Part 23 (1/2)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a hero of the young Emerson's with a notorious drug habit, described a mental operation he called ”secondary imagination” that he believed was the wellspring of a certain type of poetic creation. Secondary imagination, Coleridge wrote, is the faculty that ”dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” This notion of imaginatively transforming the givens of ordinary perception through a process of mental distortion is an idea that would go on to shape Romanticism in all the arts, from abstract painting to improvisational jazz. Can Coleridge's transforming imagination really be understood without reference to the experience of intoxication?* Whether by means of a flowering plant or a microbe invisible to the naked eye, letting nature overpower us is a way to break down stale perspectives and open up fresh ones, or so the poets have always believed. We may not be able to tally it with any precision, but can there be much doubt that the poetic imagination owes a sizable debt to this yeast?

All this talk of intoxication was getting me in the mood to sample one of my home brews. But my Irish ale was still fermenting in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and when I checked its gravity (10.18) I knew it needed a few more days before it would be ready. (Heroic patience is a critical component of successful brewing.) What I did have on hand and ready to drink was my jug of wild mead. The week before, I had restarted its fermentation, in the hopes of diminis.h.i.+ng its sweetness and elevating its alcohol. Champagne yeast is a strain of S. cerevisiae selected over the years for its exceptional vigor, alcohol tolerance, and prodigious output of carbon dioxide-important in making champagne. Kel had warned me to put the mead in a heavy swing-top or champagne bottle, since the yeast was liable to blow the cap off an ordinary beer bottle.

I had already had one explosion in my bas.e.m.e.nt. In the middle of the second night of the Irish ale's fermentation, I was awakened by an extremely loud clap. I didn't think much of it-this is a city that percolates at night with all sorts of obscure sounds, not to mention the occasional earthquake. But when I went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to check on the carboy the next morning, it had literally blown its top. The airlock was gone; the clap I'd heard must have been the report of it hitting the ceiling. A cascade of oatmeal-colored foam was erupting in slow motion from the neck of the bottle, and the white ceiling directly above had been splattered by rude blotches of brown wort. I made a mental note to tell my parents how very little has changed.

It had been two weeks since I pitched my low-proof wild mead with the killer yeast. There was no way to tell if anything was happening in the bottles, since the fermentation was now taking place in a sealed environment-no bubbles to watch squeezing their way through an airlock. But I figured whatever was going to happen had happened by now, so I chilled a bottle of the mead, and popped open the swing top. The bottle gave a satisfying pop! and emitted a tiny puff of cold steam before the mead began to bubble over its lip. When I poured the mead into a winegla.s.s, I could tell immediately that the champagne yeast had done its job: The mead had become several degrees paler in color and considerably livelier. Measuring the final gravity, I calculated the alcohol was up over 13 percent.

The mead was almost completely dry and exuberantly effervescent. It actually tasted a little like champagne, though it was obviously something very different: There were strong hints of honey, as well as figs and sweet spices and something I hadn't noticed before, the unmistakable scent of flowers. It was not only unusual but really good. And it was strong. By the time I got down to the bottom of the gla.s.s, where a pale powdery remnant of champagne yeast had collected, I could feel the warm, suffusing glow of alcohol wash over me. There's really nothing quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.

Nothing has really changed, you're the same guy sitting at the same kitchen table, and yet everything feels just a little different: Several degrees less literal. Leavened. And whether or not this angle of mental refreshment offers anything of genuine value, anything worth saving for the consideration of more ordinary hours, it does seem to open up, however briefly, a slightly less earthbound and more generous perspective on life.

I found myself turning that Coleridge quote over in my mind, thinking about imagination as a kind of mental algorithm that ”dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” Okay, it seemed completely obvious that Coleridge had to be talking about getting high. But what was less obvious, and what now struck me with some force, was the correspondence between Coleridge's notion of the imagination and (can you see it coming?) the process of fermentation. For what is fermentation but a biological faculty for doing the same thing: transforming the ordinary stuff of nature by ”dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating” whatever is given, as the necessary prelude to creating something new? Fermentation is the secondary imagination of nature.

Hey, I told you I'd been drinking. Yet even now, in a more sober hour, I wonder if there might not be something here, a metaphor worth stretching and bending to see what it can do for us. Try this: In the same way that yeasts break down a substrate of simple plant sugars to create something infinitely more powerful-more complex and richly allusive-so Coleridge's secondary imagination breaks down the substrate of ordinary experience or consciousness in order to create something that is likewise less literal and more metaphorical: the strong wine of poetry where before there was only the ordinary juice of prose. And yet these two phenomena are not just a.n.a.logies, existing in parallel. No, they cross, literally, since alcohol figures in both: as the final product of biological fermentation, and as a primary catalyst of imaginative fermentation. As yeast goes to work on sugars to produce alcohol, alcohol goes to work on ordinary consciousness. It ferments us. (So says the drunk: I'm pickled.) To produce ... what? Well, all sorts of things, most of them stupid and mistaken and forgettable, but every now and again that alcohol-inspired mental ferment will throw off the bubble of a useful idea or metaphor.

I like to think of the one in the last paragraph as exhibit A.

Afterword

Hand Taste I.

Two weeks later, on another Sunday morning, the carboy and I made the trip back to Shane's house so he and I could bottle our ten gallons of Humboldt Spingo. Shane had gone so far as to find a Victorian English beer label on the Internet, and then used some graphics software to swap out the letters for the original brewer's name with those of our home brew, a pixel at a time.

