Ravioli Preparation Games

A friend of mine recently had the luxury of attending the Ravioli Preparation Games, the premier competition for ravioli-cooking.

Naturally, they gave out goodie bags, and my friend, ever gracious, offered the entire thing to me, claiming ze didn't need another novelty spatula with the games' logo on it. I accepted, of course, and found something curious inside-- an issue of Stuffed, the official Ravioli Preparation Games periodical! I'd like to share some excerpts of the articles within-- I'm sure you'll find them delightful.

"On tableside guacamole"

...My longtime followers know where I'm going with this. Tableside guacamole is the premier food. While I might enjoy the occasional compound butter or marinara to augment my ravioli, I admit any ingredient I have for either would be better served as a component of a tableside guac. The reason for this is simple: tableside guacamole is interactive. Any old food can taste good, but tableside guacamole has power beyond that. A transcendentally good salsa might give the diner ideas about the recipe for the salsa; even a mediocre tableside guacamole, however, lays its recipe bare and asks its audience to participate.

A friend once told me that he had a bizarre idea about an egg, the process of eating which would inspire diners to call their local congressperson. Surely he expected me to ask how his political egg would work, but I was unconcerned with this-- I incuriously assumed such an egg could exist. I had bigger game, after all.

"Chef," I told him, "I'm sure your egg is good-- but if it were tableside guacamole, a true interactive food, you could involve calling one's local congressperson as an act of eating. Your radical scramble is impressive, but eggs as a medium lack the inherent power of tableside guac."

"Everything is a recipe"

...Every chef worth their kosher salt knows this: everything is a recipe. Even if it is not written down, it is impossible to cook food without performing a number of steps manipulating that food in sequence-- which, of course, is what a recipe really is. Yet let me read you the first words from the world-acclaimed YouTube series "You Can Cook! with Madame Beurre":

"You don't need a recipe!"

She says this sincerely, directly-- bluntly, even. Now I respect Madame Beurre, and it is beyond debate that "You Can Cook!" is invaluable to old and new. She's certainly changed more hearts than me, and anyone who's tasted her banh mi ravioli knows her talent!

But imagine you are new to cooking. What do you have to gain from being told a technical falsehood?

 "The 2020 Competition: Looking Back"

...outrage at the 2020 Ravioli Preparation Games. The reason? The winning entry, deconstruction iii, was not a ravioli-- or so said some detractors! A number of arguments were made to this point, including the following:

• deconstruction iii did not envelop the filling-- it simply surrounded it, leaving room for the inner works to poke out.
  
• deconstruction iii had literally no nutritional value (at the time, this was not thought to be possible). A ravioli, it was widely believed, should use its fillings to provide varied and balanced nutritional value.
• deconstruction iii had more sauce and garnish than filling, decreasing the importance of the filling that is a natural prerequisite for ravioli.
• deconstruction iii advertised itself as not requiring eating to be beautiful or appreciated. This sparked debate over whether a ravioli not intended to be eaten is technically a ravioli.
• deconstruction iii handled mozzarella innovatively. The artist first dissolved a clump of mozzarella in water. They then drew ire by diluting this water in front of an audience until, probabilistically, not a single molecule of mozzarella remained, then used this water as an ingredient. Critics dismissed this as "going too far", "disconnected from any semblance of artistic tradition", and "derivative of un-ravioli for the new millenium".

These complaints, in hindsight, look childish. We can see now that deconstruction iii is certainly more of a ravioli than Narcissus Looks Into The Stadia and Seas, the controversial "bathtub ravioli" from earlier this year...

"Against fanciful sides"

...since nobody else in the ravioli community is willing to say it, it falls to me: the so-called fanciful sides movement is a hoax. I remember my first encounter with one of these fanciful chefs well. Before me was a perfectly passable plate of ravioli, triple-fried (as was the fad at the time) with a creamy lobster stuffing. I was ready to judge-- but also to dig in!

But the chef would not allow me to simply enjoy a meal. Her eyes glittered as she instructed me to perceive what she claimed to be a "fanciful" untasteable side in the empty bowl to my left: polenta. Everything she described was not to my taste-- curious, since she could have described anything. She instructed me to only eat it if I found the lobster raviolis to be getting repetitive.

