Mission: Cook! by Robert Irvine

not in the cards for me, given my grades at school.
    My father accompanied me down to the recruitment office when I was fifteen and we had a chat with the officer in charge. He liked my background in the Sea Cadets, and we all agreed that the Navy seemed like a good bet for yours truly, so I took the test. The test wasn’t much different from most of the tests I hated taking at school, with some posers that basically called for common sense thrown in for good measure. Unlike in the adverts for the military today, there was no questioning about a career track, as in “Would you like to go in for submarine captain or test pilot?” anything like that. I certainly was never offered the chance to tell them about my hobbies, interests, or ambitions. They did, however, want to get an idea of what I might be good at, so they could best decide how they could put me to work.
    A couple of days later, my results came back. The Navy was clearly not impressed, and had a fate in store for me that they reserved for those recruits whose aptitude scores fell as monumentally short of rocket science as mine had. I had done well enough to get in, was proclaimed physically fit, but my scores in math and English were as far below the mark as I had managed to keep them at school, with my resolute determination to ignore instruction and to never study.
    Based on my testing, their recommendation for the best way for me to spend my time in the Navy was stated in a single word: “Cook.”
    Ironically, it’s one of the few words in the English language that is both a job description and a call to action. You are now a cook, my son…so cook. And so it went. Once I was in the service, I was required to bring up my scores in those “school” subjects. I took remedial classes while I trained, and I bloody well studied this time around. My attitude having now been severely readjusted, and having finally recognized that those grades could and would have a real impact on my life, I applied myself academically and aced them all.
    And that’s when I really started to cook.
    I certainly benefit from the cumulative influence of my personal biases and of knowledge gained from having spent most of my life in professional kitchens. You learn to speak the language of food with an accent, and just like the accent of your birth and rearing, it is an accumulation of your thoughts, your upbringing, what you hear, what you see, what you select or neglect to say, that is apparent to the outside world. With some chefs, you can see where they are coming from before you ever meet them, just by looking at what they choose to put on a plate and how they decide to do it.
    The style in which you choose to cook is unique to you—it is your culinary fingerprint—and you should learn to celebrate it. If you do, others will enthusiastically join you. Art, music, nature, vacations, relationships, weather, all these things influence our attitudes and moods and, therefore, our cooking. Paul Bocuse compared cooking to music, in that the finished dish and the performance depend on an element of improvisation, which are never part of the recipe or score. When this goes right, the results are magical.
    Here are a few “classic” dishes that I have chosen to do in my own singular style because of some of the influences in my life. Once you’ve made them your own, you will probably do them a little differently, too.
    Cooking is an expression of what’s inside of you. It’s the magic that matters.
French Onion Soup SERVES 6 TO 8
    1 tablespoon butter
    2 tablespoons olive oil
    4 large onions (about 1½ pounds), thinly sliced
    2 to 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
    1 teaspoon sugar
    Â½ teaspoon dried thyme
    Â½ cup dry white wine
    2 tablespoons flour
    8 cups chicken or beef broth
    2 tablespoons brandy (optional)
    Salt and freshly ground black pepper
    6 to 8 thick slices French bread, toasted
    1 garlic clove
    12 to 16 ounces Swiss