Living & Arts

On a chautauqua to perfect his cooking skills

In print | September 3, 2009

I almost chose not to study abroad. After filling out heaps of tedious paperwork, anxiously waiting for acceptance letters, and agonizing internally over the decision between studying at the London School of Economics or Oxford, I woke up one morning and thought: I will die if I leave the country for a year.

Unlike my mother, who believes that anywhere that isn’t Boca Raton, Florida is a potential site for terrorist attack, my worries are fairly down to earth. Namely: I firmly believe that, if sent into the world on my own, I will not survive by my wits alone.

I’d like to think that this isn’t because I’m intrinsically a stupid or incapable person; I’ve just never been in a situation where, by necessity, I’d have developed such essential skills as cooking or efficiently packing a suitcase.

For a long while, I tried to placate myself with the thought that these are common concerns amongst Swarthmore students. We are all, I told myself, afraid of leaving the bubble of 500 College Avenue, because the bubble is so damn comfortable. But last semester, as summer drew closer and I started talking to friends about their plans, I came to realize that I was dead wrong. Everyone, it seemed, was going to be staking out on their own, and no one seemed all that worried. As one friend (who shall remain nameless) told me about her goal to spend as much of her Lang Center grant money as possible on alcohol and subsist on rice and beans in DC all summer, all I could think was: Jesus Christ, I don’t even know how to cook beans. I am so fucked.

Which is why the concept of leaving the country for a year and living without a meal plan, an iPhone, or free coffee at 10:00 pm in the library was completely appalling to me. But, after a few weeks of anxious researching, I found out that there’s a Starbucks right down the road from Wadham College in Oxford, that I can use my iPhone in England, and that I should look at the various other day-to-day struggles of living on my own as an opportunity to become very slightly less helpless, rather than as a death sentence.

Which is how I came onto the rather unlikely title of this column, “Chautauqua”. A chautauqua, I learned while reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in 11th grade, is a semi-spiritual artsy-fartsy new age “adult education” quest that people with too much time or not enough employment can undertake to try to find themselves, or some bullshit like that. (It’s also a budget airline that I think has only one route — between Indianapolis and the Burning Man Festival. But that’s beside the point.)

While I’m still not clear on what finding one’s self actually entails, I figure that studying abroad will, by necessity, become my personal quest for self-improvement. After being dumped into the wilds of Oxford, England and left to my own devices for a year, I will return to Swarthmore as a Changed Man.

But first I need to not starve, which brings me back around to the actual subject of this week’s column: cooking.

When I expressed to my mother my fears about being unable to cook, she nodded and promised to teach me how to prepare some simple meals. Two months and zero meals cooked later, my mother left to go on a two-week vacation to Costa Rica. One week after that, the food she left for me ran out, prompting me to bite the bullet and prepare my first meal flying solo.

I read somewhere that cooking is the act of transforming the sum of a number of ingredients into more than just their combination. My first meal — a salad prepared with the limited ingredients that were left after a week of not buying groceries — failed colossally in this regard. It tasted exactly like its constituent parts: a pile of wilted spring mix, half a clumsily sliced avocado, and a vinaigrette with too much vinegar. Washing the remains of my salad into the garbage disposal, I don’t know what was stronger: my urge to order take-out and eat like a human being, or my shame at having failed at even the easiest conceivable culinary task.

My second attempt at cooking on my own — roasted vegetables — was slightly less catastrophic. And, a few days later, my family returned from their sojourn to Costa Rica, relieving me of the need to be responsible for my own sustenance. But, having experienced first-hand the misery that comes with being an incompetent cook, my worries re: England were far from assuaged. And while I’ve been promised cooking lessons by my mother and an arsenal of foolproof recipes by my sister, I suspect that until I’m actually thrown headfirst into the experience of living in another country and cooking for myself, I won’t have the faintest idea what to do.

Because if necessity is the mother of learning how to do just about anything, there’s another month to go before I actually get around to learning how to cook. When that happens, I’ll keep you posted on the results. Until then, I’m going to do my best not to panic, and also be just a little more thankful for Sharples. You really don’t know a not-so-terrible thing until it’s gone.

Yoel is a junior. He can be reached at yroth1@swarthmore.edu.