French Toast Dreams, MasterChef Myths
Contour Lines | 014
Happy Wednesday Dear Readers!
Monday I tried something relatively new, I made french toast for the second time in my life. I’m in a habit now of trying to break, or at least question the myths I believe about myself, and so today comes to you courtesy of a passage from Joseph Campell’s 1985-1986 conversation with Bill Moyers, recorded in the book The Power of Myth.
“A dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in could accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.” (Moyers, 1988, p. 48)
I’m a decent home cook. Of my friends, one of the better, and that’s not by my own estimation. I spent a long time developing those skills, but I have a secret.
I was terrified to make anything from a box with instructions for over 10 years, a written recipe just a few steps removed from anxiety.
But give me ingredients and a selection of spices and I’ll whip something up off of the top of my head. It doesn’t always work out.
Maybe the way to examine the truth of the myth lies in between.
Pulling back into the gravel driveway after dropping my kid off at the babysitter, I ran through my mental checklist once more, not even realizing I had gotten out of my car on autopilot. It was my wife’s last day before she went back to the office, and I wanted to show some effort. Feeling inspired by the recent episodes of MasterChef and MasterChef Junior we’ve been binge-watching, I had decided to make french toast.
I had the brioche, eggs and milk. Technically, that’s all I needed.
The cool morning air followed me into the house as I latched the screen door behind me and went right to the pantry, calling out to my wife in the process.
“Hey, I’m going to go ahead make the french toast, how many pieces you want?” I elevated my voice to make sure my wife can hear me in another room, and also telling myself that if I sound confident, maybe I will be confident.
Last time the french toast experiment didn’t go too well. I hadn’t read any directions in an effort to not have any anxiety from following a recipe exactly. What should have been delicious, was not.
“Just two,” came her faint response from the other end of the house. Clasping the loaf of bread gently so it didn’t get crushed, the faintly sweet aroma wafted up as I counted 6 pieces and put them in the oven to slightly dry out - a tip I had read online.
I pulled out my phone and glanced at the recipe I was using as a base for my breakfast, the glass screen still warm from my pocket. All I needed was the measurements - a recipe was more like guidelines anyway.
For years I couldn’t bring myself to that conclusion, having not been taught to follow instructions on a box when it came to cooking. In fact the only thing I had been allowed to do in the kitchen for the most part growing up was prep work and cleaning. There was too much worry the brand new glass top stove would be scratched.
Instructions meant that it had to be a certain way when the dish was complete. It had to be perfect. At least that was the myth I believed, despite my dream of being able to cook anything without a recipe.
Another tip I decided to use, was to just use yolks. As I deftly cracked the shells, I was pleasantly surprised to find I had no trouble separating them from the whites.
Another myth disproved,” I thought to myself.
Once everything was together, I paused before continuing. Sure, I could follow this recipe to a T. But I wanted to make it mine. Diving back into the pantry, I grabbed cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. The recipe had already called for vanilla otherwise I likely would have grabbed it as well.
Stacking the square spice containers on the counter, I eyeballed the amounts I put in rather than measure them out - this was my way to control the anxiety.
A lot of cinnamon.
About a 5th as much of the nutmeg and allspice.
Whisking the spices into the milky egg custard, I remembered I had some raspberries in the fridge. Out they came and into a pot with some sugar, on low heat. I popped one into my mouth, feeling the tangy burst of a slightly sweet fruit indicating it wasn’t quite as ripe as they should be. I added another tablespoon of sugar.
Now I could start the french toast.
I gently plopped the first slice into the custard, glancing over at the butter melted and bubble into the inherited cast iron pan as I waited. The toasting tip worked almost too well - I had a hard time flipping the slice over to soak the other side.
After a few minutes the slice made its way to the pan. It didn’t sizzle anywhere near as much as I thought it would. “Must be all the liquid soaked in,” I muttered to myself. Soaking another slice, I repeated until I got the last one, and the reason for not messing with recipes became apparent.
I was out of the mixture. In my effort to modify the recipe through intuition and the advice of strangers, the lack of egg whites seemed to have actually mattered.
Strangely, I was okay with this, and very acutely aware of it.
As the slices of french toast stacked up, I found myself wondering what made today’s food experiment different? I poured the raspberry compote over the top. No answer came to mind. The plating needed one more thing. I took out some triple cream vanilla bean greek yogurt and put a big dollop on top.
There. That looks good. But still no answer as to what made today different than times before.
I found the answer the moment I took my first bite.
It isn’t my dream to be on Masterchef. My dream is to be able to cook anything I can think up, and have it taste good.
And this was absolutley delicious.
My myth was that if you used a recipe as a base, it had to be perfect, both taste and appearance.
Society’s dream is that everyone has perfect little lives, and that is all that we see.
Societies myth is that whatever I show the world I cook has to be perfect, “for the' ‘gram”, otherwise the dream is a fallacy.
There will come a time when I have made french toast enough times that it looks worthy of “the ‘gram.” But those who see it, won’t be able to taste it. They won’t see the number of times I ran out of custard, burnt it, or mismeasured ingriedients.
The dream of humanity and the myth we hold to in society is the same - we will get it perfect on the first try.
It’s okay if you don’t. Small successes that noone sees, or even just a few people see, still taste better than having never tried at all, simply looking at pictures of your dreams.