No Recipe
If you read my blog post from February 24th, you might recall that Edward Espe Brown is an American Soto Zen priest and chef, who first established some fame in the cooking world in 1970 when he published The Tassajara Bread Book, which he himself describes as “an enthusiastic offering from a beginning baker encouraging others to bring wheat flour, salt, and water alive.” In 1971, at the age of twenty-six, he was ordained by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, a Zen master most well-known for coining the phrase “beginner’s mind.” Edward was the first head chef, or tenzo, at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, a very demanding position that he held for two years and about three months, after which he lived for twenty years at the San Francisco Zen Center, deepening his Buddhist practice. He also helped found Greens Restaurant and worked there for four and half years as a busboy, waiter, cashier, host, wine buyer, and manager. He went on to earn a living by teaching cooking classes and publishing the occasional book.
In 2007, Edward was the subject of a critically-acclaimed feature-length documentary film called How To Cook Your Life, which gave viewers a peek into some of his cooking classes, and which I talked about in the aforementioned February blog post. For me, that film is the ultimate movie version of comfort food. Upon first watching it in 2013 or thereabouts, I was instantly enamored with Edward Espe Brown—his wisdom, authenticity, and fabulous sense of humor—and I’ve watched it many times since.
As I write this, Edward is leading a sesshin (an intensive week-long meditation retreat, which in this case also includes qi gong) in Puregg, Austria, and from there he’ll go to Eisenbuch, Germany to teach a five-day How to Cook Your Life class, having already taught two such classes this summer in Felsentor, Switzerland, and Scheibbs, Austria. I know this because it’s on the Calendar page of his website, Peaceful Sea Sangha.org, which I visit every now and then to remind myself when Edward will be back in the States, because at that point I will check to see if he’s offering his morning dharma talks and meditations again, via Zoom, which he stopped doing back in May when his travels began. I started attending those talks and meditations in February, after writing that first blog about him—which was also about Zen Master Dōgen, who, sometime in the thirteenth century, wrote the Tenzo Kyokun, or Instructions for the Zen Cook, which features prominently in the film How to Cook Your Life and in the book by the same title, which is Kōshō Uchiyama Rōshi’s 20th century translation of the Tenzo Kyokun, along with his commentary on that ancient text—which I also discussed in that February blog post.
In the process of write that blog, I discovered Edward’s website, where I ordered a Japanese vegetable knife (also featured prominently in the film) for sixty dollars (worth every penny—the first thing I cut with it was a carrot and, compared to the other knife I’d been using, that carrot may as well have been softened butter) and Edward’s 2018 book, No Recipe. To order these items, I had to email Edward directly, and he himself put the package in the mail, complete with a postcard bearing an image of the Buddha (or at least a Buddha-like figure in statue form) on the front—a photograph that he himself took and titled “Larger Hearted”—and on the back he’d written, “Sarah—Thank you for your interest. You’ll see: it’s a good book! Warm wishes. With the knife IMPORTANT—Cut only what can be cut. No bones, coconuts, branches, tough winter squash skins. Core steel very sharp—also brittle. All the best, Edward.” He also inscribed the title page of the book with the words, “For Sarah—No one can take your place—your offering source and sustenance. Blessings, Edward.”
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No Recipe, as its title suggests, does not contain any recipes. Nor is it an instruction manual for how to cook without a recipe, which I admit I was kind of wanting. But Edward’s whole point is that people should practice finding their own way of doing things, both in the kitchen and everywhere else. When you learn how to cook without a recipe, you are essentially learning how to be you. You are opening yourself up to the moment—this eternal now—which is always unique, instead of making food taste the way it “should,” based on someone else’s aesthetic. To cook in this way is risky, because it might not turn out especially good or win you the approval of others. And I’ll be honest: I like having a guarantee that what I’m cooking will be delicious and that whoever else is eating it with me will enjoy it. And if their enjoyment manifests as praise for my cooking skills, so much the better.
