COOK OR DIE, the english version of EL ÚLTIMO CANAPÉ, LA COCINA O LA VIDA, from Lux Lumière, is coming.
Lux Lumière is looking into sharing her book with the English reading audience. A translation is therefore in process.
Here a highlight of one of his main characters's manifesto:
‘Chefs are artists with a stopwatch. Ingredients are living beings that begin
to decompose the moment they cross the kitchen door, or even before if we
bought wrongly. You have to use them at the right time. Too early is bad, too
late, disastrous. Mistakes are costly. If you let an opened can of caviar
spoil, you’re out. Recipes are musical creations, they have tempos, their full,
half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes. Full notes for marinated items; Half
notes for soups, stews, boiled dishes, cakes; quarter notes for vegetables and
grilling, for steaming and pastas, for rice; eighth notes for meat, for frying,
and omelettes; sixteenth notes for sautéed seafood, for salads. Customers have
expectations of rhythm. Their stomachs can’t tolerate a bite being delayed more
than fifteen or twenty minutes, or the digestion of the previous dish begins,
and they lose interest or enter a hungry aggression. There must be a tick-tock
inside each chef, just as there’s a metronome inside every musician. And that
rhythm is either within you, or it’s not. Because entering a kitchen without a metronome
is like playing in an orchestra without a score, an infinite and unnecessary
risk. And here, the conductor of the concert, the first violin, the soloist,
and the one who sets the note that everyone tunes their instruments to, is me,
Scarpatti’.
