For the past two years or so, I've been baking. A lot. In the years prior to that, I took photos. A lot of them. My interest in making cakes hasn't replaced my interest in making photos, though it has had an impact on what I tend to photograph these days--a heck of a lot of cakes, cookies, donuts, etc. as well as, at times, glimpses of the ingredients/processes/recipes involved in those makings. And it has impacted as well what I use to make those photos (always digital, always my ipad, always quick clicks--never a film camera, never fixer, never infrared film, never the slowness of darkroom images).
Admission: Every time I post to Facebook a photo of something I've baked, I dread the question I know will likely come: some or another variation of the "who gets to eat all this stuff?" question.
I. dread. it.
But, yet, I get it. People make food in order to eat (or gift or share) food. The prospect of wasting food is unthinkable. Inexcusable. Bad. Very bad.
When I think of all the photos I've made (I have in mind here photos shot on film, not digital images), and the time I've spent making them, this comes first to mind: So often this process was not motivated by the final product (e.g., seeing a print or negative image of whatever I'd attempted to capture), but by (in no particular order): my need to hold a camera; to get out of the house; to understand things as only a camera can help me understand their potentials; the desire to smell film fixer; to stand in the dark of my laundry room and feel the film properly align (or to feel it refusing to properly align) with the plastic film reel; to stand in the light of the laundry room, agitating the film and worrying that my impatience during this part of the process could result in under-developed film, and/or wondering whether, after all this effort and all these steps, something has gone horribly wrong and that the film I'm about to release and rinse will not contain any images at all. In truth, there were plenty of times when I was out shooting images when I could not have cared less about what I was shooting or the prospect of seeing how the camera recorded what I was shooting. Rather, framing and pulling focus on something (anything, really) and pressing the camera's shutter release was just a way to get to the part of the process I really wanted and needed to experience at the time--the smell of the fixer, the plasticky sound of the film reel snapping together, the feel of the film being fed into the reel, the careful heating and/or mixing of the chemicals.
Another memory: The day I met Chris, I had a half-finished roll of infrared film in one of my Holga cameras. Rolls of Efke 120 infrared were, at the time, about 10 bucks (the price would steadily increase before the film was virtually nowhere to be found/had), and I could not justify wasting five bucks just in order to smell some fixer. So, despite my fear of driving, I headed to the nearest park and went through the motions of finishing up the roll of film so that I could get back home and feel and smell the process of developing images about which I could have cared less.
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In "Recipes for Theory Making," Lisa M. Heldke likens recipes to theories, suggesting that both are "most usefully regarded as tools we use to do things" (256). And even before this she contends that people "create new recipes and experiment with old familiar ones for all sorts of reasons"--reasons that may include, but certainly are not limited to, producing some food. In point of fact, sometimes "food is a sort of accidental byproduct [of the process], second in importance to some other aim" (256).
Two years ago, December, my father died and my reaction was to bake. A lot. I mean a lot. Strange, really, because baking wasn't anything I did much of (or cared much about doing) prior to that. Though as Facebook reminds, prior to that December I'd sometimes make a box mix cake or batch of brownies--makings that were usually motivated by my sweet tooth, my refusal to pay bakery prices, and (most-decidedly) my desire to enjoy the final product.
Read: I wanted to eat some brownies, so I made me some brownies. It was as simple as that.
Until two years ago when it wasn't at all that simple. It was also the time at which I started baking from scratch and learned how incredibly zen I could when working in/with the medium of icing.
A memory: In the December of 2016 (or maybe it was January 2017) it didn't seem particularly odd that I'd be making three batches of (baked) donuts in a day. Or maybe it did? (Yes, it probably did when/if someone asked me who was eating all those donuts. Before I came to expect this question, I recall that it struck me as such an odd and uninteresting question, like "if you are given one question to ask about donuts, why make it that one?")
To be clear: During this time, I wasn't making three batches in the way one would if one owned a bakery or if I were making them for my students (e.g., making the batches all at once). It was, at once, more leisurely and more urgent than that: I'd make one batch and then later in the day I'd need-want to make another. And then maybe I quit for the day or maybe I'd make another. And so I'd batch again--and for as often and as long, and for as many batches as it made sense to do so. Eventually, my body-mind would say "enough." And then I'd stop for the day and likely begin again the next day. Maybe it was donuts again. Or maybe it was something new. But during that time, it was rarely (and certainly not only ever) just about the donuts.
And then there was this past December and the macarons. So. many. fucking. macarons. And I can tell you this: In terms of a final product, it was even less about the macarons than it was about the donuts. I love donuts. Macarons? Not so much. I think they are kind of foolish and not so very tasty. And maybe that explains part of the problem--I could never really honor them or want to be with them in the way I always want to be with my cameras, with donuts.
Given the excuse/incentive to speculate now on the similarities and differences between these two Decembers and all the extremely needful baking I did during each of them, I think baking my way through December 2016 (and January 2017) felt. . .I don't know. More necessary? Less negotiable? The best I can say is this: At times the camera feels like a part of my body, it's how I think and see and move and laugh and breathe. My body always knows when a shot is good--my heart pounds and the back of my legs react. This was similar to both how and what baking was for me that December. There wasn't a choice. There was only this, these motions and smells and textures and sounds that made sense. There wasn't another thought. It didn't feel like a choice, though maybe it was?
Macarons were/felt different. I wanted to stop, but couldn't stop, I didn't want to stop, I wanted to stop. It was decidedly ingrained routine (like watching myself on a loop, waking each morning, bringing egg whites to room temperature, measuring, measuring, doing the same thing again and again) but it also felt like a choice. At least when the macarons first came out of the oven. But then shortly thereafter it wasn't. If they came out, I needed to do them once more to prove the last batch wasn't a fluke. If they didn't come out, I needed to do them once more to prove that the last batch wasn't a fluke. (rinse and repeat--keep on making something you probably only want to make because they are so simple to make, so impossible to make right, keep on making something you sense can sense your disregard for them.)
I see now that the way I'm telling this sounds like a horrible way to spend a December. And it was/wasn't. I loved working on and working out techniques for wet-on-wet batter designed macarons and ideas for testing out new designs and techniques were often what motivated much of my making. (I loved the way my macs looked, but rarely how they tasted.) But I often felt an acute separation between me and the making (my body and the ingredients, the expectations/aptitudes I brought to an instance of making vs. those of the ingredients and my techniques, etc.) and this wasn't something I recall feeling in December 2016 or when shooting and developing film. Macaroning was never like breathing or being or holding in the way I am with a camera or in the way everything in December 2016 was. In my mind's eye, when I see myself macaroning, it's always with a furrowed brow.
What's most inexplicable to me now is how (and exactly why) it all just ends--this kind of needful (and I'm sure as it looks to others obsessive) making-as-baking. But it does. And I rarely see the ends (or even the beginnings) coming.
As best as I know: It's just so necessary one day and then just seemingly and completely irrelevant the next. The needful-joyful (and making is always, at least in part, incredibly joyful because necessary) usually starts up again, catalyzed by some things I think I can name and by many more I cannot.
In thinking of my many making-baking friends, my question for them would not be about who eats/enjoys what they have made but questions about the things (humans, nonhumans, memories, aims, desires, fears, absences, presences, futures, etc.) that motivate their makings as well as their not-makings.
One of my best baking memories to date: Smelling something recently that brought to mind the scent of film fixer.
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