Since I started cooking in earnest in my mid-twenties, I’ve always relied on recipes and taken great comfort in knowing that if I just follow the directions—something I’m very good at, given those directions are clear—then I’ll end up with a tasty—perhaps even beautiful—meal. Plus I don’t always know how to cook certain things; I need specific instructions regarding oven temperature, covered or uncovered, the appropriate amount of salt, sugar, spices, etc. Even after reading Edward’s book, I still need to at least reference a recipe for this reason, and then, it seems to me, I may as well just follow the damn thing.
But what No Recipe has done for me is deepen my appreciation for the act of cooking, regardless of how intuitive or pre-scribed it might be. And even when following a recipe, fiascos—to use Edward’s term—still happen. When we decide to make cooking a regular part of our lives, we sign up for such fiascos. Also even when following a recipe, cooking can be a deeply spiritual practice, inasmuch as we choose to work with the fiascos instead of letting them get the best of us. We learn how to relate with the fiascos. According to Edward, this type of relating is the essence of Zen Buddhism: “Zen, we could say, is cultivating the art of having problems—‘art’ meaning to find out how to have problems in a useful, workable way.” He sprinkles other definitions of Zen throughout the book, saying it’s “imperative is to recognize that the sacred is here [as opposed to somewhere, anywhere else] by practicing, living, cooking in the way of sacred space.” He says that one of Zen’s most basic points of emphasis is that we will suffer if we seek to attain happiness by maximizing pleasant experiences and minimizing unpleasant ones. Rather, we must be open to all experience. Another emphasis of Zen, he says, is the importance of reinhabiting one’s own body. You bring all the you-ness that you can into your physical experience of the world and your own emotions. He says, “I see Zen as knowing what you feel when you feel it, and that as you are informed by your feelings, you learn to work with them. Rather than eliminating or hiding your emotions, you aim to transform all that is afflictive into nourishment.”
And Edward definitely speaks from experience when he talks about having strong emotions. As a young Zen student he was often regarded as problematic, due to his moodiness, which often manifested as anger. People working in the kitchen with him would frequently tell him to calm down or relax, which only exacerbated his emotion. And he makes a great point near the end of No Recipe when he says that if said people had simply expressed their own feelings, rather than tell him what to do with his, he would have calmed down much more quickly on his own. If they’d said, “Edward, when you get angry like that, I feel scared and anxious,” he could've then realized, “Oh! okay, I better calm down.” In telling him what to do, they were shirking their responsibility toward their own difficult feelings. Now in his late seventies, it seems that Edward is still trying to live down the labels of angry, intense, and moody. He ends No Recipe with an “About the Author” section written in third-person, the last sentence of which is, “Inside he is a sweetheart.”
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As I mentioned in my last blog post, Edward was the one who ultimately inspired me to read Wendell Berry, as he referenced Berry’s book, The Unsettling of America, in one of his dharma talks. If you read that blog, you might recall the repeated emphasis that Berry puts on work—specifically on handwork, or manual labor. It makes perfect sense that his words would resonate with Edward in this regard, as this reverence for the humanizing power of work illuminates almost every page of No Recipe—a book that is itself the fruit of much intense labor. In the “Acknowledgments” section—which, at a little over five pages, is the longest such section I’ve ever seen in any book—he says, “The writing of this book has possibly been the most challenging project I have ever undertaken, as somehow it necessitated surfacing ancient disappointment, shame, fear, terror, and dread… The work of becoming a mature grown-up continues.” And indeed, becoming a mature grown-up requires that we do work in the world—and that world could be one’s own kitchen. Maturity isn’t merely a matter of saying, “I’m going to be a grown-up now,” but the result of working on other things. As Edward says, quoting his teacher Suzuki Rōshi, “When you work on food, you’re working on yourself.” And of course we can extrapolate and say that when you work on anything you’re working on yourself. Because everything is in anything.