The other judges on the panel fell for it-- one even pantomimed spooning a dollop of polenta into her mouth, nodding and laughing. Personally, I was disgusted. If this polenta were necessary, shouldn't it be material, rather than fanciful? And if it will never come up (a likely case-- each bite of her ravioli was unlike the last, so I never needed a break) why have it exist at all?

If this were just artsy-fartsy bullshit about the difference between taste and flavor, it would be fine. But when people walk past my stand at the Big Bread Convention and spend their money on some hack who can't even prepare polenta...

"Letter to the editor #1"

I am disappointed that you published "5 Lovely Recipes!" last February. I have written over thirty cookbooks and edited thirty more, including the romantic cookbook "Macademia Nut Hearts". Your "sexy skillet-starters" were cute, if lackluster. Much less cute was your insistence that they share the collective spotlight with my recipes that integrate themes of love into everything from filling to pasta to plating.

You're telling people that they can take their grandpa's cookbook, swap some ingredients, change the oven time to "333, like three pairs of kissy lips", and call it good. You are just a bunch of disgusting men starving your readers who make a living off selling cookbooks.

"My Time With Madame"

...Madame Beurre taught me an important lesson that day. All throughout culinary school I had been taught that food was more than just the sum of its ingredients-- you might like chocolate, and you might like ketchup, but not together. Trying to impress Miss Beurre, I told her this, expecting her to ask me why I agreed or disagreed. But she skipped that step-- she asked why I thought that.

Eventually I mustered an answer, which seemed to impress her: combinations of ingredients invoke cuisines, a form of collective knowledge, and we grow up with cuisines. After some thinking, she agreed, and told me she liked that thought. I was prepared for a complicated, nuanced response.

Her next instruction was simple, though, scraping off years of baggage: Let's make something. A ravioli, let's say, and we'll see what happens. We used the microwave a lot, and integrated everything we knew, from the pancake batter Miss Beurre's kids loved to the toppings on the cheap bagel pizzas I ate every Thursday in college. We even served it on a paper plate like I used to eat, and Beurre showed me her family's dinnertime routine.

It was incoherent. I'd never serve it to anyone. It was also the most fun I've ever had cooking-- and because of that, even if I'd never serve it to anyone other than her, it was one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted...

"On Realities and Teaching"

 ...I love teaching technique. My cooking career is built on them. In a perfect world, I would do nothing but introduce chefs to my beloved techniques, teach them everything I learned at the Tesselation bar and restaurant. I would make dishes out of the change in my coin purse, and serve them to everyone, and feed the world.

The reality, though, is a lose-lose situation: I don't particularly care for the ins and outs of knife work or grill management or which expensive salts to use when, nor do I want to use expensive ingredients or work alongside professional food photographers. Yet in order to demonstrate my ideas about flavor combinations, I must master every step along the way, or pay someone who has. And I had best do so with expensive and exquisite ingredients!

I fear for my students-- and quite frankly, my customers, who are focused on the foreign sensation of seeing a duck press for the first time. They must think my ideas are so much more obscure than they actually are!

"My Lamb Ravioli Recipe (The Point Of It All)"

...a number of artists created sheet music that separated itself from Western notation, or more generally any notation that prioritized notes. Their reasoning was that if the sequence of notes were just as important as dynamics, emotions, imagery, instrumentation, and so on, it was unreasonable to create sheet music that proposed that the notes were the point of it all, resigning concepts like "crescendo", "84 beats per minute", and "like a butterfly's wings" to marginalia...

 

...Now I'll get to the point of it all. Here, for the first time in print, is my infamous lamb ravioli recipe, the very same that won me the 2014 Games:

lamb, five-spice, cornstarch, sesame oil, rice wine, eggs, flour, scallion for sure, some sort of heat, some sort of acidity. You are momentarily an astronaut playing helmetless in Jupiter's gases; breathe them in-- how would you describe those blooming scents to your parents? I am describing what I imagined, looking up at my mother performing alchemy on the stove above me.

 

My child watches me cook, and I selfishly wish for them to imagine the same fantasies I did, just as I simultaneously hope they tell me the worlds they visited someday. Now feel the lapse in inertia as you hit the ground again, O meteorite ablaze, jostling your bones and knocking your heart up your spine into your head. Best piping hot.