escort diary® of Jolie: Why I bake for the people I care about
There is something about baking that I have never been able to explain to people who don't do it, which is that it is not about the food.
I mean, it is also about the food... I am French. If the food is bad, nothing else matters and the evening becomes a critique review. But the reason I bake, the reason I will spend an afternoon making something from scratch when a perfectly acceptable version exists at the bakery ten minutes away, is not about the result.
It is about the decision to spend time on someone before they arrive.
Cooking is improvisation: you taste, you adjust, you save it at the last moment with something you weren't planning to add.
Baking is a commitment, and one made to science and time. You follow the recipe, or you don't, and you find out which one you did about forty minutes later when you open the oven, and it has either risen or it hasn't, and there is nothing you can do about it anymore.
It is the most honest form of cooking because it does not allow you to cheat: the ingredients go in, the heat does what it does, and the thing that comes out is a perfect record of how much attention you were paying.
I think this is why I do it for people.
Not to impress them (although I will not pretend I am above the quiet satisfaction of watching someone eat something I made and go a little silent for a moment), but because the act of baking for someone is, in a way I have never been able to articulate properly, a form of saying I thought about you before you got here.
I chose this recipe because I remembered you said something about chocolate. I made this tart because last time you mentioned you hadn't had a proper one since you were in Paris. I spent two hours on something that will be eaten in fifteen minutes because the two hours were for you, and the fifteen minutes are just where you find out about it.
It is, if I am being honest, the same thing I do in every other part of my work: I pay attention, I remember, I take subconscious notes. And then I do something with what I remember, so that when you arrive, the room already knows you're coming.
The difference is that with baking, you can taste it. Everything else I do is less tangible: the conversation, the warmth, the particular feeling of being with someone who is genuinely interested in you.
Those things are real, but they are hard to hold onto after the evening ends.
A slice of tarte tatin is the version of my attention you can take home. It is proof, in butter and caramelised sugar (and the many blisters because I keep forgetting caramel is sweet lava), that someone gave a damn.
I don't bake for everyone.
That is not a policy... it is just the truth.
But when I do, know that the thing on the plate is not a performance, it is the most literal translation I have of the thing I am always trying to say, which is: you were worth the effort, and I decided that before you walked through the door.
Also, I am told my madeleines are life-altering, but I suspect the men who said this were being diplomatic about the fact that they ate six of them and were too embarrassed to ask for a seventh.
You can ask for the seventh. I always make extra...I am French, not a monster.