In the dharma talks I attended, Edward referred a lot to Zen Master Tenkei, who also pops up more than once in No Recipe. Tenkei advised, “See with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue…nothing in the universe is hidden. What else would you have me say?” Edward expounds on this notion in his book, explaining that “Nothing in the universe is hidden means (among other things) that it’s no secret that money and accomplishments may not bring you love or the feeling of preciousness inside that you have been searching for. It’s no secret that when you focus on one thing, everything is included. What you’ve been searching for is everywhere—and does not depend on your performance but on your willingness to receive the treasure that cannot be earned.” And when “working on” things, as Edward and Suzuki Rōshi say, this does not mean we are making things do what we want per se. Rather, we are bringing out their full potential to the best of our ability, thereby bringing out our own full potential, in this particular moment. “What you’ve been searching for is everywhere—and does not depend on your performance but on your willingness to receive the treasure that cannot be earned.” This present moment in all its aliveness is that treasure. It cannot be earned because it’s always already here with each of us, for each of us. We are it.
Keeping this in mind, I’m better able to appreciate the story Edward includes about Zen Master Dōgen, then a young man new to cooking for large groups of people and not sure about all the hard work it entailed. One day Dōgen saw a very old tenzo (head cook at a monastery), slaving away over some mushrooms in the hot sun, and he asked the elder, “Why not have someone else do this?” The elder replied, “Because someone else is not me.” Dōgen asked, “Why not do it at another time, when maybe it isn’t so hot out?” The tenzo said, “Because that would not be now.” I’m sure Edward has this anecdote in mind when he says “No one can take your place.” Nor can anything be done at any time but right now. Therefore when we are fully engaged in doing things, we are connecting with Now.
Edward quotes Suzuki Rōshi again in an epigraph to one of the chapters in No Recipe. This idea also relates to the notion of the treasure that cannot be earned because we already have it. Rōshi says, “What is ordinary is that people seek for what is extraordinary, while what is extraordinary is when people settle down in the ordinary and bring it to life.” Of course there are many ways to do this, but cooking is an especially poetic example, and my personal favorite. If you are not a fan of cooking, I would first say “to each his/her/their own,” and then I would ask if you’ve ever approached cooking as a way to “actualize what is innermost.” That’s how Edward describes it—and any kind of sincere work—and I love it, because it captures in words both what is happening for the sincere cook as she cooks, but also what is happening for the food. Alchemy all around. It really is magical what happens in the kitchen! Just as it’s magical, everything that’s happened to our food before we even lay hands or eyes on it.
My husband Whitman has really ramped up his vegetable gardening game this year and I have had the immense pleasure of bearing witness to food becoming food, with only the help of sunlight, water, and some basic loving attention from well-wishing humans. I like to think that helps a little, anyway. I like to think that Whitman and I are akin to the angels referenced in the Talmud, bending over individual blades of grass and whispering, “Grow! Grow!” I’ve seen the glory of a cabbage taking form, of prim little star-like flowers turning into peppers, and I’ve beheld the intelligence in sugar snap pea tendrils coiling and spiraling toward the light. I’ve seen many potatoes spawn from just a small piece of one—how magical is that? And how generous!—and I’ve watched apples grow. Whitman planted corn for the first time this year, and pretty soon I’ll get to see ears of it appear from out of nowhere. I am seeing through all of this that all food appears from out of nowhere, just as we do. It’s all miraculous. And so if you don’t like to cook, maybe you can approach it with the attitude that you’ll be performing miracles with miracles as your ingredients—and you are actually one of those ingredients, too. You make potato salad happen just as much as potatoes do.
In No Recipe, Edward says that if people find cooking tiresome, it’s probably because they’re doing it in a tiresome way. Their thoughts of how tiresome cooking is will get in the way of their noticing any “engaging, beautiful, or energizing” aspects of cooking. Addressing such people directly, he says, “You will probably cook in a repetitive manner, completing assigned tasks without any sense of curiosity or discovery, without truly engaging your life-force energy, without understanding how to bring your body and spirit alive in the kitchen.” So instead of saying, “I’m going to cook dinner now,” we could say, “I’m going to truly engage with my life-force energy now.” Sounds pretty good, right? How could you not like cooking?
