructure of your life from the latest disheveling and rebirth. First the flood, then the renewal as the overwhelm evaporates. The floodwaters recede and you examine what’s left, what’s salvageable and what is gone for good, what you have to choose to let go. And if you’re lucky, you can turn your hand and heart to salvage, finding some hope for the lesson.
The fastest way to restore things is to eat and drink your way through it, I think. The relationship broken or even slightly bent, heals best over breaking bread and becoming our most human again. The slip of sauce on lip, or slightly generous pour, the softened light of the third course and always, the gentle flush of the inevitable laugh. Dinner cannot be endlessly awkward. Someone will always break - a plate, a glass, a burp will give way to laughter that cannot be refused. So you have to eat together, to truly fix a thing, you must be human again with one another. The act of putting everything-in-its-place again.
I have long learned that time does not benefit reconciliation without charging a higher price. If you choose time, that sanctuary of hushed tones, avoided eyes and the dreaded space - you will only ever have memories and lost opportunity to reconcile over. Instead, I choose time for mise-en-place, the great preparation for reconciliation.
Mise-en-place is the sanctuary of the cook, where we exert utmost control over the powerful forces of heat, acid, salt and fat. In traditional culinary school, the poetry of mise-en-place is simply this: know your recipe, then prepare and arrange the ingredients and tools. You can make more steps of it than this, but shorthand suffices.
In the kitchen for healing broken things, mise-en-place is also The Choice. What to make of things, the ingredients you have left, the tools at your hand. That is a wise knowing - to choose what can be done with what is in your hand. Choices of compassion and mercy. Sometimes choices of love. Sometimes to forgive and sometimes to hold fast. To refuse time and space, and their high cost of admission.
Last week, finely diced mushrooms in the rendered lush fat of guanciale sauteed down to a fine crumb and then made languid with pasta water and butter. Made sharp with black pepper. It was a meal of returning and invitation to bold conversation without need for apology. The week before, hope needed a comforting blanket of reduced cream and sweet-spicy chicken, swaddling those mushrooms. That too, an invitation - this time to the safety of being honest, disrobing a discontented untruth between friends. I offered forgiveness in a saucy bowl, saying - there is generosity here, a feast of plenty.
The mise-en-place moves the conversation from the voice inside my head and heart to my hands on knife, stirring pot and acrobatic swing of pan. How I choose to corral the forces that make reconciliation palatable - written on the knife scars on my hands and the battle-scarred but willing heart. The posture I hold as I move through the kitchen, wary at first - resisting embrace until something is repaired, something that allows me to cross the threshold of kitchen to dining room. Eye to eye, eyes up and sometimes down, a comforting and then resisting slurp and hesistant second helping. The posture of forgive me, the answering gesture of moving the plate closer.
The meal went cold, the voices loud. The heart heavy and hope betrayed for a moment. I had not offered to make dessert, I knew I would have little sweetness to offer by the end. Even the most attentive mise-en-place cannot prepare the cook for every circumstance. A rotten egg, a dry lemon, an onion perfect on the outside but a rotten centre. We accommodate, we moderate but we cannot fix all things in a single dinner, even if three courses’ worth.
Another meal necessary then, to repair those breaks. Each night I break open fresh produce, peel onions or cabbage and at the same time rearrange my heart and all its tools towards forgiveness. Myself first, for foolishness and then the other, for what they cannot change. As for what can be changed, there is no magic recipe or cure for that. He is days late to the second meal, but I keep making it - a different version each night of Making Room to Move Forward.
Once, twice and three times, he sent me a recipe called Marry-Me-Chicken, reportedly guaranteed to make the dinner guest swoon. A joke between friends. No small irony, I choose the sweet-spicy chicken and creamy sauce cradling strands of pasta to ladle into dishes for that fateful meal, knowing the path our conversation would take. A friendship unravelling, a reimagining of a new friendship moving forward.
There is always room for comedy, especially dark comedy in the kitchen. It is the safest place to carry truth, anger, love and all the more complex emotions like bitterness-turning-towards-forgetting or raw-becoming-numb. Even the desire for revenge has an expression in that kitchen. Revenge turns cold and bland, absent of seasoning. A dull porridge of disinterest is the cruelest meal to serve. And on darkest days, you hope someone realises your generosity in the moment you stop cooking for their tastes and instead choose only to satisfy your own.
That is the Art of Putting Things Back Together, In Their Place.
On Sundays, the mise-en-place is for me. This week the sweetest of crisp green apple in all my breakfasts. Green snow peas and toothy edamame for lunches. Bringing colour into the final grey stretch of this winter. The new shelves above the counter have made space and structure for the tiny rituals of the day - first coffee, then chai tea. Butter for late night toast, when the day has lost its bite and my tongue, empty for conversation must meet with some bite. The stone mortar and pestle with garlic nestled now just within reach. The lengthy conversation with the birds in the tree by the kitchen window, the long walk beside the lake.
If you are to believe any fairytale from television made true, it is the cook enjoying the sanctuary of the uncorrupted, perfect kitchen that rings everclear. The empty counters, the pristine stack of pans, the brunoise stacked in clear containers in a spotless refridgerator. Just now, I walked through the galley kitchen of my home, finding comfort in a clean countertop and straightened knife rack. I know I am ready to begin again tomorrow.
Everything in perfect place, at the ready. What do you need for dinner? I can make it from this pantry of mine. I have the salve for longing and also for homesickness. I have four types of sugar nestled in glass jars so I can monitor their sweetness giving way to moisture - but whatever sweetness you need, I have it.
This is a kitchen ready at last, a kitchen for making things whole, for mending what is broken and straightening what is bent, even just a little. Even if mostly the mise-en-place is just putting myself back together, preparing for all that is yet to come in this little kitchen of mine. Bread ready to rise again and everything back where it needed to be. Shoulders back, head on straight and on towards breakfast, where all the best dinners end.
Reading your words I feel my inner soul getting unpacked, then put back together. Thanks for sharing your eloquent, honest and wonderful thoughts and words.
“The slip of sauce on lip, or slightly generous pour, the softened light of the third course and always, the gentle flush of the inevitable laugh.”
Of all of the sentences, some so poetic and profound as to stop me in my tracks and force a concentrated re-read...the sentence above got me. Evocative and playful and altogether wonderful. Thanks for sharing your way.