As we carefully siphoned the fresh beer into bottles and capped them, I couldn't help but wonder about the sanity of the whole project. Two grown men with a great many other, more pressing things to do had blown a big hole in two weekends to make something they could just as easily have bought for a few dollars. (It's not like you can't buy excellent ”craft” beer these days, even in the supermarket.) So why had we gone to the considerable trouble of making something that in all likelihood would never surpa.s.s the commercial product?

To justify brewing your own beer-or baking your own bread, or fermenting your own sauerkraut or yogurt-on purely practical grounds is not easy. To save money? Maybe in the case of the bread, and surely in the case of everyday home cooking, but brewing beer requires an investment in equipment it would take an awful lot of drinking to recoup. So why do we do it? Just to see if we can, is one answer, I suppose, though that doesn't take you much past your first acceptable batch. If you do get that far, however, there does come the deeper satisfaction of finding yourself in a position to give a very personal kind of gift-the bottle of home brew (or jar of pickles, or loaf of bread) being a convenient and concrete expression of the generosity that is behind every act of cooking.

There is, too, the pleasure of learning how a certain everyday something gets made, a process that seldom turns out to be as simple as you imagined, or as complicated. True, I could have read all about brewing, or taken a tour of a brewery and watched the process. Yet there is a deeper kind of learning that can only be had by doing the work yourself, acquainting all your senses with the ins and outs and how-tos and wherefores of an intricate making. What you end up with is a first-person, physical kind of knowledge that is the precise opposite of abstract or academic. I think of it as embodied knowledge, as when your nose or your fingertips can tell you that the dough needs another turn or is ready to be baked. Knowing how to bake bread or brew beer with your own two hands is to more deeply appreciate a really good beer or loaf of bread-the sheer wonder of it!-when you're lucky enough to come across one. You won't take it for granted, and you won't stand for the synthetic.

But even better, I found, is the satisfaction that comes from temporarily breaking free of one's accustomed role as the producer of one thing-whatever it is we sell into the market for a living-and the pa.s.sive consumer of everything else. Especially when what we produce for a living is something as abstract as words and ideas and ”services,” the opportunity to produce something material and useful, something that contributes directly to the support of your own body (and that of your family and friends), is a gratifying way to spend a little time-or a lot. I doubt it's a coincidence that interest in all kinds of DIY pursuits has intensified at the precise historical moment when we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours in front of screens-senseless, or nearly so. At a time when four of our five senses and the whole right side of our brains must be feeling sorely underemployed, these kinds of projects offer the best kind of respite. They're antidotes to our abstraction.

To join the makers of the world is always to feel at least a little more self-reliant, a little more omnicompetent. For everyone to bake his own bread or brew her own beer is, we're told, inefficient, and by the usual measures it probably is. Specialization has much to recommend it; it is what allows Chad Robertson to make a living baking bread and me to make one writing books. But though it is certainly cheaper and easier to rely on untold, unseen others to provide for our everyday needs, to live that way comes at a price, not least to our sense of competence and independence. We prize these virtues, and yet they have absolutely nothing to do with the efficiencies of modern consumer capitalism. Except perhaps to suggest that there might be some problems with modern consumer capitalism.

Of all the roles the economist ascribes to us, ”consumer” is surely the least enn.o.bling. It suggests a taking rather than a giving. It a.s.sumes dependence and, in a global economy, a measure of ignorance about the origins of everything that we consume. Who makes this stuff? Where in the world does it come from? What's in it and how was it made? The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others we now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long and attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us and the world utterly opaque. You would be forgiven for thinking-indeed, you are encouraged to think!-there is nothing more behind a bottle of beer than a corporation and a factory, somewhere. It is simply a ”product.”

To brew beer, to make cheese, to bake a loaf of bread, to braise a pork shoulder, is to be forcibly reminded that all these things are not just products, in fact are not even really ”things.” Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relations.h.i.+ps, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature-from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms-plants, animals, and fungi-to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.

The world becomes literally more wonderful (and wonderfully more literal) as soon as we are reminded of these relations.h.i.+ps. They unfold over the span of evolutionary time but also over the course of a few hours on a Sunday in a neighbor's backyard. I'm thinking of the relations.h.i.+p of the barley gra.s.s (Hordeum vulgare) and the brewer (h.o.m.o sapiens) and the remarkable fungus (Sacccharomyces cerevisiae), working together to create all these interesting new molecules-the intoxicating one, of course, but also all those other magic chemical compounds that fermentation teases out of a gra.s.s seed so that, when the ale washes over our tongue, we're made to think of a great many other unexpected things: fresh bread and chocolate and nuts, biscuits and raisins. (And, occasionally, Band-Aids.) Fermentation, like all the other transformations we call cooking, is a way of inflecting nature, of bringing forth from it, above and beyond our sustenance, some precious increment of meaning.

II.

In the year or so since I completed the quasi-formal part of my education in the kitchen, several of the transformations I've not yet quite mastered have found their way into the weave of everyday life, and others have fallen away or been relegated to special occasions. It's curious what sticks and what doesn't-what turns out to suit your temperament and the rhythm of your days. To try your hand at doing something new is to find out a few new things about yourself, too. Which is yet another good reason for coming into the kitchen.

For me, of all the transformations, braising has proved to be the most sustainable and most sustaining. Improving my knife skills (and mental att.i.tude toward chopping onions), and learning how to slow cook in a pot just about anything in the market, has changed the way we eat, especially in the cooler months of the year. What not so long ago had seemed insurmountably daunting has become an agreeable way to spend half a Sunday: finely dicing my way through piles of onions, carrots, and celery, slowly simmering those while browning a cheap cut of meat, and then braising it all in wine or stock or water for a few unattended hours. Not only do we get a couple of weeknight meals out of it, but the meals are infinitely more delicious and interesting (and inexpensive) than anything we ever used to have on a Tuesday or Wednesday night.