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Cooking and eating obviously go hand in hand, not only inasmuch as we eat what we cook, but also in that we eat what we’re cooking, while we cook it. Edward is a huge proponent of people tasting their meals in progress and seeing how each addition contributes to the overall flavor, and what their experience is of that flavor. I mentioned this in the first blog post I did about Edward (don’t be surprised if there’s a third), and it’s worth mentioning again—how Edward often hears students in his cooking classes say, as they’re tasting things at his urging, “What am I supposed to be tasting?” His answer is “taste what’s in your mouth.” What are you tasting? What are you tasting? Add lemon, perhaps. Now what are you tasting? Add honey. What now? He tells a sweet story about his neighbor coming to him with a kale salad that didn’t taste right to her; together they added ingredients—including ginger! I’m going to try that!—and they tasted after each addition until they felt they’d brought out the best in the kale. Tasting in this way is part of what Edward calls “taking care of the moment.” “Simply take care of each moment leading to the table,” he says, “giving your attention to your experience and taking action in accord with circumstances, including your own aesthetic.” Tasting as we go along also means we’re tapping into the body’s innate wisdom, or what Edward calls “the wisdom of experiencing things closely.”
And then, when it comes time to sit down and actually eat the meal you’ve made, Edward would encourage you to “please enjoy your food.” He says this to students on meditation retreats when it’s time to break for lunch: “Please enjoy your food.” He is “referring here to the Buddhist conception of joy, which is described as awareness resonating with or being moved by the object of awareness.” In No Recipe, he mentions a student being resistant to enjoying their food because then they’d “be a blimp.” Edward tries to explain that we’re actually less likely to overeat when we truly enjoy our food, because, having such a strong connection to our joy, we’ll know when it stops, when eating has ceased to feel joyful and instead feels superfluous, or more like excitement or greed. In a recent trip to Denver, Colorado, my sister and I ate the best macaroni and cheese either of us had ever eaten. It was so good—so deeply enjoyable—that well after the experience of eating it I felt grateful to have eaten it. I felt my life had been enhanced by having eaten it. Unbelievable. It was, as Edward says, “an occasion for celebrating and promoting life,” which he says all eating should be—or could be, if “restored to a rightful prominence, central to life and living.” He says it could be a sacrament. We are, after all, ingesting miracles when we eat. In his 1989 essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” Wendell Berry says, “Eating with the fullest pleasure…is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”
In this society we too often seem to forget that eating should be a sacrament. The sacredness of eating is profaned by frozen dinners and fast-food restaurants, the former of which are usually microwaved and consumed while also consuming television, the latter often consumed while driving. These are examples of how devoid of ritual our eating has become, and ritual—if only the simple act of sitting at a table designated for eating—contributes a lot to how much joy we experience in the act of eating. The word Edward uses is “ceremony.” He says there is well-documented evidence that “cultures with extensive ceremony around eating have fewer eating disorders, while cultures lacking ceremony around eating have more eating disorders.”
One example of ceremony is praying before a meal. As an epigraph to one of his chapters in No Recipe, Edward includes the following meal prayer: “We venerate the three treasures / and give thanks for this food: / the work of many people, the offering of other forms of life. / May this food nourish us, / body, mind, and spirit. / May all beings be happy, healthy, and free from suffering.” I went ahead and wrote this prayer out and made a little placard of sorts for it, so that my husband and I can start saying it before dinner each night. I took out the part about the three treasures—referring to Buddha, dharma, and sangha—since my husband does not identify as Buddhist, and at the end I added, “And also: please enjoy your food.” If that were the only prayer we said I believe it would be enough to significantly shift how we eat. For me, at least, I find that when having the intention to enjoy my food, I eat more slowly, and I realize that my default, faster way of eating feels a bit stressful.
When I was a kid, we’d say what we called “the blessing” before dinner—this was at my mom’s house, not my dad’s—and usually I was the one to say it, and I remember always saying it without ever meaning a single word: “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food, by his hands we all are fed, give us lord our daily bread, ah-men.” I much prefer the prayer that Edward shares, which acknowledges “the work of many people” and “the offerings of other forms of life.” My intention is to mean this prayer every time I say it, as a way of “entering the moment as deeply as you are able,” to quote Edward again. He says that ceremony like this is something that we do as practice, as a way of “structuring our awareness to be awake and aware, to be alert, knowing that without our conscious focus, we could find ourselves prone to disorder, to being swept away.”
Prior to eating, the act of cooking can be approached as its own kind of ceremony, and after eating, the act of cleaning up, doing the dishes. I am grateful to my husband for always taking responsibility for this part of the cooking and eating process, but I also don’t mind doing it myself, when he is out of town or something, and I also like to clean as I cook—I don’t view those tasks as separate from cooking. They’re an integral part of the process. Paraphrasing Zen Master Dōgen, Edward says, “Because you were looking somewhere else, you did not notice that washing your bowl is realization.” Yes, yes, yes. He also talks about washing plastic baggies, which is a practice I’m devoted to, as well. I let a critical mass of them build up and then wash them all at once, placing them upside down to dry on decorative bottles, wooden spoons, rubber spatulas, whatever I can find. I find this particular type of working meditation—soji, in the Zen tradition—oddly satisfying. Something that would normally be thrown away is used again and again, taken care of so that it can then take care of something else, and something else. Edward reflects on his time as a young Zen practitioner, when he and his fellow students would question all the cleaning work that was expected of them, and how their mentors would repeatedly explain that the work of cleaning wasn’t so much about keeping things clean, but about actively relating with things—“touching them, tending to them, being in connection with them, not taking them for granted… When you practice caring for, tending to things, things are not just things. They are an embodiment of spirit.” Yes, even those Ziplock baggies are embodiments of spirit.
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The practice of washing and reusing plastic bags—not letting something that is still useful go to waste—ties into what Edward has to say about leftovers. He provides some pretty shocking statistics about how much food is wasted in this country, stating that “an estimated 25 to 40 percent of the food grown, processed, and transported in the United States will never be consumed.” Going back to what I was saying earlier about providing more support to mothers and babies, maybe we could start there? I don’t use the word “sin” very often, but I think it’s fitting when applied to this level of food wasting. If I believed in Hell I’d say that there should be a special place in it for the people and corporations who allow food to be wasted on a mass scale like that. What a disgrace.
Being a cook—that is, choosing to making cooking a regular part of one’s life—means making (literally) the most of what you have on hand. My best friend Courtney is the queen of this. In an alternate life, Courtney would be a stand-up comedian, and a good portion of her act would consist of leftovers jokes. She once made compote out of one pear, because she’s not inclined to just eat a piece of raw fruit, and for some reason she had a pear and she didn’t want it to go to waste, so she made compote. I recently found myself with way too many limes, so I decided to make a batch of coconut-lime cookies, which required the purchasing of other ingredients that rather negated my overall anti-waste crusade, and I wound burning them terribly—a fiasco to be sure—but through that experience I learned that the next time I find myself with an excess of limes, I’ll make limeade. In this regard, John Irving’s top rule for creative writing applies to cooking, too: keep it simple, stupid.
In No Recipe, Edward invites readers to draw a parallel between how they treat leftovers and other “extras” and how they treat themselves. He writes, “If the small amounts of food are not precious and worthy, are you worthy? Does anyone care? Do you? Do you care about yourself?” I know it’s become a somewhat controversial thing to say, but you are, in fact, what you eat. The waste that you discard in the final stage of digestion is, to quote Edward, “what cannot become you.” When you eat food, its “nutritive essence” literally becomes you. And so isn’t all of that food worthy of your care and attention? Edward allows that we will not always be able to use up everything, that some food will get overlooked and end up spoiling. The point is not to aim for perfection, but to make a simple effort, every day, to pay attention to what we already have. This is a huge part of being a cook. This awareness of one’s resources, and this respect for them. And in helping food serve its purpose, we give ourselves purpose.
Being a cook—or you might say being a good cook—does not simply mean that one creates good meals. It means that one builds her life around the regular practice of cooking. It means that one’s kitchen is set up in such a way to make the act of cooking feel as effortless as possible. Ideally, you have a primary counter space where all of the chopping happens, and from that space, most of what you need is just an arm’s reach away, or at the most a couple steps. Being a good cook means that you know exactly where everything is, because everything has its place, and it has that place for a reason. Everything is functional. Spices are labeled for easy identification, and those used most frequently get the prime real estate on the counter spice rack, or right up front in the spice cabinet, if you go that route. (I do both.) In choosing to be a good cook—and by “good” I mean in the Buddhist way of basic goodness, or workability—you’re choosing how to spend your time, or as Edward says, how to “gift” your time, since “spending” implies that “you would want to be making great purchases with your accumulated effort.” I myself have the great privilege of designing my own work schedule, and I rarely schedule therapy sessions any later than 2:30, so that I can be done with my notes and my billing tasks by 4:00, which is when I generally start preparing dinner, as I prefer to eat on the earlier side and to not feel rushed while cooking. I think most jobs should allow for this attention to cooking, and I’m so glad I’m not one of those people who gets off at five and must then drive home through traffic and throw a dinner together, already exhausted by their long work day. I’m telling you: if we prioritized people having the time and energy to cook their own meals, this world would be a much better place.
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Throwing ourselves into an activity is one way to get free. As they say in Zen Buddhism, we must burn ourselves completely. In other words, the emptiness—or you could say boundlessness—of the self is revealed when it unites with the object of its attention, which, in the case of cooking, is food, and the tools and instruments we use in working with it. When seen as extensions of the body, we can use these tools to inhabit our bodies more fully, which is, ironically enough, how to free ourselves from what can often feel like the confines of the body.
I’m consistently struck, when cooking, by what a potent opportunity it provides for cultivating this kind of somatic connection and awareness. And by how the metaphors abound! For instance, when I lose my grip on things—like a knife—it’s usually because I’m holding it too tightly. I’ve been cooking regularly for about fifteen years now and I’m still learning how to handle things. I’m still catching myself being overly aggressive with food or cooking tools, reminding myself to be gentle, to treat the ingredients, as Zen Master Dōgen says in the Tenzo Kyokun or Instructions for the Zen Cook, as if they were my own eyesight. I think I remember reading in that same text that we should treat dishes, pots, and pans in the same way, that when we clang them together or bang them against things, those are the sounds of them crying out in pain. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier, the idea that everything is the embodiment of spirit. And of course we should give as much attention to how we’re using our own bodies as we go about the act of cooking, or any other act. Edward advises that while you stand their chopping or stirring or kneading or whatever, “You can visualize sending roots down that bring up resources to nourish you. You’re coming to standing rather than abandoning your body in a standing position… Ease comes from efforting less as you allow your body to come into alignment with the energetics of standing.” He points out that this is not something he or anyone else can tell you exactly how to do, “but something for you to study, to notice, to practice.” And this is ultimately what Edward refers to as basic Buddhism: experiencing your own experience more closely.
And so much of our experience depends upon not what we do, but how we do it. Though we might not always have a choice as to what we must do, we can pretty much always choose how to do it. We can choose, in other words, to make it sacred. This is my key takeaway from Edward’s book: make it sacred. I want to fashion little signs in tiny glass frames that say this, so people can see those words when doing the dishes or folding laundry or cleaning the toilet or any other job that they tend to label as unpleasant or somehow beside the main point of life, to remind them that everything is the main point. Like I was saying earlier, quoting Edward, "when you focus on one thing, everything is included.” The trick is to focus. Only with this kind of conscious attention can there be a true connection between what’s inside us and what’s outside us. And this connection is the greatest gift of any work that we throw ourselves into and in which we burn ourselves completely. Edward remembers what The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing—commonly known as the Shakers—told one another: “‘Work is a gift to the person working.’… By giving ourselves to the work,” Edward says, “we receive the blessing of being alive in the present moment of eternity.”
